On one of the disability forums I frequent there are several parents with adopted kids with RAD (Reactive Attachment Disorder). But I have not heard about anyone older then, say 15,who is living with this diagnosis.
Does anyone know anyone who was diagnosed with this and went on to lead a happy life? Is it a childhood condition that is called something else once they become adults? Alot of what I’m hearing are nightmare stories that don’t sound like they’ll end well.
Sounds to me like it may be a recent sort of diagnosis, or is an older syndrome under a new name.
This isn’t a direct answer to your question, but I used to collect different editions of Dr. Spock’s book on infant and child care. If I recall correctly–and this is very hazy–some editions mentioned an association between colic as a baby and children becoming “difficult” as they aged. It sounds as if somebody might have been confusing causation and correlation with colic and this syndrome, no?
A dear friend of mine and her husband fostered a boy with RAD a number of years ago. I won’t go into what happened, but suffice to say that he was eventually returned to “the system”, as it were. Last they heard he was living in a group home in another state.
I deal with these people a lot. A lot. They very often lead the kind of mess-of-a-life you can imagine. Drug addiction, mental illness, incarceration, domestic violence, child abuse, repeat repeat repeat.
I had friends who adopted a severely abused girl like that (I don’t know if that was the exact diagnosis.) Lots of therapy, lots of falling back, lots more therapy. Last I’d heard, she’d made it into college, living away from home, but the parents were a long way from saying everything was “normal.”
My husband and I went through this last year. Damn near broke us up…and continues to have negative after effects. It’s a scary syndrome, but once you get the proper diagnosis, things just click…and then you really get scared
I grew up in the same neighborhood as a treatment facility for “emotionally disturbed children”. The higher-functioning kids went to school with us; most of them had been in the foster care system, they were always several grade levels behind no matter what their IQs were, and honestly, we usually didn’t know they were from that facility until they told us.
Knowing what I do now, I think most of them did have RAD, although there are two who really stand out that I now believe were on the autistic spectrum. This was in the 1970s.
No first hand knowledge, but the description does sound a lot like it would be a personality disorder if the same symptoms were experienced later in life. I could see them becoming anti-social, for example, seeing as they can’t form strong emotional attachments to others.