Welcome, friends! If you are living in the U.S, I hope your Memorial Holiday was a good one and that it gave you some time to reflect on our country and the brave people who fought and died for it. And with that, I’m going to segue into a friendly reminder that June is PTSD awareness month, so please be kind to our Veterans and everyone else you meet, because PTSD can be developed in a number of ways and you can’t always tell from someone’s outside what is going on on their inside.

I am part of a c-PTSD group specifically geared toward people with ADHD on a popular social media site and have been for a while, but recently, the creator of said group posted a bulletin that anyone with an ACE score less than 6 did not belong in the group because “only people with c-PTSD belong in this group.” Their words, not mine.

For those of you that are less familiar with the terminology, c-PTSD is a specific type of post-traumatic stress disorder that takes place over a longer period of time during which the person suffering trauma felt as though they could not escape their circumstances. An ACE score (or Adverse Childhood Experience) is a score given on a list of 10 questions that determines the likelihood that you will have been affected by trauma during your childhood, or rather that you will suffer mental illness as a result of trauma experienced during childhood.

Here’s the thing: an ACE score cannot accurately predict whether someone will have c-PTSD. I’ll be upfront with you, my ACE score is a 2 (two) and I have been diagnosed with c-PTSD and taken associated classes in order to help myself heal. My parents were pretty great, in the grand scheme of things. They did the best they could with the information they had at the time. Unfortunately, not a whole lot was known about ADHD when I was a kid, and (as I’ve stated previously) I was lucky to even get a diagnosis before adulthood because I am female. And whether or not you will develop PTSD depends just as much on genetics, how much you have internalized, and your general ability to deal with a traumatic situation. People with ADHD are more likely to develop c-PTSD than a neurotypical person because of our difficulty in regulating emotion as well as the fact that we are more likely to experience trauma in general than the neurotypical person because of the perception of “being difficult.” So even if an ACE score were required for a diagnosis of c-PTSD (it isn’t) the score would presumably be lower for someone with ADHD, anyway.

On top of that, we know that although it is more likely that one will develop c-PTSD during childhood, some develop it in adulthood as well. In that case, an ACE score, which only takes childhood experiences into account, would be absolutely useless for determining if someone had c-PTSD, had that person developed it as an adult.

What the ACE score CAN do is tell you the likelihood that someone will develop possible mental illness due to trauma experienced in childhood. But even this doesn’t require a high score. A person with an ACE score of 1 (one) has double the likelihood of developing alcoholism than a person with a 0 (zero) score. A person with a score of 4 has a significantly higher chance of suffering chronic depression, financial problems, heart disease, or stroke. And while this may hold weight in the development of PTSD, it alone is not a very reliable determining factor.

Naturally, there was some pushback against this new rule, as people began divulging their scores and stories. You see, the ACE score really only covers physical, emotional, and verbal abuse by caregivers. What it does not cover is neglect by parents or abuse experienced outside the home, and it does not take into account the fact that some of us will be traumatized far more than others who may experience the same type of treatment. It also does not take into account the experiences and relationships we had in childhood that would have made us resilient to trauma. The good news is that the admin recanted her previous announcement and admitted that the ACE score was unreliable as a diagnostic tool, but I wanted to use this example to illustrate the importance of not gatekeeping mental illness. We all experience life differently and the result of what we experience is going to be different from person to person even if our experiences are relatively the same. Some of us are better equipped to handle some situations than other people. Some people had familial relationships that they could turn to for support in times of crisis, whereas others may not have had that. We can’t see what’s going on on the inside, so it is important that we take the outside at face value.