Dr. Yath Ramesh

But also, as you get older, you start to learn different coping strategies.

Now, with ADHD,

One of the things that we know that people often gravitate to are fast reward, fast feedback mechanisms in order to help cope and regulate your emotions.

What that could involve is it could be alcohol, it could be cannabis, and it could progress to other substances like cocaine, or it might not be drugs at all.

It could be shopping, gaming, various things that ultimately could lead to an addiction.

So these are just different ways that trauma can have an impact on children.

So I actually simultaneously worked in the NHS in a specialist ADHD service within our local area.

And I also worked in a drug and alcohol addiction service at the same time.

And essentially what I was doing was seeing ADHD presenting in two different populations.

Within the addiction service, we actually had a specific sub-team called the criminal justice team because of the propensity of crimes that were committed by people within that service.

But what you could actually see was that...

the exposure to traumatic life experiences, the combination of not having the resources to be able to support those people through the education system, through the social care system, and

Inevitably, what happened for some of those people is that they experienced an addiction, but without the financial resources to be able to manage the addiction, you end up trying to fund it.

So how do you do that when you don't have the skills or resources to have a job that's going to help you?

You need to find other ways.

So you end up in the criminal justice system.

Then what happens there?

doesn't fix the problem and so when you're out of the criminal justice system you start looking for a way to cope again and then there's a cycle that happens between uh

being in trouble with the criminal justice system, the addictions, and it's very difficult to break that cycle.

And that's fundamentally what we try to do within our service.