03/22/2020
Reactive Attachment Disorder in the General Population: A Hidden ESSENCE Disorder
As a source of information for parents and others who are struggling to learn more about reactive attachment disorder and how children are affected, what might help and what current research is being conducted to help, I will continue to post information and credible articles etc. as a resource to the community. As always, I welcome your thoughts and open discussion.
This is an interesting article that considers reactive attachment disorder (RAD) to be a severe social functionality disorder. The article is important because project researchers state that previous research was conducted on children who were institutionalized. Findings of poor language and cognitive skills were based on children in those settings, which might not have been appropriate as the study might have involved researcher bias.
The full article below describes a study of 1,600 children to determine the existence of reactive attachment disorder RAD in the general population. Characteristics which typically result in a suspected or likely RAD diagnosis were evaluated.
What researchers discovered was that children with RAD typically had multiple comorbidities with other disorders, their IQs tended to be lower than the norm, they were considered less organized in attachments and displayed more problem behaviours with poorer social skills children in the general population. As a result, such children presented in a highly complex manner which has been called "ESSENCE".
Reactive attachment disorder (RAD) is a severe disorder of social functioning. Previous research has shown that children with RAD may have poor cognitive and language abilities; however, findings mainly come from biased, institutionalised samples. This ...
