Have you seen this study in Psychiatric Times?

MamaKate

Dear Sly,

I saw this article too and was still pondering at the time you posted, hence my late answer.

To me, this study reiterates that life is a craps shoot. Adoption just compounds the odds.

Every person has the potential to have mental disorders/issues/problems at sometime in their lives. Born healthy? Doesn't matter - life is not just about genetics, but also experiences. Nobody is guaranteed that life will not toss them something that can trigger a reaction that psychology has a term for. Adoption is one of those things. Some people are tremendously effected by it and others not so much. It's about the individual and his or her experiences. No one can make more than an educated guess about how someone will "turn out".

One thing that this study should point out (whether its "methodology" is perfect or not, is that adoption has the POTENTIAL to be a negative factor in the mental and emotional health of the adoptee. It is something that PAPs/APs should be prepared for and "considering" parents made aware of. Its about POTENTIAL and PREPAREDNESS.

This study is just one of many that shows that the "better life" line is just that...a line - no guarantee.

Looney Tunes

Yup, I believe it.
Personally, I think ODD and CD are crap diagnoses; given frequently to foster children, poor children, and adopted children. So, I looked at the other diagnoses as the indicators.

I am not so sure I think that the distribution of adoptees was fair. I wonder why so few domestic adoptees (178) were included in the study compared to IA and "non-adoptees." (~540 each) Study-wise, I am surprised since they report that more than 100,000 domestic adoptions occur versus ~12,000 IA, that they took such a small sample of domestic adoptees.

But how interesting that they found IA to have less externalizing behavioral problems than domestic adoptees.

We are really not privy to what the researchers "controlled" for in the study, such as age adopted, abusive bio-parents versus not, child exposure to alcohol or cigarettes etc, etc.
I need more information.....

But that being said, I think it is highly likely that children that suffer separation and attachment issues are going to deal with mental health issues that need to be addressed, some easier to treat and get rid of like separation anxiety and some which are more difficult to treat like and longstanding like ADHD and MDD.

Randy B

Well, without having seen the full text of their study I do have a few questions on how their conclusions were arrived at.

They state that they looked at a random sample of non-adoptees and compared them to a "representative sample" of adoptees. Sounds good at first, but their proportion of international to domestic adoptees is not proportional to the actual numbers of adoptions in those two categories.

The statistics they quote say that there were almost 6 times more domestic adoptions then international adoptions however they use a sampling of adoptees that comprised of almost 3 times more international adoptees then domestic. To my mind they should have had a sampling of 6 times more domestic adoptees then international...in keeping with the actual statistics.

Based upon the fact that their representative sample of adoptees is not truly representative, I question the objectivity and accuracy of the rest of their conclusions and observations. At least what was stated in this short article anyway.

monkeykitty83

I don't disagree that being adopted can be a traumatic experience, and that the loss and grief are very real. I have no doubt that in some cases, that can cause problems later in life.

But I'm an academic, and if I tried to do a study using this method, my department wouldn't approve it as valid research. The demographics are all screwy, which means we can't trust the conclusions to be solid.

In the population, there is a vastly higher percentage of non-adoptees than adoptees. In the study, there were actually more adopted participants, with non-adoptees functioning as a "control" group. That makes sense in, say, a drug trial, where you're trying to screen for specific effects from a known source... NOT when you're trying to screen for pre-existing psychological factors and determine the percentage of any given population they already affect.

By upping the number of adoptees beyond what is found in the population, they also up the likelihood of "issues" just by having more people with the potential for "issues." Because there were fewer non-adoptees, any non-adoptee who reported being "fine" will skew toward a higher percentage than they would in the actual population.

To give a concrete example of this skewing, if you have one bipolar person in a room with nine people who aren't bipolar and call that a population, 10% of your population is bipolar. If you only have two people in the room and one is bipolar, 50% are bipolar. If that person is alone, 100% are bipolar. That doesn't mean 100% of the actual world is bipolar... just that the study didn't have a balanced demographic group. Sample sizes and makeup are a huge influence.

That's why if you want to learn anything about the general population in research, you need your sample to represent the composition of the general population, not to skew heavily toward including members of one group.

Also, they don't differentiate between international and domestic adoptees. Therefore causes that may in fact be post-institutional are not controlled out, but are lumped under the diagnosis of "adoption issues." To make matters worse, the number of international adoptees is not representative of their numbers in either the general population OR the adopted population... it's much higher. So they're not only failing to screen out post-institutional concerns, they're actually bringing potential post-institutional issues to the table at higher rates than in the general population.

This study has essentially set up an artificial population demographic, then screened for percentages within their artificial demographic. Which is kind of interesting, but doesn't really tell us anything about the actual world.

I'm not gloating about this. I'm actually disappointed. It's a valid avenue for research, and I believe it's likely that there are additional risk factors associated with being adopted. But as a researcher myself (different subject, of course) I don't find the methodology of this study valid, so I'm not able to bring myself to trust their conclusions on blind faith. If they want to make their conclusions scientific, their method for arriving at them needs to be scientific as well.

Dreamweaver ILF posse 2009

Great...now I'm not only in denial (because I'm a happy adoptee) I'm crazy too...geez

Indian-vision

Thx for sharing this article. I had read something similar too. Its very interesting and as an AP i'd like to keep a look out for all signs of depression in our child .

Serenity71

We're pretty much all aware that an adoptee has different issues at times in their life than non-adoptee children. And adoptive parents need to be sensitive of it. (I didn't need a professor to tell me that. Just read what adopteeâ€™s have had to say can confirm it.)

Though it was good to read, I found it hazy in its numbers and demographics. US universities put out so many studies it can be hard to tell how much time they spent on it or how they collected the data to be as actuate as possible in their findings. They did give some ideas on how they collected it but not enough for me to take it on face value.

Quote; â€œThe odds of having ADHD or ODD were about twice as high in all adopted adolescents.â€

Why would this be the case since medical studies in Australia have found ADHD disorder to relate to something like a chemical imbalance in the brain, along those lines. Thatâ€™s why they donâ€™t just treat the behaviour patterns and child needs the medication. So to just say adoption caused it is a big claim and needs more back up than that article provided. (The only thing I can think of and most Nparents wouldnâ€™t like the answer, but it could the higher use of recreational drugs by some women while pregnant that could cause it to higher.)

Edit; If you could find out more about the research and the people who conducted it to back up its claims, that would be great. I have spent to much time sifting through historical documents that lie or exaggerate to know that you need to know more information to see if how truthful it is. I like grounding in information, it works more if you can do that.)

OK enlighten me on NCFA, I'm not American so some abbreviations aren't common here.

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