#many of my coping strategies for ADHD were developed while reading about bipolar and PTSD

[kiragecko]

There's a lot of things that point to neurodivergency not being a bunch of discrete conditions, but rather a range of symptoms that are given names based on how they affect other people. (But since this post is about autism and ADHD, I'm going to focus on those two.)

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1 in 5 ADHD people are also diagnosed with autism. 1 in 3-5 ADHD people are also diagnosed with learning disabilities. Similar numbers for ADHD and mental disabilities or Tourette's. Personality disorders, mood disorders, and sleep disorders are also much more likely to be diagnosed.

Similar numbers exist for autism co-occurring with other neurodivergencies.

Being autistic/ADHD increases BOTH your chance of having kids that are autistic, AND kids that are ADHD. Doesn't matter which one you've been diagnosed with.

And most of the experiences that are central to the the ADHD or autistic experience are actually considered separate conditions likely to co-occur (''co-morbid'). Hyper/hyposensitivity, sensory processing disorders, emotional regulation problems, etc. are co-morbid with BOTH conditions.

Even the diagnostic criteria (things that get you a label) are frequently just different presentations of the same thing.

We've known autistic special interests and ADHD hyperfixations are the same thing for at least 20 years, now. Not being expressive 'enough' is stereotypical of autism, being 'too' expressive is stereotypical of ADHD, and both come from the exact same root. Trouble focusing affects eye contact and attention. Difficulties with social skills lead to talking 'too much' or 'too little', interrupting, difficulties forming and maintaining relationships, etc. Both groups stim, though ADHD people are likely to have it attributed to hyperactivity. Both experience meltdowns and shutdowns.

And both groups tend to end up masking and suffering burnout.

Many of the ways to support ADHD and autism are the same. Explicitly teaching social skills. Allowing stim tools. Finding ways to control stimulation levels and support emotional regulation.

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There are reasons for having different diagnoses. ADHD meds don't help most autistics very much, for example. Even if the two conditions were combined, it would definitely have subtypes with distinct management plans. (Probably a lot more subtypes than we currently have!)

But the overlap of autistic and ADHD symptoms is way higher than in anything else I've studied. And, as an ADHD person with 6 of the 8 people closest to me being autistic (and 2 of them being ADHD), the overlap is way higher even than the literature suggests. From the outside, we look different. But we really really don't seem to be from the inside.

Would you be open to elaborating more on your statement “#Admittedly I fundamentally don’t believe that many forms of ADHD and many of the tumblr-acceptable forms of autism are materially distinct”? I haven’t heard someone else voice this sentiment, but I think I have similar feelings to you around this topic and I am curious how others have come to this conclusion as well.

Sure.

When I was eight years old, I was diagnosed with ADD—Attention Deficit Disorder. This is considered a related but separate and distinct thing from ADHD.

When I was a teenager, a new DSM came out. ADD was no longer considered a distinct thing. My diagnosis changed to ADHD-I: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Inattentive Type.

My brain didn’t change, but the professional perception of what was up with it did.

Is ADD materially different from ADHD? Can you have ADHD without hyperactivity? That used to be no, now it’s yes; answer the first question, that used to be yes, now it’s no.

I see very similar things between ADHD and autism. Lots of people do. Traits like the ability to fixate on an interest to the physical inability to pay attention to anything else; infodumping past the point other people lose interest; penchant for physical clumsiness and poor coordination; emotional dysregulation; proclivity to sensory overload; anxiety over not emoting correctly… they’re ADHD things and autism things. Is bouncing my leg an autism stim or an expression of ADHD hyperactivity? Or is it just fidgeting like people do sometimes? I dunno. Are they in fact materially different things?

Similar to ADD, Asperger’s Syndrome is no longer a thing. It’s subsumed under Autism Spectrum Disorder now. Is “high functioning” autism the same material thing as “low functioning” autism? Is “high functioning” autism the same thing as “ADD”? Idk. In some people I think it is.

Especially in mental disorders and neurodivergences, diagnoses aren't physical, material things. They're names given to commonly occurring collections of traits or symptoms. There's no virus that causes ADHD, no bacteria that can be isolated that causes autism. COVID is caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2; strep throat is caused by Streptococcus bacteria. They have symptoms, but they are primarily defined by their root cause. ADHD, autism, and plenty of other Brain Things do have neurochemical correlates - that is, there is an aspect of physical reality to them, you brain is wired a certain way - but it's not like ADHD is caused by the ADHD Virus and Autism is caused by the Autism Germ. They're names given to observable sets of traits, in order to figure out ways of treating and managing them. And I think drawing a sharp distinction between them - THIS is ADHD, and THIS is autism, and they're NOT THE SAME! - is pointless.

I like to use the xkcd color survey as an analogy for... well, a lot of things about the human experience and the way we classify it.

If you weren't around in 2010, xkcd's Randall Munroe asked the internet to help crowdsource the true names and boundaries of colors. You could sit down at the screen, colors would appear before you by random hexcode, and you typed in the name you'd call it. You could do this as many times with as many colors as you wanted. This was the resultant chart he made:

This shows the entirety of fully saturated RGB color space. Each pixel is a different hex code. Each pixel represents a different individual's brain.

I usually use this chart to talk about sexual orientation/queer identities. But it's also a great analogy for the categorizations being diagnoses.

If "Blue" is, say, ADHD, and "Purple" is Autism, you can image how one person's "purple" experience may be wildly different from another "purple" experience but very similar to a "blue" experience. But they're labelled differently, for various reasons. Maybe the doctor had recently seen a lot of blues, and this one seems more purple in comparison. Maybe the doctor has a really specific idea of what blue is, so this can't be blue, it must be purple. Which is not to say some blues aren't wildly different from some purples, that some purples match the platonic ideal image in your mind of what "purple" is more than others. There's still clearly a lot of overlap in blue and purple experiences.

That's kind of how I think about ADHD and autism.

And who knows, maybe I think this just because I am actually autistic. I've asked myself that, wondered that before. Am I? Or are these just ADHD symptoms that overlap? And honestly at this point the answer isn't super important to me. I know how my brain works and how to deal with it when it gets bad, and there's very little that pursuing a diagnosis would do for me at the point I'm at in my life.

But when I say that I suspect the two aren't as materially distinct as they're sometimes made out to be, this is what I mean.