The Curious Alchemy of AuDHD
It’s so much more than the sum of its parts
It’s hard to believe it was only last year that I was diagnosed with ADHD. And that it took three years after being diagnosed autistic.
At the time of my autism diagnosis, it didn’t occur to me that I could also have ADHD. My deep dive into autism hadn’t yet taken in the high co-occurrence of the conditions.
I had a very binary view of ADHD and autism and the idea of having both seemed quite novel. The people I knew with ADHD were all so different from me that I couldn’t see it in myself. The fact that they were also very different from each other was lost on me.
I was also highly invested in my autistic identity and there wasn’t room for something that seemed to be in opposition to it.
Yet having the dual diagnosis, now commonly referred to as AuDHD, is far from unusual, with estimates that around three-quarters of autistic people also have ADHD. It’s quite extraordinary that until the release of DSM 5 in 2013, the possibility of a person being diagnosed with both conditions was explicitly ruled out.
It’s telling that it took the autistic community to come up with a term that recognised the distinct way of being that is AuDHD. The medical profession still hasn’t got the memo and I’m still…
