AuDHD
A place for those that got both Autism and ADHD, those confirmed as one and are suspecting they got the other as well, and also everyone who is neither and just genuinely curious.
Since the combo comes with its own set of challenges, this shall be a place to ask for advice, vent, infodump about special interests and/or just vibe and meme.
Please be respectful. General niceness guidelines apply - formal rules will be added later if necessary.
In regards to medication and medical advice: Please take under consideration that this is only an online support community. Offered advice is always an expression of individual opinions or experiences and shall never be taken as substitute for a professional in-person assessment!
This is a SFW community. Sensitive topics are allowed, but must be properly labeled.
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do you consider yourself an intelligent person? perhaps above average?
because in my experience this is what causes issues - if you're smart enough to do well on the tests despite neurodivergence it can give a false negative or an "inconclusive" results
the easiest way to fix that problem is visit an adhd/autism specialist who themself have adhd/autism. Then they can properly just vibe check you instead of relaying on tests
i got passed a quick intelligence test by the evaluator during the assessment and the result was high intelligence. not sure if that's worth anything
anyway, i'm not seeing how my "intelligence" would interfere with the tests exactly. it's not like there are right or wrong answers (unless i was specifically trying to fake a diagnosis, which i'm not)
i'll look for an autism/adhd specialist in my area for me an my wife, who also got recently diagnosed. thanks for the tip
high intelligence can and will make it harder to detect learning difficulties & mask life struggles. Because despite the genetic learning disadvantage of adhd/autism, things get averaged out by being smart. You can also find coping strategies easier and just figure things out on your own
also adhd evaluations always look for signs during childhood, and if you are smart enough of a kid you won't struggle in school despite not being able to focus on regular learning like everyone else - the consistency of symptoms is pretty much half the diagnosis and having those symptoms be invisible to everyone but you complicates things
most tests (apart from self evalutations) don't really test for things like regular life struggles, and if you only recently started being able to see your symptoms (that were previously masked by high intelligence, and only now you realised something was off about it all) it could lead psychologists/psychiatrists to belive it's something else - like anxiety or depression (both of which can also be caused by adhd so that makes stuff even more annoying)
if the sentence "oh you have so much potential, if only you applied yourself" has been repeated in your childhood as if on a loop, and now makes you want to cry and/or smash things, you're probably like me - and the above is how my diagnosis went
Second this.