ADHD: Private clinics exposed by BBC undercover investigation

The fact that there's still a complete misunderstanding of Autism is enough for me to be apprehensive about any of the Spectrum "orderings". ADHD and Autism have 2 very fundamental things in common. Given this, I do wonder if one can be 'both' as the overlap is enough to throw confusion but the polarities are really important.

I'm absolutely certain I would've been diagnosed ADD when young, and recall thinking this around 20. The key is in the potential: An autistic will grow to thrive in being helped to focus on one thing at a time, while ADHD will thrive with multi-tasking. There are several other polarities to help individuals grow into themselves. Misdiagnosing Autistic as AuDHD could be unhelpful to their well-being. 

I'm %100 I'm AuDHD though even tho awaiting diagnosis, many things I do/happen to me can't be ascribed to ASC alone, and I was assessed correctly with as autistic and having OCD as a child back in the dark ages of classic autistic criteria. I never thought ADHD could be there only because I was told back then you could only be one or the other but now we know that's not the case.
I missed a deadline I was told repeatedly was coiming up last week because I never got the alarm from my phone, because I had walked upstairs with my phone, put it down then went to do something else and forgot it even existed for 3 days whilst the battery life on it slowly died. I got an email through my work laptop saying why didn't I turn X Y and Z in, I then had to ask for an extension which luckily I got, I said I'd lost my phone (not really lost thugh I did then spend a full day after panic searching for it around teh house because I couldn't remember where I put it down). Only to later find for reasosn unknown I had left my phone just around the corner of the bathroom doorway in the hall up against the wall, near the clean laundry basket. Which apparently despite putting my phone down to have a spar hand free still didn't get around to putting it's contents away now 4 days later.
I also had many times where I just forgot I even had a phone and had to fin it in the campus lost and found a few times.... thank goodness my fellow students are an honest bunch and not a load of tea leaves.
And that's just %1 of the top of the iceberg than makes me feel I'm ADHD, another %3 is I noticed on better days with my ocd and autisstic lens I get even more impulsive and innatentive, so Autism is literally hiding some of it and the anxiety of OCD and GAD has been silently keeping me remembering to lock my front door and not allowing me to be as forgetful from the sheer anxiety of "must not lose A / must get B done or else it will all go to heck" as much as I could be because when I think about it I also fit ADHD criteria to the letter as a kid before I started mentally wrappping myself wih "sticky tape" to "hold it together" with aquired anxieties and trauma. Kinda sucks knowing I'm just barely being held together by anxiety tape.

I'm %100 I'm AuDHD though even tho awaiting diagnosis, many things I do/happen to me can't be ascribed to ASC alone, and I was assessed correctly with as autistic and having OCD as a child back in the dark ages of classic autistic criteria. I never thought ADHD could be there only because I was told back then you could only be one or the other but now we know that's not the case.
I missed a deadline I was told repeatedly was coiming up last week because I never got the alarm from my phone, because I had walked upstairs with my phone, put it down then went to do something else and forgot it even existed for 3 days whilst the battery life on it slowly died. I got an email through my work laptop saying why didn't I turn X Y and Z in, I then had to ask for an extension which luckily I got, I said I'd lost my phone (not really lost thugh I did then spend a full day after panic searching for it around teh house because I couldn't remember where I put it down). Only to later find for reasosn unknown I had left my phone just around the corner of the bathroom doorway in the hall up against the wall, near the clean laundry basket. Which apparently despite putting my phone down to have a spar hand free still didn't get around to putting it's contents away now 4 days later.
I also had many times where I just forgot I even had a phone and had to fin it in the campus lost and found a few times.... thank goodness my fellow students are an honest bunch and not a load of tea leaves.
And that's just %1 of the top of the iceberg than makes me feel I'm ADHD, another %3 is I noticed on better days with my ocd and autisstic lens I get even more impulsive and innatentive, so Autism is literally hiding some of it and the anxiety of OCD and GAD has been silently keeping me remembering to lock my front door and not allowing me to be as forgetful from the sheer anxiety of "must not lose A / must get B done or else it will all go to heck" as much as I could be because when I think about it I also fit ADHD criteria to the letter as a kid before I started mentally wrappping myself wih "sticky tape" to "hold it together" with aquired anxieties and trauma. Kinda sucks knowing I'm just barely being held together by anxiety tape.

I appreciate your input, and sorry if it became a whole thing I wasn't quite sure what was or wasn't being a bit too liberally interpretted by each of us and where in the text as it's a complex topic I don't mean to ascribe your intent per se as I'm literally not in your head, it's just the way certain phrasing combined overal made me feel dismissed. Maybe it's just down to the way meanings get lost in a text format and this conversation would have been easier to have face to face and that would have led to more mutual understanding. Who knows. ‍ I can read people better irl than I can communicate and I get lost without tone inflectors or emojis in text form. ‍

As you mentioned awaiting diagnosis, I was trying to help with the technical terminology to speak with professionals.

My apologies! 

JuniperFromGallifrey said:

What can mark the difference is a matter of socialisation and language. I find all my ADHD friends understand NT and Au communication (even if they prefer Au speak) but because they understand NT's, they deal with far more social anxiety than Autistic individuals. And the rest of the traits we seem to share. ADHD have a little more trouble with inertia.

That's all me too. In text form it's difficult but face to face, I can reed them, I receive the signals but I don't transmit them back very well. That social anxiety is added toby the fact that we are painfiully aware of what we are not able to do socially.

Sorry but I think you misunderstand me, I see why you might like things to be clear cut but I have to insist you stop trying to pigeonhole me and my experience which although it's nobody's fault I can only explain in a limited and imperfect form here at best. I respect your opinion generally here on the forum but you don't live with me or in my shoes and I'm starting to feel uncofortable because it feels like you want to police my identity and shared experiences to fit your own view. If you can't accept my own expertise on my own life can we just drop it? Because I don't want this to be the thing to come between us.

That's the Montropic brain! Capable of hyper-focus and also too many things all at once. There are certain markers which make one ADHD or Autistic. I have a feeling over the next 10 years we'll be seeing too many cases of ADHD'rs misdiagnosed as Autistic and Autistic misdiagnosed as ADHD.  clinicians who are NT don't quite get the polarities because they don't understand how we're similar. The not being able to sleep because I need to be up at a certain hour for an appointment is something most of us who are older remember all too well of our 20's and 30's. I promise it gets better as you get older, though I wish I'd know when I was younger! 

What can mark the difference is a matter of socialisation and language. I find all my ADHD friends understand NT and Au communication (even if they prefer Au speak) but because they understand NT's, they deal with far more social anxiety than Autistic individuals. And the rest of the traits we seem to share. ADHD have a little more trouble with inertia. But I find, when I partner with an ADHD friend they can spin a dozen plates and I will end up tidying them up. As a team: I need closure and detail and they can be amazing at big picture while also speaking my language. They can do the client management and I can handle the data. Neither of us seems like like admin, but needs must.

No, wait, it's 18 interests, just tripped over some hobby paraphernalia I had forgot to put away in the hallway actually and I remembered it. It's funny because now I suddenly got the bug to get all the stuff out and paint the Warhammer models again.

I think for others it may well be so, (re: all just autism), but no I am sure, I actually relate more to people in ADHD spaces than I do here, (and that's not a reflection on my fellow autists here) despite having a childhood diagnosis of autism.
Unfortunately I'd never have the spoons or focus to write what I estimate to be a small book describing every reason why, even just a "short" list would be too long for me to write.
(Post script edit: I know that looks ironic considering  my replies can get quite long, but that's because I regularly go back and add stuff I forgot to mention in the first typing, also my bio is only that long because I add a bit more every couple of weeks or so as and when that info becomes more relevant to "pin" somewhere.)

Though I'll address one more easy to desbride one now: My brain isn't always working in a monotropic way, I'm actually polytropic it's just that the interest that is "at the fore" switches around, I hyper focus on it for maybe a few weeks and then it swaps back round with one of the other- hold on I'll count them on a bit of paper- 17 special interests I have had in rotation in the last 2 years.

I did enjoy reading your insight though, and thank you for using bite size paragraphing, sometimes I find lareger replies on this forum and if it's very wall to wall text it is often impossible to read in a single sitting.

I promise I will read your reply later properly when I have more energy and focus, I just wanted to confirm I've seen you've replied, and at least on what I can get my brain to skim rn it looks like there are a lot of very interesting points in there so I appreciate you took the time to write a response.

I hear you - this all sounds like Autism. It's something we have in common with ADHD and Dyslexics! This has to do with making hyper-connexions, sensing everything-all-at-once, and rather than being in tune with Linear time (Chronos), a being in Aion/Aeon (an eternal sense of time) - more easily lost or stuck in a moment. We all share this. 

If we go back to Freud, who is a bit of a Grandfather of outlining the Neurotic (NeuroTypical) Psyche, and follow the understanding of NeuroTypical-isms (or technically called Neuroses), we can find grounded definitions for something like OCD.

OCD is good to contrast with Hyper-Vigilance. While OCD is something harmful to the self, we want to stop but cannot, Hyper-Vigilance is a matter of keeping the chaos at bay and life in a fluid, working hopefully functional order. OCD is usually a momentary blip in the NeuroTypical or Neurotic type and arrives from social impact - from those secret signals and codes the Autistic will not have "picked up". 

A massive part of the problem isn't just NeuroTypicals trying to cash in on the "Autism Industry" getting things wrong due to a completely wrong perspective, creating chaos and misdiagnoses and arresting the process globally of the understanding, but then the push back from Autistics who are trying to set the record straight, some with a louder voice who might need better accountability hacking into bits of misrepresented psychology and then also getting things wrong. It's a MESS!

If you're interested, I'd suggest to just start focusing on your potential. If you can make absolute magic multi-tasking but still have the Autistic Bonus of communicating how we express and use language, then yes, I'd say find each Au / ADHD strengths and go with them. But if you notice you begin to thrive by self-direction forced engagement to finish One-thing-at-a-Time (I can explain good hacks to do this), then like the rest of us, who share a hyper-sensory Salience Network and the Monotropic Brain. 

What I needed when I was young was forced pauses. Stop, breathe, take a moment to regroup and collect my thoughts. I am accident prone and forgetful if rushed. If given a deadline, I will construct how to meet it at my pace. I work best doing one little specific task to completion. And I sometimes have to open my mouth and speak out loud self-directing tasks. I need to envision what I'm wearing the night before. Envision how my day will play out and write down the tasks. ADHD has a biological complexity which changes the rules. One won't be able to just do the boring task and feel a strange sense of Resolve / Completion from "just doing it". 

This understanding of my capacity didn't happen over night but took years. And most importantly I had to learn to create protected time/space for uninterrupted (by myself or others) engagement. x

More of the AuDHD+OCD iceberg:
I had to force myself into bed at 7pm to make sure I atleats got 6 hours of sleep after struggling to to for a few hours, and now I'm awake (woke up at 3:30 AM, because I need to be ready to go to appointment at 10AM today...... So now I have to have brunch at 8AM and hope to lunch in 11am-1pm and have an early dinner and then maybe a supper later on if I don't just go nonverbal and crawl into bed at 9PM which would be the smart thingh...but I know despite putting time stamps on all my plans I will be lucky if Ican be on time to even one of them.