Published on 12, July, 2020
Harley Psychiatrists (one of the clinics investigated) did my online ASD assessment via the NHS.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-65534448
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.
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.