Published on 12, July, 2020
Forgive me if this is obvious or has been talked about here a dozen times before but is it possible or common to have both ASD & ADHD.
I'm not yet well versed on my Autism yet and still discovering how it effects me. Over the years of which I was part in denial and part just unaware I'd only ever loosely heard some small bits about the condition from TV docs/representation or the occasional TikTok and other possibly misinformed and unreliable sources and it seemed to me, from what I heard at least, was that these were implied as being mutually exclusive to each other and that it was rare if not impossible for one to have both. With that possible misinformation in mind I have been questioning a bit because I've related to a fair amount of ADHD posts online and it's got me wondering, feels like damned near every post I come across...
I've also assumed and had a fair amount of anecdotal experience of ADHD folk being quite a fair bit more sociable and high energy which is polar opposite to me.
Could my presumptions have been wrong and it be possible that I could even have both? Is there actually a bunch of overlap between the two I'm just not wise to?
From what I’ve read, it is believed between 50% and 75% of autistic people also have ADHD, so it’s very common indeed. You sometimes see it called AuDHD.
Hmm, interesting. I wonder how I came to some kind of opposite understanding as if it was really rare. I guess I've just been unfortunate to have stumbled through a bunch of misinformation over the years. I hadn't looked deeply into any of that.
Im pretty sure they used to think if you had autism you couldnt have adhd and vise versa, which may be where you got that information from. But yeah AuDHD is a thing and quite a few people on here have both, as well as some youtubers I watch
That must be it, that's all I used to remember is you could only have one. I've been looking at some of the Venn diagrams of the two though and some of the stuff that isnt in the overlap are polar opposites which seems unusual such as "impulsive" versus "rigid routine" or "misses details" versus "detail oriented".
I guess it's worth exploring on this self discovery journey whether I'm among the AuDHD, it could potentially help me even further to have a more complete picture.