colliegrace wrote:
ADHD and ASD can have VERY VERY similar symptoms, my understanding is that they tend to have different reasons behind them.
Very true. I've received an ADHD diagnosis (during which the doc mentioned that I had ASD traits), and have just started meds. They help me concentrate a bit better, but any college student can tell you that.
Even so, I still get internally distracted by almost compulsive scripting - any unfinished email conversations, conversations I had yesterday, ones I could have tomorrow, etc. This is the great bulk of my distraction generally.
Still on the topic of meds, I've also sensed sometimes that the extra alertness also makes some sensory sensitivities worse. It could be that they are the same as always, and I'm just more aware of them now.
I'm starting to wonder if the ADHD was slightly off-target, as there is a large overlap in symptoms, albeit with different roots. I was never hyperactive (yes, I know there is the quiet subtype), for example, and lack some other fairly typical ADHD traits, such as losing things. They can be co-morbid, but I can't see much in my own experience which couldn't be explained just as well by ASD.
I went looking for the ADHD diagnosis based on my understanding of what I'd read, and would never have considered ASD until the doc himself saw fit to mention it. (Until recently, my idea of autism was the stereotype, I'm sorry to say.) I've tried to follow up on the ASD side of things with him, but he's not a specialist in the field, and his generally philosophy is that we can medicate for the ADHD but not for the ASD, and I'm too 'high functioning' anyway, whatever that means.
Don't know what to think. I'll persevere with the meds for a bit longer and see how things settle.
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子曰：「君子不器」《論語．為政篇》
20 Apr 2023, 9:41 pm
