Alex Partridge

I spoke to Gina Rippon, the author of The Lost Girls of Autism.

She was talking about exactly that.

It's when you get a diagnosis of autism or ADHD and suddenly you just focus on that diagnosis so much that the traits come out more.

And the masking towards hiding them slips away.

So actually you focus more on the traits and sometimes that can actually cause a negative because you become more aware of your differences and you focus on the fact that you perhaps are different more so than you thought and that can cause some self-esteem issues.

And Rox, seeing Rich go through the process of going through the autism assessment and getting diagnosed, has that made you question whether you might have autistic traits or, dare I say, be all DHD?

The stats are really interesting.

50% to 80% of people with ADHD would reach the criteria for an autism diagnosis, and 30% to 50% of people with autism would reach the criteria for an ADHD diagnosis.

Wow, is that true?

The overlap is huge.

If I was a betting man,

Go on.

No, I'm interested.

And obviously, from a very unprofessional opinion, I would put money on you.

In fact, I would put money on both of you being all DHD.

How would you even... So I think it's a travesty that ADHD and autism, OCD, are diagnosed and assessed in silos.

As more research comes out, there's more information showing that they're not standalone conditions.

And many people who are ADHD...

are also autistic, have also got OCD and other things, and dyspraxia, and people associate with the diagnosis that they've got, but there's various points of their behavior that doesn't quite fit the current understanding of what they think they have.

But the reason I say I think