Ep. 97 Autism, ADHD, or Both? Understanding the Key Differences & Overlaps
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What is the purpose of this episode and who are the hosts?
What's up everyone and welcome to Making the Shift for Autistic Kids.
We're an SLP couple from California with four boys.
And we're here every week to bring you neuroaffirming tips, tricks, and tools. Are you ready to make the shift? Let's do this!
Today we are talking about ADHD versus autism. I will tell you, I had something happen to me that was so mind blowing. And maybe you sitting here thinking about the people you know, you will have the same feeling. Okay, but I will tell you that. These are often misdiagnosed. I often see a lot of people diagnosed with H ADHD who are actually autistic or who should maybe get a diagnosis of both. And we are going to be talking today about what about when people are aw DHD. It's called A. Capital A little U Capital D H E. A D H capital D. That was easier in my head. Okay, so today we're going to be talking about some core traits of autism versus ADHD, why, what that can look like. And then we're going to talk about, but what about when it's both?
What does that look like in kids? And this will hopefully give you a lot better understanding of how to then take this information and be able to support. The little ones and students and others in your life. Okay, so I had this huge light bulb moment, maybe a year, two years ago, because I grew up very close to someone who was diagnosed as ADHD. Okay, this person was Incredibly smart. Never needed to do homework, always got the top grades. would always get in trouble for not showing his work because he would just put the answer on the paper. Okay. Extremely spar smart. struggled connecting socially until he found his people, which were the computer people. Okay. And then he had some areas of deep interest were like math and electronics, and was like building computers and
went on to work in that industry as well. Okay, so this person was diagnosed ADHD as a child. So whenever I thought in my life about what does H ADHD look like, I've pictured this person. And this is probably true for you too. You probably have someone in your life who ha had di a diagnose of ADHD and then in your brain that's just what ADHD looked like. And then I started dating Chris. You guys know here my partner, Chris. Who is ADHD? And it took that for me to say, wow, that person in my life who I originally thought had ADHD is actually autistic. This is what ADHD looks like. So I'm gonna share some, you know, personal experiences as well because for me, when I then could compare the two of them, it was just so easy for me to see that person's autistic versus Chris who's ADHD.
And I ended up having a conversation with this person because he came to me after, you know, he sees me putting out this content all the time and he asked me straight up. Um, do you think I'm autistic? And I asked him what he thought and he said yeah, and I said, Yeah, I think so. And it was like, and then we later, just for fun, did one of the online autism assessments. And, you know, that said he was autistic. Okay. So it was just one of those moments where I was like, I can't believe my whole life I thought this person was ADHD when in reality they were autistic. And then it completely influenced the way I thought about people who were ADHD in the future. But in reality, I just had this other perception of what ADHD was.
Okay, so we're gonna talk a little bit about what each of these look like, kind of like core traits, and then we're gonna talk about I'll give you some examples of how I saw the that in these individual people. So ADHD attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The three main areas that we see in people who are ADHD are Oh, this the way we see them affected is in their attention. Their impulse control. And activity levels. Okay. We know a lot of ADHDs who have a lot of activity. They're always looking for more, always looking to move their feet or their finger, tap their toes, right? Looking for a lot of stimulation. Whereas an autistic person, you would see mostly differences in like communication, sensory processing, emotional regulation, things that might affect behaviors like routines and um, you know, stuff like that.
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Chapters
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1 identifiedMore from The NeuroAffirm Podcast
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Ep. 120 Why Anxiety is So Common in Autism (And What Actually Helps)