In other words, it’s really just an improvement in awareness that has led to an increase in identifying who can be helped more effectively than before.
Maybe because there’s an army of us born and raised before diagnosis was common, living undiagnosed, and thinking we’re just fuckwits or that we broke our brains when younger.
A combination of having to live with just themselves for company over lockdown, and finding au/adhd memes that start as funny, and then slide toward “oh fuck, that actually explains a lot… is that… me?” has led a lot of people to seek help and diagnosis, so it looks like a rise of adult au/adhd spectrum individuals.
Even people who were diagnosed may not have been diagnosed properly when it was commonly believed that ADHD and autism could not exist at once in the same person.
Yeah. Memes are like the first step towards watching/reading/hearing lived experiences, which is the most effective way the understanding of these neurotypes grows.
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He is now trying to spread what was once an unbelievable message: that both autism and ADHD can coexist in the same person simultaneously.Just over a decade ago, the two conditions were considered to be mutually exclusive, with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, often referred to as “psychiatry’s bible”, stating that the diagnosis of one precluded the existence of the other.
“My clinical experience suggests it’s more than three-quarters in both directions,” adds Dr Eccles.Online, the idea that autism and ADHD can coexist is so widely accepted that it has spawned its own label – “AuDHD” – and a groundswell of people who say they recognise its oxymoronic nature, perpetual internal war and rollercoaster of needs.
“It’s unpleasantly loud, it’s going to distract you from your food, it’s anxiety-inducing.” Additionally, some autistic people may find social situations exhausting or overwhelming, or feel incompetent when they’re unable to decipher the subtleties of interpersonal communication, 60% of which is non-verbal.
They impulsively dopamine-spike with food, sex, drugs, booze, the internet, people, hobbies and novelty of all shades.“I am a slave to my own brain and it’s tiring,” writes one anonymous person on an ADHD Reddit support group.
ADHD UK is one of many advocacy groups calling for the Autism Act, which legally compels the government to support autistic people, to be widened in scope to include other forms of neurodiversity.Once a correct dual diagnosis is obtained, there are still complications.
The balance of masking has changed.”The prevalence of autism was widely believed to be 1% until last year, when a first of its kind study published in the Lancet found the true rate to be more than double that, with at least 1.2 million autistic people in the UK.
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