Do I (Or My Child) Have Autism, ADHD, or Both?
You may be surprised to learn that until 2013, both ADHD and Autism could not be diagnosed together – According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), a person could only have one or the other. As the field has learned more about neurodevelopmental conditions through research, we now understand that ADHD and Autism can not only co-occur, but that that is actually the norm rather than the exception! In fact, somewhere between 50-70% of autistic people also have ADHD. Colloquially, you may have heard of this as “AuDHD.” Many people who have ADHD display some traits of autism despite not meeting full diagnostic criteria, and vice versa. It can also be tricky to tell the two conditions apart at times due to symptom overlap and how similarly the conditions can present. So how do we tell them apart, and how do we know when someone has both? Let’s dig into these two conditions a bit more.