She wanted me to make this post, because she is not sure if she is just “weird” or if she can get diagnosed with ADHD and/or autism and make her life a bit easier. The symptoms that bother her the most are the following:
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Sometimes walks away from uninteresting conversations without realizing (with familiar people) with strangers, feels like being held hostage.
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Intense focus to the point of forgetting to eat, drink water and neglecting to go to the toilet.
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Periods of low mood and anhedonia vs periods of intense obsession(?) and excitement with some activity (specific game or game genre, desktop customization).
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Diagnosed with dysthymia and BPD traits (due to self-harm).
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Suicidal thoughts since 14 yo but never made an attempt.
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Low self esteem.
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Persistent interests for many years in which she has made great contributions.
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Does not like to go out much and feels dirty after going out.
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Very annoyed by insects, afraid of bees and wasps.
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She is a perfectionist.
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In kindergarten, she would not go out for recess if she was still in the middle of doing something (finishing a drawing).
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When learning how to do something, she liked repeating the process e.g. making boxes out of paper, drawing the same image.
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Always sits with her knees close to her chest.
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Occasionally rocks back and forth or from side to side sometimes repeats certain sounds / jingles / song melodies.
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She thinks in images instead of words, except when having depression-related thoughts (e.g. “I am useless”), or positive thoughts (“I can do this”) or when daydreaming scenes with dialogue.
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Because of this, speaking is hard for her as she has to translate the images to words.
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Performs great at work but gets burned out quickly.
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Is bad at socializing, and has cut contact with her old friends and does not want to go back to having friends
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Zones out of conversations.
Hmm I just took the RAADS-R test after reading this comment (already have an ADHD diagnosis) and scored a 68:
On some of these questions, like when they use words like “normal” I found myself wondering “how do they define normal?” The “interests” part stood out to me too, because its always been true that if you get me on a topic it can be hard to stop. I also feel way less awkward when I’m talking with someone about a shared interest. Like “finally I can get all this information out of me.” I also feel compelled to provide all the context in order to tell what might be a simple story.
🤷♂️ its interesting, giving me something to think about.
Yeah, that’s definitely a question that comes up in these sorts of screening tests.
It’s also limited because it’s self-assessment and that can be inherently flawed because the question might be worded in such a way that it prompts you to assess how well you perform than necessarily assessing how much difficulty it causes you or what you are like when you aren’t engaging in the methods you have developed to compensate for or adapt to what you’re like at your baseline. For a high masking autistic person, they might be quite disconnected from what their baseline is because they are so used to always being high masking that this obscures their baseline from themselves.
Without knowing more, your results are in an interesting place - they are high for an allistic person and low for an autistic person. This might be reflective of your ADHD, although if I was expecting your results to be reflective of ADHD as the reason for why you scored highly I’d anticipate a skew with higher numbers in the sensorimotor category and a lower score in the circumscribed interest category than you have.
Without knowing how you answered each social relatedness question, I’d venture a guess that your score is significantly higher than the typical allistic score because ADHD/society and societal expectations makes social relatedness quite difficult for a lot of ADHDers.
If we used ADHD to explain the SR score and the SM score, for argument’s sake, we’re left with an interesting split with your language score being expected for an allistic person, if not a little low for an ADHD perhaps, and a CI score which is high for an allistic person and higher again than I’d expect for an ADHDer.
The questions this leaves me with are:
Is your ADHD helping you to compensate in the language domain, or perhaps is it making it more difficult for you to make an accurate assessment of your function/level of difficulty in this domain?
Is your CI score reflective of ADHD traits? I’m going to grossly stereotype here for the sake of contrast but if your CI is such because you love model trains then that would make me want to investigate more but on the other hand if it was this way because you love something like paintball or MMA then that would probably be more in line with what I’d expect for an ADHDer. (Of course everyone is different and there’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that some autistic people adore MMA or paintball and some ADHDers adore model trains, but I’m sure you get what driving at here.)
The other things that would be informative would be knowing your ADHD type based on how you perceive yourself today as well as how you score on the ADHD screening test (although as people reach adulthood they tend to mellow out on the hyperactivity and end up drifting into the combined-type or becoming more towards the inattentive type just because of how things work) and whether you were socialised as a boy or a girl when you were a child.
It’s definitely interesting and your results are pretty inconclusive tbh. You might find that other autism screening tests that you can find on that site provide you with more clarity on the matter.
Thanks for taking the time to write all this! Very interesting perspective. When I was tested for ADHD I was never really tested in a way that determined what kind of “subtype” I might have, but it’s definitely a combination of both inattentive and hyperactive at this point in my life.
I never have an issue talking to people, I can make small talk, but when meeting new people for the first time I generally stay quiet for some time. I have this tendency now (and when I was young) to “ramble” lacking a better word. In my social circles when I was younger, my friends group latched on to calling it a “RedWizard Story” and would regularly interject with “Uh oh, here comes another RedWizard Story”. That hasn’t changed as I’ve aged. Regularly I have to “get to the point”, but I’ve become much more aware of when I’ve entered this mode and can find off-ramps that terminate to the point. I won’t lie though, I always feel cut off, or like slighted when this happens because I’m always “sure” everything I was saying was relevant (it’s clear to me now that’s not always the case from the listeners’ perspective). So part of staying quiet initially is me waiting for my opportunity to “cut in”, but also not wanting to dominate the conversation if I happen to get on a topic I’m particularly interested in.
Those topics are like coiled springs in my mind. If I find out you have played D&D before, for example, I have an ocean of thoughts about it that range from practical to philosophical. Engaging with me on that topic is like pulling loose the cotter pin on the spring and releasing a payload of D&D enthusiasm that might not be shared with the person I’m talking to. I’ve learned over time to temper that enthusiasm with some leading questions to try and gage what level of interest the person has in the topic and navigate from there.
I wouldn’t say that I’m necessarily anxious about engaging in casual conversation. Likewise, I don’t get stressed about the prospects of socializing. Sometimes I feel a little off kilter if I have to make pleasantry with people I’m assisting at work, the kind of idle chatter you engage in to fill the void while you are working towards getting them what they need. Especially if I’m not super familiar with the person.
Maybe what I’m describing here is masking, but frankly, I have no idea how to identify if I am masking, or if I’m just doing what people normally do in regular conversation. Which I think leads back to your initial point of:
If I find some time today, I’ll look at some of the other tests on that site.
That’s a very interesting and relatable description of socialising.
It’s really tricky to give you a good read on this because it really feels like it could be autism or both or just ADHD. The classic ADHD conversation is a constant barrage of tangents and sometimes even these random abrupt topic shifts. The classic unmasked autistic conversation is typically more monologue-style infodumping and an excessive amount of specificity and “irrelevant” detail.
You tend to see my more autistic traits coming out in my posts and comments here - even just now “posts and comments” is unnecessarily specific. I could have said “in me here” and it probably would have been sufficient. I also brevity is not my strong suit unless I really strive for it consciously.
With that being said there’s also some degree of ADHD traits visible - I often overlook simple spelling mistakes and I can kinda bounce from one topic to another, often tangential ones, without really gliding gracefully between them but it’s less obvious and looking at how someone posts is more like the MBTI than it is a clinical assessment.
When it comes to idle chit chat, an autistic person tends to find it perplexing and pointless, and they’ll struggle with reciprocating and knowing what is deemed appropriate to talk about and what isn’t. An ADHDer tends to find it either frustrating (because they’re trying to focus on something else, they are struggling to focus on the boring vapid nonsense, or because they feel impatient and they want to talk about something interesting or they are struggling to wait until the other person has finished their sentence before jumping in) or they really enjoy having someone new to engage with.
It’s worth noting that ADHDers definitely engage in masking. It’s a bit different because an ADHDer doesn’t face the same difficulties with communication so usually ADHD masking is about trying to mellow out the inattentiveness or the impulsiveness, trying to stay on track, trying not to interrupt, trying to be observant of what’s being communicated etc. whereas an autistic person masking is trying to consciously read and interpret all of these little signs and indicators to make sense of them while trying to give the right ones to the other person, so it’s more like playing a card game that you have only just learned the rules of where you’re constantly trying to remember them all while making the right play as the game unfolds. It can look very similar, especially outwardly, but I think the internal experience is different.
AuDHD though. It’s really kinda hard to describe what communication is like an an auDHDer and I suspect it depends on what traits are more predominat, how severe the ADHD is and if it’s appropriately medicated etc.
This is my experience for sure. In the moments when I’m having a very hard time with it (usually right after work) I have to close my eyes and cross my arms to really focus on a conversation. Too many times, I’ve been trying to listen to my SO tell me about her day, and even though I really do want to hear about it, I can feel the invisible hand turning my thoughts and attention away. Medication helps with that a lot. That sense of “newness” is also very real. Talking to new people for me can be a little daunting, but once I find some kind of common ground or interest, it’s really difficult to shut me up. I’ve always been told I’m very personable, and I can be very extroverted in the right settings, but there is this kind of ADHD ennui that sets in when things become too familiar, which really sucks. My life has been defined by my “obsessions”, those transient hobbies or projects that ADHD tends to latch onto, and when I encounter people who are not like that, who have nothing they are currently OBSESSED with, I can feel my brain just click off. Just as much as I absolutely CRAVE info-dumping on someone or someone to have an enthusiastic back and forth with, I also desire to be the target of that kind of enthusiasm. I can be incredibly energized by other people’s unbridled enthusiasm for something, and their willingness to bless me with that torrent of enthusiasm. I know from experience, though, that most neurotypical people do not feel being that target is a blessing. When I’m talking to someone I’m really comfortable with, those tendencies, to interrupt or monolog, grow stronger, probably because I assume I can just let the spring loose and not be judged for it.
This is a realization that I’m only having as a result of this conversation. I picked up “Unmasking Autism” and read the Introduction and a good portion of the first chapter. Some things described in the book resonated with me (samefoods for example), while others didn’t (not understanding social queues or norms). Even in what I’ve read so far, it’s really opened my eyes to just how much work I do to “pass”, and how much of myself I really do suppress for the sake of others.
This aligns totally with my day-to-day experience.
This does not. Which I think makes sense.
I do think I have a pretty intense case of ADHD, though. Without medication, it takes only a matter of a week or so before I start to come apart at the seams. I had a lap in medication recently, and it was only like 10 days, but by the 10th day I was a totally irritable mess. I’m also realizing as a result of this conversation that I don’t have a lot of other neurodivergent people around me that I can actively talk about these things with, or at least, not ones who think about these experiences like this. So I definitely appreciate your willingness to engage with me here, it’s very helpful!