Find a therapist to help with ADHD

ADHD's traits can leave autistic traits misattributed or missed, a process of diagnostic overshadowing.

Social struggles, sensory needs, and emotional responses to change can be misread through an ADHD-only lens.

Seeing both conditions clearly isn't about collecting labels, it's about having the right lens.

Many people who are both autistic and have ADHD, sometimes called AuDHD, spend years being understood through only one lens. ADHD tends to be visible, recognizable, and identified first. And once it's on the chart, it can become the frame through which everything else is explained.

Social struggles get understood through the lens of "impulsivity" and "inattention." Sensory needs and stimming become "hyperactivity." Emotional distress around change becomes "poor frustration tolerance." None of these explanations is wrong, exactly, but when ADHD becomes the whole story, autistic traits can be overshadowed for years.

This pattern came up again and again in a survey I conducted with over 700 AuDHD adults for my upcoming book, AuDHD Unlocked, years of partial recognition before the full picture came into view. Clinicians call this diagnostic overshadowing: when traits that could belong to multiple conditions get automatically attributed to the first diagnosis. Research bears this out: when ADHD is identified before autism, autism recognition is delayed by an average of 1.8 years, and closer to 2.6 years........

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