Does your partner also have ADHD and/or Autism?

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Around 7 years ago, long before I knew I was autistic, I was talking to a guy on a dating app. We were talking for two months before we actually met. During those conversations I asked him "are you autistic?". I think it might have been his love for Disney. Obviously I was ignorant. It was a bit of an inappropriate question. 6 years later, I get diagnosed with autism and then a few months after that ADHD.

He now suspects he has ADHD too.

I'm Autistic but neither my bride nor I suspected it until I was 64. Other than telling her my suspicions and on-line test score I did not tell anyone of my suspicions until I saw a psychologist for a formal assessment. I would never have said I was possibly Autistic
nor even strongly suspected it until I was formally diagnosed.

My bride is ADHD. She was diagnosed as a young child but did not mention to me that it was a formal diagnosis so when she told me she was ADHD I discounted it as an amateur assessment. We'd been married for almost 20 years before she mentioned that she had been formally assessed as ADHD when she was a young child. Since it was a formal diagnosis, not an amateur's assessment, I then believed she was ADHD.

My current girlfriend is very likely also on the spectrum & has ADHD & other various mental stuff. We met on this forum. I met my 2nd girlfriend on this forum as well & she had autism & social anxiety but I don't think she had ADHD. My first girlfriend had ADHD & dyslexia & we met on a forum for a common interest. I've been diagnosed with dyslexia & ADD since kindergarten & that's one of the reasons we connected.

I certainly have a defecit of attention at times, but I prefer not to seek an official assessment of ADD or ADHD - I don't know of any interventions except drugs, and I don't trust those, nor do I want the expense and bother of going to a diagnostician. Even so, I'm curious.

Is it possible for an individual to tell the difference between ADD/ADHD and the lack of attention that comes purely from autism? Is it even possible for a diagnostician to do that? If so, how is it done?

The "symptoms" of Autism Asperger's Syndrome and ADHD overlap. It was this table that allowed my bride to distinguish her ADHD from my Asperger's Syndrome Autism.

It is possible to have both. All I can say about that is my mind boggles!

Now that's interesting. So it hinges on narrowness of interests and rigid adherence to routines?

I'm kind of mixed with the narrowness of my interests. There are certain subjects that I'm rather passionate about, and quite a few subjects that I wouldn't touch with a barge pole, but I think I have fairly broad tastes.

As for rigid adherence to routines, I certainly have routines but I often find myself deviating from them, sometimes out of sheer boredom and because they get too easy and I start feeling like a micromanaged slave with every minute of my day cut out for me and no scope for spontaneity. Whether or not I could become a total creature of routine, I don't know, because I'd hate the tedium of doing the experiment to find out, and just wouldn't bloody do it.

But as you say, the mind boggles. How does anybody tell whether such a relationship with routine and interests is down to ADD/ADHD or just down to the spectrum nature of ASD and the fact that we don't have to be full-blown in all the traits to qualify?

So your presumption was that diagnosticians are usually correct?

"How does anybody tell whether such a relationship with routine and interests is down to ADD/ADHD or just down to the spectrum nature of ASD and the fact that we don't have to be full-blown in all the traits to qualify?"

There are trained professionals who know how to test that stuff.

I was just an untrained "patient" being assessed. But the assessment process was kind of fun!


"So your presumption was that diagnosticians are usually correct?"

For something complex it think the person with training is more likely to be correct.

My current girlfriend is sometimes hyper, sometimes talks fast without stopping, & often suddenly switches to a completely different topic in the middle of talking. Cass is also very absent minded like she's in the middle of playing a game on Playstation & grabs her phone to look something up in her game but instead of looking it up she checks email, checks social media, & does random web browsing & then an hour later she goes back to playing her game to suddenly remember she never looked up what she intended to. I doubt most autistics without ADHD are like that.

Yes they may well be more likely to be correct. I suppose a lot depends on personal experience of health professionals. In my experience, my father was diagnosed with "worn discs" by a GP, but he turned out to need a hip replacement. Another prescribed rubbing oils for what turned out to be broken ribs. And my daughter-in-law was assessed for ASD and told that she didn't have it, but my wife and I thought that she did, and hired another diagnostician for a second opinion, and that came up as fairly severe ASD. So I know for a fact that the professionals do sometimes get it wrong, though they may themselves express no doubt about their conclusions.

I'm not saying professional opinion is always worthless, just that sometimes it turns out to be. And testing for ADD/ADHD in the presence of ASD must be one heck of a challenge for the cleverest diagnostician. I sometimes wonder whether these conditions are entirely real in the sense that a missing leg is real, and whether their very definitions are too flawed to allow anybody to know for sure, except perhaps in extreme cases.

So the criterion would be whether or not the client is easily distracted? I can certainly get distracted like that, but these days it usually remains in the back of my mind that something's in danger of getting overlooked, and if the idea of overlooking it worries me enough, I generally get back to it before significant damage has been done. I also hate letting ideas get lost even if they're not especially important, so I tend to remain aware of even those things. I guess all that would suggest I don't have ADHD.