I’m proud to be autistic and I’m proud to be one of the increasing numbers of autism advocates who are contributing to the rewriting of the autism narrative; the pejorative narrative is what harms autistic people.
In my experience the medicating of co-existing ADHD can be valid options if after adapting the environment in order to meet individual needs the ADHD is still causing distress for the individual. (I am not a physician this is solely based on my own lived experience of ADHD)
I’m Autistic-adhd and need medication; no matter what I do to the environment I am still distressed all the time. I lived 44 years in a state of fight and flight and now I’m on adhd medication I no longer feel like I’m in a constant state of fight, flight or freeze.
My ADHD is severe combined, which might be ok on its own but for me combined with my autism, which has very different needs to the adhd causes internalised conflict that for me led to cPTSD (chronic post traumatic stress disorder).
During those 40+ years I never questioned my experience I just assumed it's what everyone felt but since learning more about myself, autism and adhd I started to realise this wasn’t a sustainable state for me and so the ADHD had to be dialed down to give the autism the space and shared control.
The autism wants routine, which the ADHD hates and due to the poor impulse control of the ADHD, which acts upon what it thinks needs to be done -dragging the autism along regardless of it’s protesting. When you add to said internal conflict the perceived hostile external environment that conflicts both the autism and ADHD's needs - it is here where I believe the 'pathological' or as I prefer to call it, debilitating demand avoidance (PDA) appears.
Through my own lived experience and my observations of others like me I believe that demand avoidance can exist in its own right in both adhd and autism - it's only when the two combine (AuDHD) within one brain, which is then subjected to percieved hostile external environments that the reactions become ‘pathalogical’ or debilitating - This is my hypothesis.
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