I need order and routine – just as much as I crave excitement and variety. What’s life like with both autism and ADHD?

by Sarah Hendrickx  BIO

Photo by Claudia Schwartz/Unsplash

is an AuDHD author, speaker, freelance writer and former diagnostician. Her latest book The Complete Guide to AuDHD is forthcoming in November 2026. Her previous books include Women and Girls on the Autism Spectrum (2nd ed, 2024) and Could I Really Be Autistic? (2025).

Edited byPam Weintraub

How would it be if you woke up one morning around 4 am, consumed by an idea that felt like the Best Idea You Ever Had. You spend the next two hours fervently researching said idea, watching videos, reading in-depth articles, compiling a spreadsheet comparing costs, techniques and options, then buying a whole load of books and equipment, and signing up to courses to teach you how to bring this fantastic, life-changing idea to fruition. You book a viewing for the new house in a new country that you are going to buy after investigating climate, housing options and work opportunities. You book the flights for that trip, to a Pacific island, where you will learn to scuba dive and set up a business as a dive instructor having fully understood the tourism industry and its legal implications. You sign up for that master’s programme in hypnotherapy/mushroom-growing/road-building after comparing the cost and quality of all colleges offering these courses. Your research is deep, your conclusions well justified. These are all good choices.

Buzzing on your own brilliance at finding the answer to all of your problems, your true calling in life and, basically, frigging nirvana, you are desperate to wake your beloved, who is lying beside you, blissfully unaware that their world is about to be rocked. You think about waking them because you can’t contain all this excitement alone and need to share it, but it’s only 6 am and you know from experience that this wouldn’t end well. So you sit, fidgeting, watching the clock until 6:30 am. Surely, that’s late enough? Perhaps if you bring them coffee, they won’t be so mad. Yet how could they be mad, when what you’re about to reveal to them will make them say: ‘Why didn’t you wake me up sooner, you genius?’

But as you sit impatiently waiting for an acceptable hour to rouse your beloved and blow their mind, your whole self shifts sideways, like someone just turned the TV over to another channel or a changeling took over your mind. You suddenly realise that your previously designated Best Idea Ever is full of holes and is actually a Terrible Idea. You are puzzled that you didn’t see this sooner. What were you thinking? You can’t move house because your kids are in school here, you have a full-time job and bills to pay, and you don’t have the attention span to read your horoscope, let alone do a master’s. And you can’t even swim.

What idiot thought that any of this was a good idea? Oh… it was me. OK… time to cancel it all and hope that you didn’t lose too much money and that it will all be back in the bank account before ‘they’ wake up.

And hope that you don’t do the same thing again tonight.

Welcome to the world of AuDHD.

You will likely have come across the term AuDHD used as a shortcut to describe those given the dual diagnosis of autism and attention-deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It is a relatively new label and for good reason – until recently, no one individual was clinically permitted to be given both diagnoses and therefore there was no one to whom the term ‘AuDHD’ could officially apply.

In 1994, a mere 32 years ago, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition (DSM-IV), included Asperger Syndrome for the first time. In 2013, the diagnosis was removed from the 5th edition (DSM-5) and subsumed under the broader category of ‘autism spectrum disorder’. Asperger Syndrome had identified individuals who met the social and behavioural aspects of the diagnostic criteria for autism but who did not have intellectual disability or the language-development differences then associated with an autism diagnosis. As a result, an autistic person reading this magazine today would have been unlikely to receive an autism diagnosis in the past: there was simply no diagnostic category that fit their profile. That helps to explain the huge rise in adult diagnoses in recent decades.

Autism and ADHD were long considered mutually exclusive

Alongside this, diagnosis of ADHD in adults has been a similarly recent arrival. Having been considered a predominantly childhood condition for most of its history, the idea that children can continue to experience ADHD features into adulthood was not seriously considered until the early 2000s. Earlier versions of the DSM required that symptoms had to have been present prior to the age of seven years, and focused almost entirely on childhood behaviours to form the diagnosis. In 2013, with the publication of the DSM-5, the onset age of ADHD symptoms was raised to 12 years, and fewer symptoms were required for adults to meet the diagnostic threshold – which took into account........

© Aeon