I’ve seen it referenced on TikTok but I’m curious about the evidence. It seems pretty plausible. The same gene is involved apparently. There’s very high “comorbidity.” Even in non “AuDHDers” many of the symptoms of one (that an individual “doesn’t have”) are present. Autists can be very different from eachother and it seems like they may sometimes have more in common with some ADHDers than eachother. Dividing things into specific labels like this is kinda lib and undialectical anyway. People already realizing Aspergers and other things were just autism. “Pathological Defiant Disorder” (allegedly) seems to basically just be a common presentation of AuDHD. There’s also the monotropism theory that both tend to be high in.
This is just my uneducated opinion on something I’ve been fixated on and pondering for a little while. I’m curious if anyone has any serious evidence or more interesting thoughts. There’s probably also connections to other neurodivergences.
To speculate wildly, that would make more sense than the disorders being a spectrum of one another.
It’s important to think about this stuff with a scientific perspective as well. These theories to the underlying mechanism are working understandings based on available evidence. They’re far from being proven fact, or even consensus, and it’s entirely possible that there are confounding factors that aren’t being taken into account because of Donald Rumsfeld reasons. It might seem appealing to do, but connecting one working understanding to a second separate working understanding and then trying to synthesize novel conclusions from that doesn’t really work.
We know a lot of the symptoms that present with both disorders, we know that the symptoms share a significant amount of overlap, we know that they co-present at a higher level than the baseline (if you have one you’re more likely to be a person who has the other compared to regular-brained people), so it’s highly likely that they have similar underlying physiology, but our understanding of that physiology isn’t anywhere near complete enough to make a definitive guess.