Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Getting assessed and diagnosed
Autism and ADHD share some surface features and are still two different things. The social difficulty in each arrives by a different road.
With ADHD it tends to be impulsiveness and missing what was going on: the interruption, the thing said too fast, the friend never rung back. With autism it is more often that the social rules themselves are not obvious in the first place. That distinction decides what actually helps, whether the work is slowing down and noticing or learning the rules explicitly, so it is worth getting right rather than settling for whichever label arrived first.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Who taught man what he did not know (Quran 96:5). Learning something true about how you are put together comes as a gift in that phrasing, not as an exposure.
عَلَّمَ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنَ مَا لَمۡ يَعۡلَمۡ
who taught man what he did not know
Qur’an 96:5read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A clinical review of adults with autism describes a generation who grew up before the criteria were broadened and were never identified, and treats a first diagnosis in adulthood as a legitimate clinical matter rather than an oddity. Arriving at either of these questions late in life is common. The review makes a clinical case rather than reporting new measurements.
Lai MC, Baron-Cohen S. (2015). Identifying the lost generation of adults with autism spectrum conditions.. The lancet. Psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
What helps depends on why the difficulty happens, not on what it looks like from outside.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
When you need a date, hand people events rather than months. Was that before or after the holiday? Same year as the move?
Trouble with eating, and with how your body looks, gets missed far more often in men. The questionnaires and the expectations behind them were built around women.
A man who could not get himself to bed kept his bedtime alarm upstairs, where his wife and baby were sleeping. Switching it off meant climbing the stairs, and leaving it meant waking them. The walk to the alarm was the thing he was trying to do anyway.