What is AuDHD? (Autism + ADHD Together)

Have you ever had that experience of reading about ADHD and thinking, yes, but also no, this doesn’t quite fit. Or reading about autism and feeling the same thing. This fits, but it doesn’t quite
explain everything.

Hi, I’m Dr. Megan Ann Neff, an ADHD clinical psychologist, founder of Neurodivergent Insights, and the author of Self Care for Autistic People and the Autistic Burnout Workbook.

To be clear, there are actually lots of reasons why you might mostly relate to ADHD,
but not quite, or why you might even relate to autism, but not quite. Things like bipolar, social anxiety, trauma, all of these things can all have overlapping experiences and features with ADHD and autism.

So it could be one of those, or it could be AuDHD. AuDHD is when a person is both autistic and
ADHD.

Now, when I first heard the term, I thought the term was a bit odd, but maybe that’s because I was pronouncing it wrong. I was pronouncing it as “odd,” ODD, DHD. Once someone explained to me that it’s pronounced as
“awe” as in awesome, AuDHD, I began to feel a bit better about the term and I eventually have warmed up to it. And it’s a term that I now like quite a bit. AuDHD isn’t a formal diagnosis.

You’re not going to find it in the DSM, and most clinicians won’t write it on a chart or an assessment report. AuDHD is a community created term. It emerged online, not f rom research labs or diagnostic manuals, but f rom people who are trying to describe their lived experience. Many of the words that we now use in the neurodivergent community, things like neurodivergent, masking. It showed up because people needed language, language for something that didn’t quite fit inside the existing f rameworks that we had available to us.

So at its simplest, AuDHD is simply shorthand for being both autistic and ADHD. But what it really captures is that dynamic interplay between these two neurologies. AuDHD is not just the sum of their parts. It’s not simply ADHD plus autism. AuDHD has its own unique rhythms, experiences, and patterns. Autism and ADHD intersect and compound to create new and different complexities.

So coming to discover ourselves as AuDHD, it’s often a light bulb moment for many of us, the moment where things finally click into place and our lives for many of us for the first time begin to make sense. You’ll often hear people use AuDHD as an identity term, as in I’m AuDHD or I’m an AuDHDer. That mirrors a broader pattern that we see within the neurodivergent community where many people, particularly in the autistic community, prefer identity first language.

So saying, “I’m autistic rather than I have autism.” For many people, identity first language is about ownership, pride, and community. It’s about naming something that shapes how we move through the world rather than distancing from it.

So when you hear someone say, “I’m AuDHD,” it’s often less about labels and more about
recognition. Sure, it’s technically smashing together two diagnosis labels, but typically people are telling you something about their identity, about how their brain takes in the world and how they move through the world.

Now, not everyone in the community prefers identity first language, and it’s important to make space for that too. If you yourself are not autistic, ADHD or AuDHD, it’s always best to go with the language the person you’re talking to prefers. Generally, most people are okay with you asking what language they prefer. As part of my upcoming book on the AuDHD experience, I surveyed the community and asked a simple question.

What did finding this term give you? And here are a few of the things that people had to share.
I feel like I actually understand what’s happening in my head for the first time. It helped me to understand the push, pull I always felt. I thought it was low self-esteem, but the contradiction finally made sense. I give myself more grace now. I’m less frustrated with the constant tension between the two states. It changed everything about how I see my behavior, my life, and even my family dynamics. Seeing other people describe my experience made me feel less wrong, less alien, less alone. Over and over, the same themes came up, relief, validation, and a melting of shame.

There was a sense, “I make sense. I’m not broken. There is a name for this. ” And this is the power of naming something. When we finally have language to wrap around our experience, language that fits, our body can often begin to settle. Our minds are no longer trying to solve an invisible puzzle or explain away contradictions and uncertainty.

Things that we may have personally clocked as personal failures or character flaws, we can now begin to understand as part of our innate neurology.

Now, there’s a few reasons that AuDHD can feel pretty different than ADHD or autism alone. AuDHD folks often don’t fully relate to the stereotypes of either ADHD or autism. The chaos often associated with ADHD or the rigidity often associated with autism. For me personally, my autistic traits and my need for predictability can curb some of my ADHD chaos. And the ADHD helps me to get out of some of the ruts that my autism often pulls me into. For many of us, we live inside this tension between structure and novelty, quiet solitude and loud impulsivity, deep focus and overwhelm with pingy thoughts.

Understanding AuDHD helps us to name several of these paradoxes that we embody and hopefully to help us have a little bit more gentleness with ourselves and self-compassion along the way.

The term AuDHD is relatively new. It started showing up more widely around 2022. At least that’s when we see a noticeable spike in people searching for it online.

Now, there are a few different reasons for this. For one, there’s been an explosion of neurodivergent education and advocacy online.

More people are starting to share about their lived experience. There’s more collective meaning making happening, more community culture that’s being created. And as part of that, more creation of language.

Now, another important reason is the diagnostic history of these experiences. For 2013, clinicians couldn’t formally diagnose someone with both autism and ADHD. They had to choose which one best fit.

Now that change with updates that were made to the DSM-5, so more people are now being diagnosed with both ADHD and autism. And then on top of that, more and more of the last generation of autistic and ADHD adults are also being identified.

So with these diagnostic and cultural changes, we’re seeing a rise in awareness of the AuDHD experience. Again, to be clear, AuDHD is not a medical diagnosis, neither is this video.  A provider might diagnose someone with both autism and ADHD, but AuDHD itself lives outside the medical system as a community created term that celebrates identity. If you are AuDHD, it’s an exciting time in our community in the sense that we’re at the emergence of culture building,
awareness. And yes, even building our own language like AuDHD.

So what is AuDHD? It’s an identity term, a community term, one that many people find deeply empowering and freeing because it names a complexity that they’ve been trying to untangle for
years.

So AuDHD isn’t about inventing something new. It’s about finally having a proper word to wrap around what for many of us is a very complex experience. In future videos, we’ll talk more about how ADHD and autism intersect and what that means for diagnosis, burnout, energy, and daily
life.

But for now, if this term landed for you, I hope you know this. You’re not broken, you’re not a shameful walking contradiction, and you’re not alone. There is a whole community of us out here.