Dear Tony and Craig, thank you for choosing to discuss my question. I am the lady from the Isle of Man. I have since been formally diagnosed with moderate High Functioning Autism and moderate ADHD-combined type. I have been fortunate to find a fellow Nurse who is a Nurse Consultant who specialises in ASD and ADHD assessment and ongoing follow up. The down side is she is a private practitioner and it has already cost me £800 and yet I need to continue to see her, because she is slowly helping me to find and accept the real me and find a future, which I have struggled to see for so long. On a slightly different note, I have become a Health (Wellbeing) and Safety Representative for our nursing union and within this new role I have been asked to help champion disability inclusion here on the Isle of Man and I know this is a role where I can use all my experience honed into a deep compassion for people. Finally, like the student, I feel I have under achieved and been under employed my whole life and of course, I now know I have both ASD and ADHD, which I now know made school, college and university a real struggle and have also made my 32 years of employment a struggle to. Thank you again gentlemen.
Hello from a fellow AuDHD nurse 😊 I would recommend Dr Russell Barkley's channel for understanding ADHD too - he's fantastic and very knowledgeable. On the subject of underachieving I think it should be noted that reflecting on what you have achieved is really important because I think a lot of us are way too hard on ourselves when it comes to what we should or could have done better and acceptance of our humanity (even though we might feel like aliens quite a lot) is very important. I just want to wish you well on your journey and let you know that you're a valuable part of the neurodiverse community 🤗
@@saraselmon6642 thank you, I will certainly look Dr Russell up. I think it's hard not to slip back into self criticism. You can be going along, confident and wham, a word, or look can trigger you and you are right back to where you started. At least this is my experience but hey ho, you just have to pull up your big girl pants and walk on, forward one step at a time.
@@saraselmon6642 I have check Dr Russell out and wow, he described my ADHD to a tee. Got me thinking about medications as I must confess I struggle now and especially with my emotional dysregulation. Sara, do you take meds?
Thank you so much! I like this somewhat shorter episode as it makes it easier for me to digest and appreciate all the information that is provided. Dr. Tony thank you for your compassion and your knowledge and thank you Mr. Evans for being such a charming host and putting in all the effort to get this all recorded and online.
Oh my gosh! I'm so grateful to see the series back! It's my fav on yt so I have the notifications turned on for this channel (and one science channel I like). Tysm tysm! This is the most invaluable resource on autism that I've ever come across online 😊
Thank you for a very interesting podcast! I hope to see more of these in the future. I would like to add, as an autistic OCD therapist, for anybody who has or believes they have OCD, rather than see a general CBT therapist for help to manage this condition, it's crucial to seek help from a professional experienced in working with Exposure and Response Prevention therapy. This is the gold standard treatment for OCD.
Thank you Dr. Tony for furthering awareness of the term situational mutism. The times it has happened to me it is very much freeze response, which makes sense as I have overactive fight/flight/freeze. It is accompanied by overwhelming fear, sort of like performance anxiety elevated to a phobic state, as if I am being asked to stick my hand inside a hornet’s nest. It has certain things in common with what I think of as PDA behaviors in me.
Dr. Tony, I'm an adult autie (diagnosed 2 years ago at 44), and I'm finally in university. My major is psychology, and I have won a national scholarship (US) to perform a research project. I have decided to educate the faculty at my university about autistism in uni students and how they can be better supported. (The ignorance is overwhelming here.) Could you discuss some ways that instructors in higher education can accommodate auties alongside their neurotypical peers? I have done a few years of research, but I think hearing you discuss subjects helps the main points gel for me better. (I'm 3 standard deviations above the mean for verbal. Hearing this helps a lot.) I will be perfectly capable without an assist, but it would be appreciated. Also, I hope I can get you to come to my school to give a talk; I'm starting a student organization for ND students to provide peer support and parallel play times. Through that, we can bring speakers to campus to help grow understanding. Thank you so much for all you do!
Thank you! Have been eagerly awaiting a new episode and every time a topic is revisited, it's very helpful to hear updated information. Also the ending was fantastic and I feel that you both could have a blooper reel!
It was assumed that i had BPD just because I'm female and (at the time) self harmed. There is no other reason listed on my medical records and not one doctor bothered to discuss it. This was the assumption from the age of about 18 until i was 30 and finally diagnosed with ASD. I'll bet that this has happened to a lot of people.
Hey there, I'm a mental health nurse and see this a lot in clinical practice as well as many young people developing BPD probably, in part due to undiagnosed AS & the trauma that this can cause (ie not knowing why someone is different, bullying etc). I think many of the diagnostic 'symptoms' (I don't like to think of autism in terms of symptoms however) can overlap & thus be difficult to ascertain the underlying aetiology. I also see many young people with ADHD misdiagnosed with BPD due to emotional lability associated with executive dysfunction being a prominent feature; the tell tail delineating factor appears to be that when you put someone with actually ADHD on stimulants the emotional lability appears to dissipate (I'm one such example of this). I have been diagnosed with AS but I was deeply depressed at the time (I have bipolar) and don't actually struggle with social nuance & subtext so the jury is still out as to whether I'm on the spectrum or not. I'm not sure our current conceptualisations of autism fully grasp the heterogeneous nature of the condition & what a cognitively diverse bunch people actually are 😊
For the person undiagnosed with ADHD please seek an assessment as Dr Tony advised; I was diagnosed until I was 36 & despite having done superlatively well at school I feel like it put a barrier on me being unable to get into the likes of Oxbridge as my executive function was just so poor...God knows how I managed to pull off the grades I did without being able to revise properly. Now I'm diagnosed & treated with elvanse I'm undertaking my PhD & life in general is a whole lot easier. People generally assumed I was lazy as they thought I should excel across the board because of my IQ meanwhile I couldn't maintain a household, make it out the door on time, do simple multi tasking, set shift etc. honestly you'll notice the difference very quickly with medication.
❤ amazing I have adhd and autisum and unique speech problems X and so appreciated of what you stand for helping others in spectrum so nice to watch X 😊
I am so glad Tony Attwood spoke about autism and bpd.I was diagnosed with bpd in the past but later diagnosed with ASD and ADHD and I am glad he speaks on this because looking back at it I dont agree that I ever had bpd.I feel it was a diagnosis given because of struggling with mental health as an Autistic person.I do agree DBT did help me though.I am glad this issue is being talked about because I dont feel I am the only one who has been diagnosed with bpd to later realise I am autistic.
Yes, Dr. Tony has commented that BPD is even more stigmatized than autism. I admit I have fraught feelings about personality disorders, having grown up in an era when Behaviorism was a mainstream concept and cold mother theory was prevalent. I think it’s important to acknowledge that cognitive function and dysfunction always involves a mix of physiological predisposition and environmental influences, experiential and otherwise. Mental health is a complex mix of neurological processes and psychological factors.
Situational mutism describes how I feel many times. When I have to speak with someone for the first time, I literally can't walk and talk to the person. I cannot think what to say no matter how much I try. Another example is that I know how to dance. I have no problems dancing in a musical play, but getting up and dance to whatever song is playing just for the sake of dancing is tremendously hard for me. Just getting up and moving to the rhythm becomes impossible and exhausting. It's not fear, it's more like my mind can't really coordinate when it is thinking about those situations.
Instead of or in addition to putting the table of contents at the beginning, there is also a way to insert the table of contents as sections of the video which can be accessed at any time. That would be very helpful from the viewer instead of having to check back to the beginning every time to find a relevant section.
Thank you for your valuable information. I believe my husband is autistic, but refuses to get a diagnosis. My son was recently diagnosed as autistic level 2. We don't have a relationship. He is a flat mate who does not work or housework, but does computer games all day and all night.
Great interview and love the shirt colours too ;) I can relate to the friendship part for me it feels like walking of a cliff when I feel pushed away. Can Autism be regarded as an intellectual ability? Sometimes I feel as though I am wrongly portrayed as having an intellectual disability and treated like a baby.
I was teasing him about his shirt before we filmed. He said he wore it, because it was bright and fun, not like the weather where I live (it’s winter here, summer there). He was trying to brighten my day. That’s how genuinely considerate Dr. Attwood is.
@@autismhangouti actually love his shirt, but it DID occupy my brain far too long. I eventually realized the pattern is made up of letters in the font on the optometry charts, and sliced-up landscape illustrations! it's 2 patterns in 1!
I think I have autism. My brother has it and every day I think I'm finally realizing I do too but where do I first go for help? I'm a sociable aspie even eccentric I've been told (after drinking usually). But is it wise to inform your employer or not?
What about the studies with a loop of 60 or more genes linking autism, ADHD, scizophrenia and bipolar? Seperately schizophrenia and autism tend to run in the same families. 70 to 80% of autistic people also have a mental illness. The seperation of autism and mental illness might not be as easy as you claim in this video. I don't think autism itself is a mental illness. But it has many ties to mental illness.
Please, use UTC in international date format. The date on this is ambiguous at best, and I've no idea what that acronym represents. 2023/11/05 08:00 UTC +0800 is pretty clear and unambiguous, once learned. It has the merits of clearly not being American or standard British Empire. I don't like "Spectrum" or "Disorder" in ASD. We don't talk about spectrum in the context of height, eye colour, mass or anything really, except light. If I go searching for what disorder means, I find "illness." I am autistic, I am not unwell and I certainly do not have a disease. If ADHD can be acquired after birth, perhaps that is an illness. FASD is consequence of being poisoned by one's mother. I'm not sure the D is actually useful though. I do like the idea of autism being equated with something like keratoconus though. I have that too.
Dear Tony and Craig, thank you for choosing to discuss my question. I am the lady from the Isle of Man.
I have since been formally diagnosed with moderate High Functioning Autism and moderate ADHD-combined type. I have been fortunate to find a fellow Nurse who is a Nurse Consultant who specialises in ASD and ADHD assessment and ongoing follow up. The down side is she is a private practitioner and it has already cost me £800 and yet I need to continue to see her, because she is slowly helping me to find and accept the real me and find a future, which I have struggled to see for so long.
On a slightly different note, I have become a Health (Wellbeing) and Safety Representative for our nursing union and within this new role I have been asked to help champion disability inclusion here on the Isle of Man and I know this is a role where I can use all my experience honed into a deep compassion for people.
Finally, like the student, I feel I have under achieved and been under employed my whole life and of course, I now know I have both ASD and ADHD, which I now know made school, college and university a real struggle and have also made my 32 years of employment a struggle to.
Thank you again gentlemen.
Hello from a fellow AuDHD nurse 😊 I would recommend Dr Russell Barkley's channel for understanding ADHD too - he's fantastic and very knowledgeable.
On the subject of underachieving I think it should be noted that reflecting on what you have achieved is really important because I think a lot of us are way too hard on ourselves when it comes to what we should or could have done better and acceptance of our humanity (even though we might feel like aliens quite a lot) is very important.
I just want to wish you well on your journey and let you know that you're a valuable part of the neurodiverse community 🤗
@@saraselmon6642 thank you, I will certainly look Dr Russell up. I think it's hard not to slip back into self criticism. You can be going along, confident and wham, a word, or look can trigger you and you are right back to where you started. At least this is my experience but hey ho, you just have to pull up your big girl pants and walk on, forward one step at a time.
@@saraselmon6642 I have check Dr Russell out and wow, he described my ADHD to a tee. Got me thinking about medications as I must confess I struggle now and especially with my emotional dysregulation.
Sara, do you take meds?
Thank you Dr. Tony and Mr. Evans for bringing this series back. It has been a very valuable resource in understanding my Asperger's diagnosis.
Thank you so much! I like this somewhat shorter episode as it makes it easier for me to digest and appreciate all the information that is provided.
Dr. Tony thank you for your compassion and your knowledge and thank you Mr. Evans for being such a charming host and putting in all the effort to get this all recorded and online.
Oh my gosh! I'm so grateful to see the series back! It's my fav on yt so I have the notifications turned on for this channel (and one science channel I like). Tysm tysm! This is the most invaluable resource on autism that I've ever come across online 😊
Thank you thank you
Thank you for a very interesting podcast! I hope to see more of these in the future. I would like to add, as an autistic OCD therapist, for anybody who has or believes they have OCD, rather than see a general CBT therapist for help to manage this condition, it's crucial to seek help from a professional experienced in working with Exposure and Response Prevention therapy. This is the gold standard treatment for OCD.
Thank you Dr. Tony for furthering awareness of the term situational mutism. The times it has happened to me it is very much freeze response, which makes sense as I have overactive fight/flight/freeze. It is accompanied by overwhelming fear, sort of like performance anxiety elevated to a phobic state, as if I am being asked to stick my hand inside a hornet’s nest. It has certain things in common with what I think of as PDA behaviors in me.
I was just checking if you guys had posted any more of these a few days ago. I'm so glad you're back! These are so helpful!
Dr. Tony, I'm an adult autie (diagnosed 2 years ago at 44), and I'm finally in university. My major is psychology, and I have won a national scholarship (US) to perform a research project. I have decided to educate the faculty at my university about autistism in uni students and how they can be better supported. (The ignorance is overwhelming here.)
Could you discuss some ways that instructors in higher education can accommodate auties alongside their neurotypical peers? I have done a few years of research, but I think hearing you discuss subjects helps the main points gel for me better. (I'm 3 standard deviations above the mean for verbal. Hearing this helps a lot.)
I will be perfectly capable without an assist, but it would be appreciated.
Also, I hope I can get you to come to my school to give a talk; I'm starting a student organization for ND students to provide peer support and parallel play times. Through that, we can bring speakers to campus to help grow understanding.
Thank you so much for all you do!
Thank you both for doing this again😊
Thank you! Have been eagerly awaiting a new episode and every time a topic is revisited, it's very helpful to hear updated information.
Also the ending was fantastic and I feel that you both could have a blooper reel!
It was assumed that i had BPD just because I'm female and (at the time) self harmed. There is no other reason listed on my medical records and not one doctor bothered to discuss it. This was the assumption from the age of about 18 until i was 30 and finally diagnosed with ASD. I'll bet that this has happened to a lot of people.
Hey there, I'm a mental health nurse and see this a lot in clinical practice as well as many young people developing BPD probably, in part due to undiagnosed AS & the trauma that this can cause (ie not knowing why someone is different, bullying etc). I think many of the diagnostic 'symptoms' (I don't like to think of autism in terms of symptoms however) can overlap & thus be difficult to ascertain the underlying aetiology. I also see many young people with ADHD misdiagnosed with BPD due to emotional lability associated with executive dysfunction being a prominent feature; the tell tail delineating factor appears to be that when you put someone with actually ADHD on stimulants the emotional lability appears to dissipate (I'm one such example of this). I have been diagnosed with AS but I was deeply depressed at the time (I have bipolar) and don't actually struggle with social nuance & subtext so the jury is still out as to whether I'm on the spectrum or not. I'm not sure our current conceptualisations of autism fully grasp the heterogeneous nature of the condition & what a cognitively diverse bunch people actually are 😊
they are both 71? that's so inspiring
For the person undiagnosed with ADHD please seek an assessment as Dr Tony advised; I was diagnosed until I was 36 & despite having done superlatively well at school I feel like it put a barrier on me being unable to get into the likes of Oxbridge as my executive function was just so poor...God knows how I managed to pull off the grades I did without being able to revise properly. Now I'm diagnosed & treated with elvanse I'm undertaking my PhD & life in general is a whole lot easier. People generally assumed I was lazy as they thought I should excel across the board because of my IQ meanwhile I couldn't maintain a household, make it out the door on time, do simple multi tasking, set shift etc. honestly you'll notice the difference very quickly with medication.
❤ amazing I have adhd and autisum and unique speech problems X and so appreciated of what you stand for helping others in spectrum so nice to watch X 😊
Once again thank you so much for all this wonderful information and insights. I look forward to the next one.
I am so glad Tony Attwood spoke about autism and bpd.I was diagnosed with bpd in the past but later diagnosed with ASD and ADHD and I am glad he speaks on this because looking back at it I dont agree that I ever had bpd.I feel it was a diagnosis given because of struggling with mental health as an Autistic person.I do agree DBT did help me though.I am glad this issue is being talked about because I dont feel I am the only one who has been diagnosed with bpd to later realise I am autistic.
lots of autistic people get bpd because of the struggles with autism. it's a valid and fair dx.
@princessadora yeah I agree.I did feel I was treated differently by some mh profs because of bpd diagnosis though but I agree it's a valid diagnosis.
Yes, Dr. Tony has commented that BPD is even more stigmatized than autism. I admit I have fraught feelings about personality disorders, having grown up in an era when Behaviorism was a mainstream concept and cold mother theory was prevalent. I think it’s important to acknowledge that cognitive function and dysfunction always involves a mix of physiological predisposition and environmental influences, experiential and otherwise. Mental health is a complex mix of neurological processes and psychological factors.
Merci!!! Really interesting, et les rires à la fin étaient tellement sincères hahaha Awesome!
Hi from France :)
Oui. Nous nous apprécions beaucoup.
Situational mutism describes how I feel many times. When I have to speak with someone for the first time, I literally can't walk and talk to the person. I cannot think what to say no matter how much I try. Another example is that I know how to dance. I have no problems dancing in a musical play, but getting up and dance to whatever song is playing just for the sake of dancing is tremendously hard for me. Just getting up and moving to the rhythm becomes impossible and exhausting. It's not fear, it's more like my mind can't really coordinate when it is thinking about those situations.
Instead of or in addition to putting the table of contents at the beginning, there is also a way to insert the table of contents as sections of the video which can be accessed at any time. That would be very helpful from the viewer instead of having to check back to the beginning every time to find a relevant section.
What a wonderful discovery, thank you very much!
Shut downs for me feel like my head and my body aren’t connected I can’t force the signals from my brain to my body.
These videos are profoundly helpful to me. Thank you!
Thank you very much for this video, so useful and as always I can see so much of myself in the content. -Brian
Thank you for your valuable information. I believe my husband is autistic, but refuses to get a diagnosis. My son was recently diagnosed as autistic level 2. We don't have a relationship. He is a flat mate who does not work or housework, but does computer games all day and all night.
Thank you very much for that ability overview, I would have never been able to formulate it! 👍
Hey fellow aspies Hey who loves greece movie instead it so real 🎶
Great interview and love the shirt colours too ;) I can relate to the friendship part for me it feels like walking of a cliff when I feel pushed away. Can Autism be regarded as an intellectual ability? Sometimes I feel as though I am wrongly portrayed as having an intellectual disability and treated like a baby.
can't focus on his words because i'm trying to understand his shirt
I was teasing him about his shirt before we filmed. He said he wore it, because it was bright and fun, not like the weather where I live (it’s winter here, summer there). He was trying to brighten my day. That’s how genuinely considerate Dr. Attwood is.
@@autismhangouti actually love his shirt, but it DID occupy my brain far too long. I eventually realized the pattern is made up of letters in the font on the optometry charts, and sliced-up landscape illustrations! it's 2 patterns in 1!
could the websites where the seminars are be posted into the description
It’s there: attwoodandgarnettevents.com
AI search system has been updated with this episode :)
I think I have autism. My brother has it and every day I think I'm finally realizing I do too but where do I first go for help? I'm a sociable aspie even eccentric I've been told (after drinking usually). But is it wise to inform your employer or not?
What about the studies with a loop of 60 or more genes linking autism, ADHD, scizophrenia and bipolar? Seperately schizophrenia and autism tend to run in the same families.
70 to 80% of autistic people also have a mental illness.
The seperation of autism and mental illness might not be as easy as you claim in this video.
I don't think autism itself is a mental illness. But it has many ties to mental illness.
Please, use UTC in international date format. The date on this is ambiguous at best, and I've no idea what that acronym represents.
2023/11/05 08:00 UTC +0800 is pretty clear and unambiguous, once learned. It has the merits of clearly not being American or standard British Empire.
I don't like "Spectrum" or "Disorder" in ASD. We don't talk about spectrum in the context of height, eye colour, mass or anything really, except light.
If I go searching for what disorder means, I find "illness." I am autistic, I am not unwell and I certainly do not have a disease. If ADHD can be acquired after birth, perhaps that is an illness. FASD is consequence of being poisoned by one's mother. I'm not sure the D is actually useful though.
I do like the idea of autism being equated with something like keratoconus though. I have that too.