- cross-posted to:
- neurodiversity@lemmygrad.ml
- cross-posted to:
- neurodiversity@lemmygrad.ml
As an AuDHD person, the college dropout story is relatable to me, except for the YouTube career success. I grew up in a madhouse during my traumatic childhood, and going to college free from my backwards, overprotective, overly strict parents was essentially like falling off a cliff. I was already burnt out during my last year of high school, and I was too excited with the freedom and ended up wasting time playing video games and skipping classes regularily because I had little energy to function as an adult. I still struggle with burnout to this day due to being an overworked IT contractor for years.
Now imagine being ADHS person living in a country where majority still thinks ADHS is just a phase and having a child with most likely ADHS as well going to school soon and having to work 100% to earn enough money to sustain
🤪 but it kinda works right now (we are trying to find help, but thats is just another long ass task chugging along…)
I still struggle with burnout to this day due to being an overworked IT contractor for years.
hahahahaha ha… ha… fuck
This video finally convinced me I probably have A(u)DHD. I already thought I was on the spectrum probably but didn’t feel any need to go to a psychiatrist for it (I don’t… like or trust them? not for any great reason necessarily I just have an aversion) but if there’s any chance ADHD meds help me I probably owe it to myself to go
I don’t know why this is what did it. probably the fact that the 2 month procrastination jobby is basically what I’m doing with a key part of my day job right now. Ruined my whole weekend and the mental block is still there.
Unsolicited advice specific to auDHDers:
-
AuDHDers tend to be more sensitive to stimulant meds, going by anecdotal reports
-
Stimulants tend to “bring out” a lot more autistic traits, some report that it is more difficult or downright impossible to mask on stimulants
-
I’m of the opinion that auDHDers are particularly prone to developing posttraumatic symptoms (call it low-grade PTSD or legit PTSD or developmental/C-PTSD - I’m not really concerned about how it gets described tbh, can go into this in more depth if anyone wants)
-
Most people who have experienced significant trauma and/or unresolved trauma as an ADHDer report finding that going on stimulants can cause a pretty rapid processing of that trauma, so it can be a bumpy ride in the early days
-
Stimulants can be particularly useful for dealing with executive dysfunction and burnout
-
Stimulants need to be used carefully with chronic or severe burnout
-
Stimulants have a complex relationship with autistic catatonia, and catatonia in general, however based on my own personal experience I’m of the opinion that long-term stimulant use can exacerbate autistic catatonia and potentially to precipitate it
-
I think that auDHDers are particularly prone to having an overworked nervous system, partly due to social factors, partly due to sensory sensitivity, and the ADHD emotional reactivity amplifying some common autistic experiences, amongst other factors. I think it’s really important for auDHDers to look at managing this with augmentative ADHD meds (clonidine/guanfacine/certain other meds) either at the same time as starting stimulant meds or soon after. It’s not for everyone but I think it’s worth exploring to see if it fits your needs.
I recently wrote another comment that goes more into stimulants for ADHDers, which may be of interest. Here’s the comment.
Note that I’m far from being opposed to the use of stimulants for ADHDers/auDHDers - I use them myself, I have absolutely relied upon them to get me through so they have been critical for my own wellbeing, and under most circumstances I’d encourage ADHDers to get a prescription for stimulants.
That being said, some people don’t need or want stimulants, some people don’t play well with them, they don’t play well with some people and so on - I’m in full support of people who take non-stimulant meds or who manage ADHD in other ways too. For some people, appropriately-medicated ADHD is unmedicated ADHD and I respect that.
I read that comment when you posted it! Doing my best to learn I guess, even before I accepted this might be a thing lol
I have no idea if stimulants will work well for me. I’ve definitely used caffeine to self medicate most of my adult life so maybe? But either way I know it won’t be a magic bullet, just one thing to try if a doc recommends it I guess. I honestly don’t know what not being able to mask would look like for me, but I work from home on a computer and have very accepting friends so hopefully the adjustment wouldn’t be too rough? I try not to downplay (or play up) my own struggles but all things considered I’ve lived a pretty chill life I feel like. Lots of self-repression and some serious struggles socially at times but you know, not outright horribly traumatic? So maybe that helps idk.
Thanks for your prolific support and advice all over the site! I just got new insurance so I’ll have to see what it will cost to see someone this summer. I hate to say it but I want to see if I can get the ball rolling on this diagnosis stuff without telling them I’m trans… (is that a horrible idea?) Let’s just say I don’t want to be on that list given the way the US is going lately… My gender is none of their business and even barring government action, telling your doctor you’re trans unfortunately seems like an excellent way to get subpar medical care. Or maybe I’m needlessly paranoid but I’d rather be paranoid and wrong than the target of fascist repression or plain ol discrimination.
To be clear, my childhood wasn’t severely traumatic, but stressful enough that I had forgotten most of my childhood.
I have been diagnosed with Autism and ADHD at an early age. Of course, the doctors said at that time that I would never be able to experience any emotion besides anger and sadness for my entire life, so I would be careful with the information you give to them and try to find a good psychologist/psychiatrist. I have had to jump between multiple as often they were on a grift to get me on a particular med that didn’t work for me. This was during the med change after dropping out of college, but I had other doctors before that wanted to use me for profit when I was younger. Others were just backwards and refused to update themselves in their profession.
I have been on the max dose on methylphenidate since middle school. It does work for me, but I have taken it so long that I believe the effects are not enough to overcome my severe burnout. When I quit my job, I am considering going off meds for a week and sleeping all day. When I have had breaks with my stimulant, its effects have improved again for another period of time until the burnout overcomes it again.
I went on antidepressants for situational depression after dropping out of school, and then I continued going through a med change and ended up back on a stimulant again, but this time Vyvanse. It’s effects were the same on me, but I believe I felt a bit weird (tingly in the brain?), so I think the side effects were worse on me. I went back to methylphenidate because I was poor and it was cheaper at the time. Going back on stimulants after around a year made me feel much more functional again.
I have also been drinking a lot of caffeine on top of my stimulants, sometimes even 600-1000 mg, because I have been struggling to do work. Once I drink around 900+ mg, I get a terrible headache and stomach ache, so I try to avoid that range.
Rant incoming
I haven’t been able to take a vacation for so long, and I feel a 6 month vacation would be necessary for me to recover.
A lot of the people in my job are quitting and moving to other positions as my workplace, a $200 billion indie company, refuses to invest in more IT people even though they spent millions on an IT audit only to find out we are more than 50% understaffed, meaning we would have to over double our IT team, including contractors. My coworkers say one day we are going to be all just contractors.
Meanwhile we have problematic higher-level IT teams that treat production as the testing environment and constantly break things. They’re a bunch of dinosaurs that were grandfathered in to higher positions and have no experience outside of the company, thus they are a bunch of egotistical morons that refuse to hold themselves accountable or admit they made a mistake, turning every email that could have been 5 minutes to resolve a user’s issue to an hour long argument. They also make decisions such as “let’s delete Visual C++ off of everyone’s computers because it is a sEcUrItY vUlErNaBiLiTy!1!”, and then everyone’s softphone stops working, which I called way beforehand and no one listened to me.
A script was requested to disable settings on a network adapter that have been causing disconnects and reconnects in our environment, and an old contractor in our team that was hired to be in the networking team with no experience mentioned they attempted a small script. I then added to the email that I already have an improved version already in production to run on new machines, and they congratulated the networking guy, circlejerked each other exclaiming how well they are communicating, meanwhile completely ignoring me.
These glorious geniuses also use ChatGPT (prohibited at our workplace) to create scripts without any modification to match our environment needs. We have also had scripts from the higher level IT teams that are completely broken and that have been running in our environment. I didn’t even know PowerShell starting my job, but I managed to quickly learn to write scripts at a professional level and had to fix all of these broken scripts made by our lovely Newtons who had a frozen apple fall on each of their heads.
The company also uses the worst software ever because they buy everything a shell company tries to sell them. Meanwhile they are harping on us regarding tickets and making every project a number one priority, so honestly what’s a priority at this point.
I honestly feel the work I have to do would be very difficult for even neurotypicals, and it’s amplified due my neurodivergence and ongoing, worsening burnout. I’m going back to college next year in a last ditch effort to turn my life around.
I have been going very late to my job, and I use the restroom a lot out of anxiety and stress. It’s a 35+ min drive to work and a 45+ min back home, and it absolutely sucks. I think I have managed to keep my job as I have made a lot of PowerShell scripts that have helped the company immensely, which I even received a large pay raise and multiple gift cards for. I feel as I have always relied on my ability to do work at a perfectionist quality to make up for my shortcomings.
I went on Jornay during my current job, which seemed to help me get to work on time a little easier, but I had to go back to my old meds because it was very expensive, and it would really suck when I forgot to take it the previous night.
Damn, you have so many great comments on ND. Have you thought about making some posts with all this knowledge? I would love to read it.
Thank you!
I really need to pull my finger out because I need to write a deep dive post on autistic burnout and catatonia, and another one on how ADHD and autism intersect when they are co-occuring. I suppose I could do another one giving a rundown of the main medications used for ADHD and how they tend to work for people too.
I’ve been struggling with pretty severe burnout. Honestly, it’s the absolute worst of my entire life. So at the moment I get brief jolts of inspiration to reply to comments here and there and then I either lapse back into the void or I have life committments to deal with so these sporadic comments are the best I can muster a lot of the time.
I also have crippling posting anxiety and making a genuine post is hard because I invest too much into it and feel overly responsible for replying and stuff. Is that a symptom of grass-deficiency? It’s definitely a symptom of grass-deficiency lol
Coming back to this to say I’d really appreciate your post on Autistic Burnout. I think I’m going through it right now. Wheeee
I’m sorry to hear that.
I’m in a bit of a slump right now so I’m going to scrape together the barebones advice but it’s probably going to be a bit scrappy rather than being a fully-developed effortpost like I can usually produce.
Here goes:
- Try to reduce the demands on you
Create structures and schedules etc. so that you aren’t using up precious executive function trying to figure out what tocook or what you’re supposed to be doing.
Outsource whatever you can, draw on support from loved ones and the community to help you manage things.
Reduce your commitments where possible (study, work, volunteering and organising work etc.)
Opt for the easiest option, wherever possible - takeout, ready meals, getting groceries delivered, protein shakes or smoothies as simple meals etc.
-
Do gentle exercise if and when you have the energy to, but don’t push yourself
-
Engage in the things that excite you and give you energy - hobbies, deep interests, spending time with good people and pets
-
Try to spend some time in natural environments if possible
-
Meditation and other mindfulness activities can be helpful
-
Allow yourself the opportunity to do less, don’t beat yourself up over needing to recharge
-
Try to get vegetables into your diet where possible
-
Try to maintain a regular sleep schedule and good sleep hygiene (lots of info online about this)
-
Try to reduce/avoid alcohol and most drugs, with the exception of prescription drugs and maybe cannabis if you feel that it is helpful. Try to reduce your caffeine intake as much as possible too.
-
Try to engage in stims, especially calming or soothing stims. Schedule this in if you need to. Try to double up on stims at the same time to make the most of it - go for visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory/olfactory, and vestibular if you know what works for you in these domains.
It might be autistic catatonia. Don’t have it in me to write out a post that this topic deserves right now. Here’s the basics:
If you want to test to see if it’s autistic catatonia, taking most benzodiazepines (especially lorazepam) should cause a rapid and noticeable lift in the symptoms. This can also be achieved through zolpidem and zopiclone, which are usually much easier to get your hands on.
Lorazepam and zolpidem/zopiclone are not necessarily going to resolve the catatonic episode but there will be at least a temporary improvement while the drug is working in your system.
If you take zolpidem/zopiclone and you fall asleep then that’s a pretty surefire indicator that you aren’t experiencing catatonia at that time.
(I would anticipate that valerian extract would also work in this respect but to a lesser extent. As it’s a herbal supplement it is easier to access.)
Longer-term management of autistic catatonia requires reducing your levels of stress, especially anxiety, and not pushing yourself too hard.
For longer-term maintenance and prophylaxis of catatonia you want to aim for NMDA antagonists:
-
Ketamine therapy
-
Topiramate
-
Amantadine/memantine (given a choice I’d opt for amantadine as the preference)
-
Dextromethorphan (especially combining dextromethorphan and together bupropion but ensure that you’re doing this under medical supervision from your prescribing doctor, or just get your hands on Auvelity through a prescription)
-
Tramadol
-
Gabapentin
-
Nitrous oxide therapy (you would need to find out if there are any clinical trials going on in your region. If you opted for self-administering nitrous, there are risks involved.)
For supplements there are a few options:
-
Magnesium
-
Zinc
-
Vitamin C
-
Creatine
-
Phenylalanine (aspartame sweetener contains phenylalanine)
-
Agmatine
-
Guanosine
Some of these things are going to be easier to get your hands on than others. Some are relatively safe at recommended doses, especially magnesium, zinc, vitamin C, and creatine. If it’s within your means there’s little risk of throwing them at yourself (at the recommended dosages) and seeing if there’s any improvements, especially if you have identified that you are experiencing catatonia. Even if you haven’t identified catatonia as a cause, there’s minimal risks associated with those and you may get other benefits from them anyway so you don’t have much to lose.
Dextromethorphan is probably available over the counter where you are. This puts it much more within reach than some of the other medications. Unfortunately it gets metabolised very rapidly for the purpose of treating catatonia and this is why taking it with bupropion is ideal. (There are lots of other CYP2D6 inhibitors out there though and this is getting beyond the scope of the reply and squarely into the territory of needing to do extensive research and, ideally, getting professional advice but fluoxetine, paroxetine, venlafaxine, duloxetine, sertraline, and others also inhibit this enzyme to a certain extent but at the very least if you’re going to take DXM with one of these then make sure that your pharmacist gives it the greenlight first.)
Also some of the medications listed are going to vary with regards to side effects and accessibility - Ambien isn’t that hard to get your hands on, lorazepam is probably going to be a lot harder, most doctors will be baffled if you try to get amantadine but there’s minimal risk of abuse, interactions, and even side effects so if you can make a compelling case then you’ve got a decent shot of them agreeing to it whereas trying to get benzos is probably going to be a lot harder (and rightfully so - I’d strongly recommend avoiding benzos for anything beyond a couple of one-off doses as they are extremely addictive and are very hard to kick once you become dependent).
If you get relief of catatonia be careful not to throw yourself right back into the conditions that produced your catatonia or you risk exacerbating the problem.
Try to treat catatonia as the product of a lifestyle that is unsuitable and unsustainable over the long-term, with medication and/or supplements being a measure to help you get out of the worst of the catatonic symptoms, so that you can start making positive changes to address the root cause(s). Don’t do the equivalent of yo-yo dieting - swinging from catatonic episodes to treating the catatonic episodes to going straight back into a lifestyle that causes catatonia only to relapse into another catatonic episode. Easier said than done though.
Let me know if you want more information about anything and I’ll do my best to elaborate or to point you in the right direction for more info.
Thank you so much ❤
-
i often feel like i might have adhd, how does one get diagnosed? like is it expensive (i’m under my parents’ insurance), and do i have to go through hoops to find a psychiatrist?
Step one is to drink an energy drink and to see if it calms you down or hypes you up. Calm is likely adhd. If not then it will take a proper equation. Several other issues can cause similar executive disfunction and ruling out ADD vs Minor depression is sprisingly hard.
i don’t really notice much from energy drinks. but i take caffeine pills if i got very little sleep and i guess that helps
i’m diagnosed with clinical/major depression from when i was 15. still there i guess but not as bad now? i used to be on meds but i feel like they didn’t do shit but make me an emotionless robot
what makes me think i might have adhd as well:
-
even pre-depression i’d procrastinate bad, i’m terrible at starting tasks i don’t want to do. from a very young age i’ve been awful at doing homework despite doing very good in school otherwise, for most of elementary school i didn’t even brush my teeth
-
bad at paying attention to things that don’t interest me, fixate too much time on specific things e.g. an internet rabbithole
-
impulsiveness; music is very important to me and i’ve gotten mild tinnitus at 19 from blasting headphones and yet i still turn the volume way too high when i’m feeling it. easily addicted to social media and video games too
-
forgetful and misplace stuff. sometimes i’ll like, think of something i want to look up and then forget 10 seconds later because my mind wandered elsewhere and then i have to think of a cue to remember what it was. before going out i think to myself a dozen times if i have everything
-
fidgety. hyperactive from early childhood, always climbing shit and tripping lmao
-
perfectionism
-
often creating made up scenarios in my head
-
brain fog and very bad at being on time
-
difficulty making decisions. a month ago i literally spent 3 days taking hours researching a new pair of shoes to buy in between watching anime or scrolling on tiktok, because i told myself i couldn’t do anything else productive or even go for a walk until i got the task of picking a shoe out of the way
-
i lowkey pace back and forth and talk fast to myself when i’m alone. have a hard time just sitting still
sorry if this is long, not sure how much of these are genuine symptoms just things that seem ND that i experience. btw my dad is diagnosed with it
Just a general word: ADHD is a dimensional disorder. Meaning, there isn’t a single identifying symptom that differentiates ADHD from say, a more neurotypical person that is a bit disorganised. Everyone forgets shit, everyone is late once in a while and everyone fidgets when they are nervous.
So the question you have to ask yourself (and which will be part of the diagnosis): How often does that happen? Is this majorly impacting the direction your life is going and are you okay with it?
If the answers are “pretty much everyday” and “I would not be where I am, if I didn’t behave like that and I feel like I can’t do anything about it even though I want to”, you have a pretty good indication.
Your wording and descriptions all sound very much like my (inattentive) ADHD to me.
Excellent comment!
-