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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

ADHD is highly comorbid with autism. In some cases, an ADHD diagnosis may in fact be autistic symptoms that the diagnosing clinician failed to recognize as autism.

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That is interesting my impression (tv/random articles ) was autism was very far away from the hyperactivity in ADHD

...there's ADHD-PI ("primarily inattentive") that lacks the highly visible hyperactivity signs you find in TV-stereotipical ADHD.

It's even worse when masked by high-IQ and good coping behaviors, because when life hits you hard with trouble, it flares up and gets amplified a zillion time, and you go from 'genius' to 'retarded' instantly!

(Couple the frustration of this with some testosterone and some bad habits and you can get pretty close to "stupid and violent criminal" levels and at that point society loses all sympathy for you. I got close to this but stopped, but I imagine that most of the clever-and-ultra-violent-criminals that fill up the prisons worldwide are mostly "my kind of people" but they just lacked some special "stabilizing component" that my brain happened to have and theirs didn't.)

Most "clever and ultra violent" criminals by far are in fact sociopaths. Sociopathy does correlate with a severe lack in executive function, but the causal mechanism is very likely different from what we see in ADHD - it's probably a sort of "callousness towards oneself" stemming from the sociopath's exceedingly-poor emotional palette, that also leads to their callous behavior and lack of empathy towards others.

It's an unfortunate stereotype. ADHD has loose subtypes of "mostly hyperactive" and "mostly attention deficient"; and autism spectrum consists of introverts and extroverts just as much as the general population.

Another stereotypically-opposite but actually possibly related pairing I find interesting: the OCD stereotype is "neat freaks" (not all that accurately, because hoarding is also compulsion-related, and many types of OCD operate on a different axis to neat/messy anyway), and the ADHD stereotype is messy and chaotic, but in a way they both centre around not being able to control what your mental runtime is spent on.

That's the thing. Autism has so many manifestations that the saying goes "When you've met one autistic person, you met one autistic person." In fact autistic people are more neurodiverse with respect to each other than allistic people are. In addition, there are different ADHD variants as well. So any stereotypes you picked up from media are likely to be not true in the general case.

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