The Tie Dye Mannequin — THINKING PERSON’S GUIDE TO AUTISM
Just like red and blue overlap, intersect, and interact in a tie-dye t-shirt to make unique color combinations, Autistic and ADHD traits combine to create AuDHD.
It has been possible to diagnose both autism and ADHD together in the same person since 2013 (under the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition). However, it wasn’t until 2022 that the term AuDHD started taking off online. And it has only been recently that researchers have started to take the concept of AuDHD more seriously, as over the past few years it has started to show up in academic journals.
While parts of the clinical and research field are still deciding whether or not to accept AuDHD as a useful construct, many professionals have started to embrace it. Craddock (2024) points out that autism and ADHD interact to create a distinct clinical profile just like red and blue combine to create a whole new color—purple. Expanding on this analogy, when we combine red and blue in a tie-dye t-shirt, sometimes the traits interact and overlap to create various shades of purple and sometimes they maintain their original colors, creating beautiful overlapping designs with distinct shades of red and blue.
Likewise, autistic traits and ADHD traits remain in AuDHD people—and there are also some additional traits that result from the combination of the two. When we try to describe exactly what a tie-dye shirt looks like, we can never say exactly what each shirt will look like because the colors blend uniquely every time. Likewise, autistic and ADHD traits interact and overlap differently for each individual, so each person’s neurotype is a little different even if they could all be described as AuDHD.
Why AuDHD?
AuDHD has not been completely accepted yet in the professional world, but it is widely used in the community. One of my colleagues recently asked me, “Why don’t we have DepXiety or AnPression?” Likewise, at a recent presentation on AuDHD, someone asked me, “Can you clarify how AuDHD isn’t just the overlap of two separate diagnoses that each contributes rather than a separate clinical condition? Why not AuNxiety? AutEpression?”
To answer the question of why we should consider AuDHD, I think it makes sense to ask why we have diagnoses and identities in the first place. They help us describe experiences for the purpose of identity, community, research, and support. In light of this, there are three main reasons that professionals should pay attention to the concept of AuDHD:
- Because the community is using the term. If a large group of people have decided that a certain label resonates with them, it only makes sense that people who value the community would consider what they have to say. Expanding on Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice (e.g., 2007), Chapman and Carel (2022) discuss how Autistic people’s status as knowers, interpreters, and providers of information have been diminished and stifled in a way that undermines their agency and dignity. Since research on Autistic experience has typically focused on nonautistic people describing Autistic ways of being (often in a deficit-focused way) and since we are moving, as a field, to acknowledging that Autistic people deserve to have a chance to tell us what it is actually like to be Autistic, it only makes sense to consider that a community label that has been largely embraced might have some validity.
- Because it helps to have a name for something in order to describe it and research it. AuDHD is at the exciting stage where we are still figuring out what it is exactly, but what we have found so far is that the experience of being AuDHD (or having AuDHD) is different than the experience of just having a combination of Autistic and ADHD traits. For this reason, further research will benefit from having a term for it. While there is some research on how autism and ADHD co-occur, research using the term AuDHD specifically will help expand our understanding of how to identify it, describe it, and support it.
- For treatment. Research suggests that there may be different medication options that work for people who are AuDHD versus ADHD (Mellahn et al. 2022). Likewise, the sensory experiences and executive functioning difficulties of people with AuDHD also differ from those who are just Autistic or have ADHD. For example, AuDHD children tend to experience a combination of sensory avoiding and sensory seeking behavior that may sometimes be in conflict (Huang et al. 2024). Within the eating disorder world, unique needs of AuDHD clients have also been identified (e.g., Makin et al. 2026).
Autism and ADHD Interact
In an exploratory qualitative analysis of 374 publicly available tweets discussing AuDHD by AUDHDers, there were several recurring themes (themes were explored using Braun and Clarke’s 2006 thematic analysis). Interaction was a key theme (Woods, 2025). Many people describe the experience of being Autistic and ADHD as feeling like a set of paradoxes—being pulled in two different directions (e.g., wanting routine versus craving novelty, hyperfocusing on specific topics but also feeling their attention drawn to multiple things at once, feeling overstimulated but also seeking stimulation, needing rules but also wanting freedom). At the same time, AuDHDers also describe the ADHD and autistic traits as sometimes complementing each other. For example, as one AuDHDer tweeted,
One of the benefits of being #AuDHD is that sometimes you can get into that sweet spot where the autistic brain is hyper focusing, but when you need to switch to another project, the ADHD switches you over right away and you easily start hyperfocusing on the new one.
While much of the formal research literature has focused on deficits associated with autism and ADHD, both autism (Cope and Remington 2022) and ADHD (Hargitai et al. 2025) are associated with strengths, and more research is needed to investigate exactly how the strengths interact. For example, how does the ADHD need for novelty positively balance out the Autistic need for routine? And how does the Autistic inclination toward systems help with balancing out organizational difficulties associated with ADHD?
Diagnostic Overshadowing: When Traits Are Missed
Autism and ADHD can sometimes be missed due to diagnostic overshadowing (Gupta et al. 2025). For example, when AuDHD children are diagnosed with ADHD early on, their social differences are sometimes attributed solely to ADHD, which results in missing the autism piece. AuDHD children often get their autism diagnosis later than Autistic children without ADHD, resulting in misunderstanding and lack of support (Sainsbury et al. 2023). The rates of co-occurrence can also vary depending on who you ask. For example, in one study, only 36% of Autistic children also had ADHD based on clinician report, but 78% met criteria based on parent report (Stadnick et al. 2017). This shows how important it is for clinicians to gather information from multiple sources when deciding on a diagnosis.
Making Room to Consider the Beauty of Tie-Dye
Autism and ADHD are recognized as disabilities that require support and AuDHD is often described as two sets of deficits added together. However, there is evidence to suggest that the AuDHD is experienced as more than that. A common theme among AuDHDers who tweet about AuDHD is that many individuals describe joy associated with AuDHD. For example, one AuDHDer described it as follows:
AuDHD is the main driver for all my hobbies and why I love finding new hobbies to get into.
Many individuals talk about how their AuDHD allows them to embrace their interests and creates an intense and productive form of curiosity. This is consistent with my clinical experience as a psychologist, with people across the lifespan describing the intense joy of both immersing themselves in their interests (and developing mastery quickly) and going down rabbit holes switching from one focused interest to another. In order to get a more comprehensive picture, researchers will need to engage more with actual AuDHDers who can describe what the experience is really like, including both challenges and sources of strength.
AuDHD Difficulties
AuDHDers do also describe consistent problems, especially executive functioning problems (planning, starting tasks, organizing, switching attention) that can sometimes be debilitating. For example, one person tweeted:
“Trying to move house while the entire household has various types of AuDHD is the very definition of herding cats except I am also one of the cats who required herding.”
These difficulties should not be underestimated. Research suggests that AuDHDers may actually have more executive functioning problems (Antsell & Russo, 2019) than those with autism and ADHD alone, as well as sensory differences (Huang et al. 2024) and co-occurring conditions (Zablotsky et al. 2020), but difficulties are only part of the picture.
Prevalence
AuDHD is also not a rare condition. Estimates vary widely depending on methodology, but some research suggests that as many as 70% of Autistic people may also meet criteria for ADHD (Hours et al. 2022) and approximately 20% of people with ADHD also meet criteria for autism (Hollingdale et al. 2020), suggesting that AuDHD may be more common than red hair.
A venn diagram depiction of the possible overlap of Autism and ADHD
The Value of Naming AuDHD
Some people might argue that it doesn’t really matter what label we put on it. We can just describe a person’s traits and support them. On the other hand, research repeatedly shows the importance of helping people understand their identity. As one person tweeted,
“Learning I have AuDHD is probably the best thing to ever happen to me in my life. That’s it. That’s the tweet.”
Of course, there are limitations to using social media research to understand something like AuDHD. Some people worry that maybe some of the people who describe themselves as having AuDHD online do not have the same traits as people who would be clinically identified as having it (or being it), for example. And it is difficult to capture the full experience of a neurotype based on social media analysis alone. This is why further research involving ongoing in-depth collaboration between community members and the research and clinical communities is needed. AuDHD may not make it into the DSM as a separate diagnosis, but it is already being considered a useful concept in the community and that warrants our attention.
Focusing too much on deficits and statistics out of context also leads to a dull, one-dimensional view of neurodivergence. Like trying to describe a tie-dye shirt just by labeling its colors, it misses the patterns. Understanding AuDHD requires more than identifying traits separately. It requires seeing how they interact, overlap, and shift in the real world. That kind of understanding will only come from continued collaboration between the AuDHD community and the research and clinical worlds.
Dr. Woods thanks the many AuDHDers who share their experiences online and her friend, Dr. Jennifer Cometto, for helpful comments on an earlier revision of this article.
Tie dye spiral in hot pink. purple, and blue.
References
Antshel, Kevin M., and Natalie Russo. “Autism spectrum disorders and ADHD: Overlapping phenomenology, diagnostic issues, and treatment considerations.” Current psychiatry reports 21, no. 5 (2019): 34.
Braun, Virginia, and Victoria Clarke. “Using thematic analysis in psychology.” Qualitative research in psychology 3, no. 2 (2006): 77-101.
Chapman, Robert, and Havi Carel. “Neurodiversity, epistemic injustice, and the good human life.” Journal of Social Philosophy (2022).
Craddock, Emma. “Raising the voices of AuDHD women and girls: Exploring the co-occurring conditions of autism and ADHD.” Disability & Society 39, no. 8 (2024): 2161-2165.
Cope, Rosie, and Anna Remington. “The strengths and abilities of autistic people in the workplace.” Autism in Adulthood 4, no. 1 (2022): 22-31.
Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford university press, 2007.
Gupta, Nihit, Srinija Srinivasan, and Mayank Gupta. “Rethinking psychometric testing in autism: overcoming the challenges of comorbidity and diagnostic overshadowing.” CNS spectrums 30, no. 1 (2025): e19.
Hargitai, Luca D., Emma LM Laan, Lessa M. Schippers, Lucy A. Livingston, Graeme Fairchild, Punit Shah, and Martine Hoogman. “The role of psychological strengths in positive life outcomes in adults with ADHD.” Psychological Medicine 55 (2025): e278.
Hollingdale, Jack, Emma Woodhouse, Susan Young, Adie Fridman, and Will Mandy. “Autistic spectrum disorder symptoms in children and adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a meta-analytical review.” Psychological medicine 50, no. 13 (2020): 2240-2253.
Hours, Camille, Christophe Recasens, and Jean-Marc Baleyte. “ASD and ADHD comorbidity: What are we talking about?.” Frontiers in psychiatry 13 (2022): 837424.
Huang, Zhi, Fang Wang, Leran Xue, Huilin Zhu, and Xiaobing Zou. “Relationships between sensory processing and executive functions in children with combined ASD and ADHD compared to typically developing and single disorder groups.” Brain Sciences 14, no. 6 (2024): 566.
Makin, Lauren, Karina Allen, and Kate Tchanturia. “Time to Notice Neurodiversity in Eating Disorder Services: A Three-Year Real-World Analysis of Autism, ADHD, and AuDHD.” Frontiers in Psychiatry 17 (2026): 1787957.
Mellahn, Olivia J., Rachael Knott, Jeggan Tiego, Kathryn Kallady, Katrina Williams, Mark A. Bellgrove, and Beth P. Johnson. “Understanding the diversity of pharmacotherapeutic management of ADHD with co-occurring autism: an Australian cross-sectional survey.” Frontiers in psychiatry 13 (2022): 914668.
Sainsbury, Willow J., Kelly Carrasco, Andrew JO Whitehouse, Lauren McNeil, and Hannah Waddington. “Age of diagnosis for co-occurring autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder during childhood and adolescence: A systematic review.” Review Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 10, no. 3 (2023): 563-575.
Stadnick, N., Chlebowski, C., Baker-Ericzén, M., Dyson, M., Garland, A., & Brookman-Frazee, L. (2017). Psychiatric comorbidity in autism spectrum disorder: Correspondence between mental health clinician report and structured parent interview. Autism, 21(7), 841-851.
Woods, S. “Like Two Wolves in My Brain”: Descriptions of AuDHD on X (Formerly Twitter). Poster presentation, International Society for Autism Research Annual Meeting (INSAR), Seattle, WA, May 2025.
Zablotsky, Benjamin, Matthew D. Bramlett, and Stephen J. Blumberg. “The co-occurrence of autism spectrum disorder in children with ADHD.” Journal of attention disorders 24, no. 1 (2020): 94-103.
