If 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 Doctor Megan Anna Neff and Audi HD, 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 Audi HD Audi HD 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
ODDDHD. Once someone explained to me
that it's pronounced as AW, as in awesome AW DHD.
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. Audio HD 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. Audio HD is a community created
term. It emerged online, not from
research labs or diagnostic manuals, but from 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 frameworks that we had
available to us. So at its simplest, Audio HD is
simply shorthand for being both autistic and ADHD.
But what it really captures is that dynamic interplay between
these two neurologies. Audio HD is not just the sum of
their parts. It's not simply ADHD plus
autism. Audio HD 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 Audio HD, it's often the 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 time begin to make sense. You'll often hear people use
audio HD as an identity term, as in I'm audio HD or I'm an audio
HDR. 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 how we move through
the world rather than distancing from it.
So when you hear someone say I'm audio HD, it's often less about
labels and more about recognition.
Sure, it's technically smashing together to 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 Audio HD, it's always best to go with the
language the person you're talking to prefers.
Generally, most people are OK with you asking what language
they prefer. As part of my upcoming book on
the Audio HD 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 gave 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
Audio HD can feel pretty different than ADHD or autism
alone. Audio HD 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 rest 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 Audio HD 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 audio HD 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 S,
more people are now being diagnosed with both ADHD and
autism. And then on top of that, more
and more of the lost 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 Audi HD
experience. Again, to be clear, Audi HD is
not a medical diagnosis. Neither is this video.
A provider might diagnose someone with both autism and
ADHD, but Audi HD itself lives outside the medical system as a
community. Create a term that celebrates
identity. If you are Audi HD, 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 Audi HD.
So what is Audi HD? It's an identity term, a
community term, one that many people find deeply empowering
and freeing because it names the complexity that they've been
trying to untangle for years. So Audio HD 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.