oh lord the shitty “special interest is an autistic-only term/hyperfixation is an adhd-only term” is back
to clarify:
- they’re literally exactly the same symptom
- autism and adhd share like half their symptoms/diagnostic criteria, and people with the same symptoms are routinely diagnosed as one or the other, and trying to prevent people “with one diagnosis” from using terms associated with “the other diagnosis” reifies these diagnoses, prevents the formation of alliance between people with the same goddamn symptom, and ultimately causes far more harm than it claims to prevent
- this does not mean that some of these people were diagnosed “incorrectly”, since diagnosis is literally just a label for a collection of symptoms
- in fact, this is a really good example of why a psychological system based on diagnosis rather than symptoms is such a bad system