Book Review: Explaining AuDHD by Kurram Sadiq#

As I mentioned in an earlier post (/posts/am-i-on-the-spectrum/) there are some hints that I may have some degree of autism. This is centered mostly around social skills and a preference to avoid meeting people. At the same time I have been diagnosed with ADHD though I supposedly have developed appropriate compensatory mechanisms (though I’m not so sure!)

Anyway, When I saw this book that discusses the co-incidence of autism with ADHD I was intrigued. I had not seen any other discussion of this combination before. That said, once I started looking, I discovered several books on the topic.

The book is written by a psychologist who has, himself, been diagnosed as AuDHD. The challenge in diagnosing AuDHD is that the characteristics of autism and those of ADHD often overlap making it difficult to discern what is actually going on. As the book notes, it often comes down to determining which characteristics are more dominant and which set of characteristics is more abundant. (That is, are there more characteristics of one of the conditions than there are of the other.)

The book, honestly, did not meet my expectations, though to be honest, I’m not sure what I expected. Despite the fact that the book provides a fair amount information, I completed it still without a clear understanding of the next steps. The book talked alot about how a diagnosis helped guide support and provided explanations for the individual’s behaviors but it didn’t provide suggestions, really, on how to manage some of those behaviors.

To help the reader understand the two conditions and how they differ he used quite a number of case studies. However, most of those case studies essentially echoed what he had written in the preceding paragraphs so that the cases didn’t really clarify much.

Another critique I had was that there seemed to me to be a ton of repetition, sometimes with almost exactly the same wording. Whether this was intentional in order to drive home the concepts he was describing, or whether it was simply the writer’s style, I can’t say. I can say, however, that it became boring and distracting. The book ran to something like 200 pages. I believe that the book could actually have been edited down to not more than 100 pages while retaining all of the essential information. In fact, I think [Christina Avelar](https:///the nuerodivergentbrain.org/audhd) did a great job of summarizing the key features of the co-incident conditions in an 8 minute read.

The more I read Explaining AuDHD the more I felt he was just writing to meet a page requirement. I’ve seen similar redundant writing in academic papers where page counts mattered.

At the end of the day, I did not complete the book. I have one chapter remaining, which I will complete, though I had to step back from it after becoming frustrated with the repetition.

Do I recommend it? No. Mostly because of the repetition and pedantic nature of the writing. I love to learn and often prefer more detail to less. But, I also don’t like wasting a lot of time. The ADHD side of me wants to get to the point and move on and that is something this book just didn’t seem to do.