Hi, I haven't posted for a long time. We just finished moving and life has been crazy. Since the last time I was on I finally found a place willing to consider a diagnosis other than ASD and my son has received a new diagnosis of ADHD. They chose to keep the ASD diagnosis because he still has "ASD features". I'm still not at all convinced he actually has autism though. As it is a spectrum I think it makes sense that you can have subclinical levels of autistic like behaviors. He has no stims or restricted interests and no communication difficulty or trouble with recognizing or responding appropriately to emotions. He does present as a bit odd and gets stuck on certain ideas sometimes and is a bit rigid (he got upset at his meet your teacher event because she wrote instructions to finish and turn in a worksheet at the end of the event and he didn't get done on time... he calmed down when she erased what she had written and wrote to turn it in on the first day of school instead, it had to be written on the instruction board to count despite the fact that we were verbally reassuring him turning it in late would be fine).
At any rate, I have of course been searching the internet for info about highly gifted kids with severe ADHD. I can't seem to find anything other than articles saying gifted kids don't have the level of disability associated with ADHD as non-gifted peers do. It's more of a hard to spot inattentive type and may not even present until later in school when more executive function stuff is required.
I on the other hand have a child who (now that he has started on meds) clearly can be seen to be very severely affected by ADHD, to the point where he looks severely disabled without the meds and looks (relatively) normal with them. With his meds he is like a whole new person. He loves his medication because he can function. He can carry on a conversation, not interrupt, wait his turn, control his emotions, sit still for minutes at a time, sit on my lap and snuggle, remember to raise his hand before speaking in school, play happily with toys, etc. Without his meds he is hyper, totally unable to even listen to a whole sentence (usually because he talks over us about an unrelated topic in the middle of our communications), can't get dressed in under half an hour (with prompts), gets easily upset and has episodes of explosive anger (now that he is 6 this no longer includes hitting, he keeps it down to screaming, whining, and crying, yay), etc. The medication has been effective beyond our wildest dreams. It took me 2 years to finally find someone willing to prescribe a stimulant to a child with an ASD diagnosis. Unfortunately they were all too willing to prescribe prozac to a 4 year old though, in addition to other medications at 5. They were looking to try him on an atypical a few months ago and still refused to let us try a stimulant. Couldn't get it at the pediatrician or anywhere else because he was seeing dev peds and "they are the experts". I almost want to sue them for the 2 year delay in help and all of the pain and suffering that resulted because of their preconceived ideas and current popularity of the autism diagnosis.
But back on topic. Does anyone here know anything about severe ADHD with hyperactivity and beyond belief impulsivity in gifted kids? DS also has Tourette's and the stimulant drastically reduces his tics as well. I can tell by volume and frequency of tics the very moment his med starts to wear off. Unlike everything I read my sons giftedness is not being used to compensate for his ADHD leaving behind a kid who looks totally normal in the end. He is a kid who is 6.5 and currently obsessed with chemistry, just completed book 3B of Beast academy, reads at whatever level the Ramona books and According to Humphrey books are, has a great working knowledge of geography, enjoys designing and playing complex games, and loves to talk about history. And that's all him without his meds. With his meds he can even sit down and do writing assignments and concentrate on learning to spell words and work through complex logic problems. But academically he never struggled. He started speaking at 5 months and just picked up tons of academic concepts from a very young age (this was all cited as proof of autism over the years). But he got kicked out of all 3 preschools we tried and I had to pull him out of public school because they could not meet his behavioral needs at all. This is not the gifted ADHD kid I read about all over the internet. Do I just have a really especially unusual kid or did no one write our article yet?
