@AlsoTapered please don't worry about me. My new focus in life has become my ADHD assessment which is hopefully coming up relatively soon, one way or another.
If there are too many confounding and complicating factors, and I mean especially in terms of alcohol and substances, when I have my assessment, it could really fuck up my chances of a proper diagnosis and treatment.
As you would probably know or guess, Alcohol and substances, esp benzos, can worsen or mimic ADHD symptoms, so I need to get them out of the way.
It's become clear that I need to change my trajectory, so the combos have gone, the modafinil has gone, the spirits have almost gone, and the benzo taper will be next.
Hopefully substances will be well out of the way before my assessment, and then
all they will have to work out is whether my ASD and anxiety is separate from my ADHD symptoms. I think it is, but it is complicated, and I hope that I get a good assessor / team of assessors / whatever it will be.
It's only 10 years since it's been considered possible to have both ASD and ADHD together since the release of the DSM5. In the preceeding DSM4 it was deemed categorically impossible, so the science in this particular corner is still very new, and I just hope I get someone who knows what they are doing.
It concerns me massively that even the so called top of their field research experts didn't really seem to have a fucking clue what is going on in this particular corner of neurodivergence that I find myself in, until just 10 years ago. They seem to be making things up as they go along, and changing their minds with every new version of DSM. I know it's progress, of a sort. But I wish they were 50-100 years ahead of where they actually are. It's not a great time to be going through the system right now.
Although better than it would have been 10 years ago.