Have you heard the terms ADHD or autism, but do you really know what they mean? Most people don’t know what ADHD or autism really is, and even if they do, it’s usually very little. You may know that ADHD and autism are mental disorders. I’ll be educating you on what ADHD and autism really are.

Autism spectrum disorder or as it’s commonly known as autism is a mental disorder that can affect different parts of your brain like a persons verbal or nonverbal, how well you take in information and many other things. You may think of autistic people as not being able to speak and can’t do things for themselves there are a lot of cases that are like this but on the other side of the spectrum there are autistic people that can think for themselves and are very smart. Autistic people can be nonverbal, which means they don’t talk to people, some autistic kids grow out of being nonverbal, while some do not people have created tools to help autistic people who are nonverbal help communicate with other people one of these tools are apps that when you press a button it says a certain word. Let’s throw out a common misconception according to kidshealth.org “there is no connection between vaccines and autism.”

Kids can show signs of autism as early as kindergarten while some don’t show signs of autism for a lot longer. A lot of people who have autism can go undiagnosed because they were never tested for it. How doctors check for autism is basically asking you questions and seeing how you react with your body language and tone of voice. Something that some autistic people do is stimming, stimming is basically where you repeat a sound multiple times without noticing it, or when a part of your body moves repeatedly, these can include bouncing your leg, popping your fingers, messing with your thumbs, etc. Some things that some people with autism struggle with a lot are understanding peoples emotions, eye contact, and many more things.

Attention hyperactivity deficit disorder, or as it’s commonly known as ADHD, is a mental disorder that can affect how you focus, how long you can focus, what things you can focus on, how hyperactive you are, etc. A lot of people think of someone with ADHD as hyperactive and not being able to sit still or focus on anything, but that’s only true in some cases other people with ADHD can focus on stuff, though sometimes it can be only certain things that they can focus on, and sit still. The H in ADHD can also mean hyperfocus; this is when you are able to focus on something for hours while being out of tune with everything else around you, which a lot of people with ADHD are able to do. Boys are more commonly over diagnosed with ADHD because of them being hyper while girls are under diagnosed with ADHD because it appears differently in girls than it does in boys.

If you’re interested in this topic I suggest you go read more about it on professional websites that talk about this topic. Like I said in the beginning, this topic is very under-talked about, and many people aren’t informed much about this topic. I get it if you aren’t fully informed of this topic, but it should definitely be talked about more.