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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Honestly, this sounds a lot like my daughter at that age. She was diagnosed with inattentive ADHD with some anxiety at age 14.

As a kid, she’d be off in her own world a lot of the time, and have a hard time coming back to the real one. Lots of bleed-through from her imaginary life to her everyday life. It was harder to focus on conversations with more than one or two other kids, but she did Ok in a group when she could lead the play and be the one to get others involved. (All of this is in retrospect—we had no idea this was what was happening back then.) But more often than not, she was much more at ease when she was alone or with one trusted friend.

She was bright enough that she learned pretty quickly how to mask the other ADHD symptoms at school, so we just thought she had a really vivid imagination that led her to prefer her imaginary world to the real one. I guess that was part of it, but in some ways it was probably a defensive strategy developed as she became aware of her differences.

Medication has helped her manage small talk a little better, and she can keep eye contact, follow the thread of a conversation, and doesn’t need to fidget constantly to keep her focus from drifting.

But she’s still working with her therapist to overcome the social anxiety and move away from the coping strategies that had become ingrained over the years. She’s never been one to participate actively in small talk because she was always afraid she’d missed something and was about to say something way off-base, so she kind of has to learn that skill from scratch.[/quote]

For us, [b]the anxiety was coming from the ASD[/b].  It had always been coming from the stress of dealing with the ASD.  We wasted so much time trying to treat the anxiety ("try taking some deep breaths" omg the gall!) when the issue was so much deeper.

It does seem like ASD and ADD/ADHD get confused and cross-diagnosed with one another a lot.  My daughter has been diagnosed with both at various times.  Glad you figured things out.[/quote]

What changed in terms of how you approached ASD vs anxiety? My DC has a similar profile, where I think the anxiety is coming from the ASD, but it feels like there are limited things we can really do to "treat" the ASD, whereas anxiety comes with more meds and strategies.[/quote]

Some of my daughter's anxiety went away with the ASD diagnosis itself, to be honest, after she had a few weeks to sit in the diagnosis and feel her way around a little.  The incidents of her "losing it" at school and needing to isolate or get away from the classroom went down.  I think it was a little bit of a relief to know that the pressure she was feeling wasn't HER, it was the way she is built, and having that, she accepted it and herself a little more, and had more trust in herself.

She is still on an antidepressant and we still use anxiety strategies, and I'm sure there will be more anxiety as she gets older, but for now the diagnosis itself was something of a relief.[/quote]

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