Rethinking ADHD:Episode 4: AuDHD: Living at the Intersection of Autism and ADHD

Rethinking ADHD: Voices from Research, Practice and Lived Experience is a podcast mini-series produced for the British Education Research Association (BERA), bringing together researchers, practitioners and people with lived experience to explore what ADHD and neurodiversity really mean in educational settings, and what it would take to do better. Across five episodes, the series moves from the theoretical foundations of Critical ADHD Studies through questions of epistemic injustice, school culture, co-occurring conditions and the social world of neurodivergent young people, drawing on recent scholarship and the expertise of guests who have spent careers and lifetimes thinking about these questions.

Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist returns as sole guest for this episode, which deepens the 'unknowing' thread established in Episode 1. Now Professor of Social Work at Karlstad University, her research career began in gender and sexuality studies before transitioning into disability research in 2008, where she has remained working at the intersection of neurodiversity studies, social work and the lived experience of autism and ADHD. She is AuDHD herself. Her collective autoethnographic work with neurodivergent scholars (Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al. 2023a, 2023b, 2023c) provides the primary source material, alongside the CADS chapter and emerging AuDHD scholarship, particularly Craddock (2024, 2026) on AuDHD as a residual diagnostic category that falls outside and between existing definitions of autism and ADHD.

The episode addresses the generational dimension directly: the pre-2013 diagnostic exclusion of co-occurring autism and ADHD left a generation without the full picture of themselves. Questions move from the historical to the experiential to the practical, asking what AuDHD-affirming practice would actually look like in educational settings.

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