Ruling out ADHD in favor of Asperger's
However, I did start to question the effectiveness of the meds that they were now pushing to help his inattentiveness. Over the course of 2 years, he was on just about every common stimulant from Ritalin to Adderall to Concerta, plus a few others to mix things up and calm him down. This was all supposed to help the ADHD but the funny thing is we never noticed a single difference in his impulsiveness and attentiveness at school or home.
Why was my ADHD/AS child unresponsive to such medical miracles as they were sometimes described?
Naturally we were aware that every child responds differently to every med. I guess we were just hoping to find at least one that would help in a positive way, and not always just the negative symptoms like lack of appetite, insomnia, etc.
I knew what meds were supposed to help ADHD patients, and none of them seemed to work for Andy. People with Asperger's however are not known to respond to any one type of med in particular - unlike ADHD, there doesn't appear to be any cure-all medication. An aspie can take different meds to address different symptoms associated with AS, but there isn't anything specifically for the disorder alone.
The question still remained unanswered, why wouldn't a stimulant help a child that clearly had severe attention problems? After all, Andy's inability to stay on task and not dwell on his favorite theater obsession could certainly use a boost. Presumably this was all a sign of his ADHD at work and he should technically be able to respond to something.
Or maybe his inattentiveness is not due to his inability to sustain attention for a prolonged period of time after all. Maybe just maybe his supposed lack of attention is really due to excessive attention towards a particular subject (or obsession in his instance). He may just be overly focused on theater, and thus appear distracted and inattentive. This would explain why the usual stimulants failed to help.
Some of the other known differences between AS and ADHD that I found are:
- Lack of eye contact which is very common in AS, but not an issue with ADHD
- Odd motor mannerisms (i.e., hand flapping, awkward body movements, etc) - very prevalent in Aspies yet not necessarily a problem with ADHD individuals
- Poor motor skills - Aspies have trouble both with fine and gross motor skills while
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