There is a moment, familiar to almost every AuDHD adult in this country, that begins in a primary school classroom. A child is reading the same book again. Or drawing the same dragon for the eleventh week. Or talking, again, about trains, or volcanoes, or Pokémon, or whales, or the entire taxonomic hierarchy of carnivorous plants. A teacher leans over the desk, kindly, and says some version of the same line. We need to broaden your interests. We need you to play with the other kids. We need you to stop being so fixated.
Most of us did stop. We learned the lesson Australian schools spent thirty years teaching: that the thing your brain loved most was the thing most likely to mark you out. By the time we were adults, the special interest had been sanded down into a hobby we were embarrassed about, the hyperfocus had been re-labelled as procrastination, and the deep, satisfying pull of a single idea had become something we apologised for at dinner parties. Then, often in our thirties or forties, we got a diagnosis. And the question that followed was almost unbearable. What if the thing they tried to train out of me was the part of me that was actually working?
That question is no longer rhetorical. In April 2024, an autistic researcher now based at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Patrick Dwyer, published a study in the journal Neurodiversity with Wenn Lawson, Zachary Williams and Susan Rivera. They surveyed 492 adults — 122 with ADHD, 130 autistic, 141 AuDHD, and 99 in a non-diagnosed comparison group — about hyper-focus, inattention, and the way attention is regulated across diagnostic lines. The headline finding cuts through three decades of clinical training: hyper-focus and inattention were elevated in every neurodivergent group, and they were positively correlated. The same brain that “can’t pay attention” is the brain that drops into a tunnel for six hours and forgets to eat. They are not opposites. They are the same trait, expressed in different conditions, and that trait is the engine of the AuDHD mind.
Dwyer’s paper is the most rigorous trans-diagnostic test yet of an idea Australia has been quietly central to for thirty years. The theory is called monotropism, and its co-author Wenn Lawson — an autistic researcher, Adjunct Associate Professor at Curtin University in Perth, and resident of Warrnambool, Victoria — is one of the field’s foundational voices. Together with Dinah Murray and Mike Lesser, Lawson formalised it in a 2005 paper in Autism — but the term goes back to talks Murray gave in Durham in 1992, the year many AuDHD adults reading this were still being told off for reading the dragon book again. The idea is simple and quietly radical. Most non-autistic minds spread attention thinly across many channels at once. Autistic minds — and, on the new evidence, ADHD and AuDHD minds in their own way — pour attention down a smaller number of much deeper channels. Inside one of those tunnels, processing is faster, more accurate, more emotionally regulated, more alive. Outside one, the world is loud, fragmented and overwhelming. Hyperfocus is not the bug. The unmet transition between tunnels is.
If that framing sounds suspiciously affirming, the wellbeing data has been catching up. In December 2025, researchers from the University of Bath, King’s College London and Radboud University Medical Center published the first large-scale study of psychological strengths in adults with ADHD in Psychological Medicine. Two hundred adults with ADHD and two hundred without were asked how strongly they identified with twenty-five positive traits. The ADHD group endorsed ten of those strengths more strongly than the comparison group: hyperfocus, creativity, humour, spontaneity, intuition, openness to new experiences, and others in the same family. More importantly, in both groups, the more aware people were of their strengths and the more they used them, the better their quality of life and the fewer mental health symptoms they reported. The opposite of suffering, in other words, is not the absence of ADHD. It is being allowed to use the parts of an ADHD brain that work.
The autism evidence runs parallel. Rachel Grove and colleagues published a study in Autism Research in 2018 showing that special interests in autistic adults were associated with subjective wellbeing across social, leisure and life-satisfaction domains. Two-thirds of the sample reported having a special interest. The motivation behind engaging with it — joy, identity, mastery — was the strongest predictor of wellbeing, while engagement at very high intensity was associated with poorer wellbeing. Identity, several respondents told the researchers, was the special interest. The Reframing Autism community in this country, led by Dr Melanie Heyworth, has been saying the same thing in plainer language for years: monotropic attention is not a deficit to manage but a way of being to support.
Which makes the Australian situation more painful, not less. Because while the science has moved, much of the system around AuDHD children has not. Restricted and repetitive interests remain in the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for autism — a phrase that does enormous quiet work. It tells teachers a child’s deepest engagement is a symptom. It tells funders that the goal of intervention is reducing it. Reframing Autism’s position statement on therapies notes that ABA and other early intensive behavioural interventions have, for years, been recommended in Australia as the “only” evidence-based treatment for autism, with goals that frequently include suppressing stimming and reshaping the way children engage with their preferred interests. Recent qualitative work with autistic adults — including Australian respondents — describes the long-tail consequences of that approach as something close to grief: the sense of having been trained, very effectively, to perform attention rather than to use it.
The cost of that training is now visible in the burnout literature. Bougoure and colleagues at the University of Western Australia and Macquarie University validated the AASPIRE Autistic Burnout Measure in 2026 with 379 autistic adults, and the qualitative work around it makes the same point twice. Special interests, when entered freely, are a recovery resource: a route back to flow, to regulation, to a self that exists outside the role being played for the world. Special interests, when masked, suppressed, or deferred until exhaustion, are a recovery liability — the engine that won’t start because the petrol has been siphoned off all week. AuDHD adults sit on both sides of that finding at once. ADHD task-initiation difficulty makes the tunnel harder to enter; autistic monotropism makes the cost of being kept out of it higher. The combination is one reason this country’s AuDHD adults so often describe their best week as the one nobody asked anything of them.
There is, finally, a piece of Australian regulation worth naming, because it changes what AuDHD adults are entitled to expect from their clinicians. From 1 December 2025, the Psychology Board of Australia’s Code of Conduct and updated competencies require every registered psychologist to demonstrate “strengths-based” and “neurodiversity-affirming” practice. The National Autism Strategy 2025–2031 names a neurodiversity-affirming, strengths-based approach as its underlying principle. The Medicare item number for an integrated AuDHD assessment still does not exist. Foundational supports for AuDHD adults under Mark Butler’s NDIS reforms still have not been designed. But the regulatory floor has shifted. A psychologist who tells you to “broaden your interests” or to “stop fixating” is no longer simply doing what was always done. They are arguably out of compliance with the code now binding their registration.
So what does an AuDHD-affirming life actually look like, on a Saturday in May, in Australia, for a 38-year-old who has spent thirty years apologising for their own attention? Closer to this. You stop calling the thing you love a guilty pleasure. You build the week around at least one tunnel — protected, uninterrupted, unjustified — and you treat that hour the way other people treat a gym class or a Sunday roast. You teach the people around you, including your manager, that you do your best work when you are allowed to finish, not when you are made to switch. If you parent an AuDHD child, you stop trying to broaden their interests and start asking what their interest already teaches them: pattern, precision, persistence, joy. If you are the clinician, you cite the new code, the trans-diagnostic Dwyer paper, the Bath strengths study, and you write the report accordingly.
Australia spent thirty years teaching its AuDHD children that the thing their brain loved most was the thing most worth giving up. The science has now made that lesson untenable. You weren’t supposed to outgrow it. You were supposed to be helped to live inside it, without the world breaking you for it.
Sources
- Dwyer, P., Williams, Z. J., Lawson, W. B., & Rivera, S. M. (2024). A trans-diagnostic investigation of attention, hyper-focus, and monotropism in autism, attention dysregulation hyperactivity development, and the general population. Neurodiversity. journals.sagepub.com
- Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism. journals.sagepub.com
- University of Bath, King’s College London, Radboud UMC (December 2025). The role of psychological strengths in positive life outcomes in adults with ADHD. Psychological Medicine. cambridge.org
- ‘Playing to your strengths’ improves wellbeing in ADHD — University of Bath announcement. bath.ac.uk
- Grove, R., Hoekstra, R. A., Wierda, M., & Begeer, S. (2018). Special interests and subjective wellbeing in autistic adults. Autism Research. onlinelibrary.wiley.com
- Reframing Autism: Monotropism — Understanding Autistic Ways of Being Through the Lens of Attention. reframingautism.org.au
- Reframing Autism: Position Statement on Therapies and Interventions. reframingautism.org.au
- Bougoure, M., et al. (2026). Measuring autistic burnout: A psychometric validation of the AASPIRE Autistic Burnout Measure in autistic adults. Autism. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Psychology Board of Australia: Code of Conduct (effective 1 December 2025). psychologyboard.gov.au
- Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing: National Autism Strategy 2025–2031. health.gov.au
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