Child diagnosed with GAD during ADHD or autism assessment?

[Wigglinaround]

Has anyone else’s child been diagnosed with Generalised Anxiety Disorder after an ADHD/autism assessment?

MY 12 year old has just been diagnosed with GAD. The clinicians explained that her anxiety is currently so severe that they feel it gets in the way of clearly assessing ADHD-related attention, despite her having longstanding attention and executive functioning difficulties that were present before the anxiety became so severe.

We’ve also been told to consider beta blockers, melatonin and an SSRI, even though her anxiety is almost entirely related to school. I’m trying to understand whether anyone else has been in a similar situation.

Did your child have anxiety that was mainly school-related? Were medication options discussed? Was anxiety treated first? Did your child later have their ADHD reassessed, and if so, did the outcome change? Did your clinician explain what they believed was driving the anxiety?

I’d really appreciate hearing about other families’ experiences, as we’re trying to understand what the next steps might look like. Thank you.

I havent had your exact situation but I have had a child diagnosed with ASD and Anxiety at the same time. I can see why its hard to diagnose when someone's very anxious as the anxiety masks the symptoms of ither things or mimics them.

My sons anxiety stemmed entirely from the core deficits of asd- so communication issues, the need for routine and sensory issues - this did make him anxious about school because he didn't understand what was going on, it was very unpredictable and it was noisy, bright but also stopped him doing what he needed to do to regulate which was a lot of movement.

The anxiety was treated by Speech and language, occupational therapy, equine therapy, a new environment and medication - setraline and melatonin.

The medication was key - but im not sure they'd have helped without other measures too.

The anxiety has pretty much gone now. He now longer has setraline. he is still autistic but I would say without the debilitating anxiety, its much easier to manage.

Have cahms offered any support for GAD beside medication? Do you feel that she needs support with social communication or sensory issues or can you see something like chronic stress from her executive function at school triggering it. Because you'll need to support that too. What we found was he wasnt in a place to access therapies until the setraline kicked in. We also found a lot of charities doing equine therapy which was really good.

I was misdiagnosed with anxiety for years until my dad got a late autism diagnosis and everything began falling into place for me too. Anxiety is a really common part of living with neurodiversity unfortunately but that doesn’t mean medication won’t help - I take SSRI’s and will do for the rest of my life. I’m still autistic but it makes a lot of day to day activities that bit more bearable.