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For Erin, it's been a long process to confirm her diagnosis of both autism and ADHD.
"In my early 30s, I got the autism diagnosis first, and have found out other family members had ADHD, and I notice that both of those conditions apply to me, so when I start seeing a psychiatrist, Ii asked her if I could be assessed for ADHD."
According to Australia's government-fund service Healthdirect, Autism Spectrum Disorder, or autism is a developmental condition that affects individual interaction with the world.
Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD is also a developmental condition that includes symptoms of being easily distracted, impulsive and overactive.
Going through testing for both conditions are costly, according to Erin.
"Each one of them involve different testing. There are some that are overlapped, like some classic intelligence test, to see if you do have intellectual disability. But the test are pretty separate, and it is expensive. All it cost me a few thousand dollars, I calculated it at the end of the day, and it was somewhere about 12.5 per cent of my entire year salary."
In recent years, as people become more open to discuss mental health on social media, new research have found people have blurred the line between the two mental health conditions when discussing them on social media.
Jemima Kang is a graduate researcher at the University of Melbourne.
She's looked into over 470,000 Reddit posts over a ten-year period from the forum's ADHD and autism communities.
"And what we found was that users are increasingly mentioning ADHD in the autism community, and vice versa. And we also found that memberships of the two communities have also become more overlapping. And last, we use natural language process technique that analyse the context in which a word is used, and we've found the term ADHD and autism are being increasingly used in similar semantic context in Reddit."
Ms Kang says there are both benefits and risks of this social media phenomenon.
"In general this rising public interest in ADHD and autism and the interconnectedness is helping a lot of people better understand themselves and find community and articulate what they've been going through. But at the same time, the growing interconnectedness can also blur important distinction between these two conditions. And it can foster unwanted dual diagnoses and place restrain on clinical services."
For a long time, ADHD and autism were not allowed to be diagnosed together.
But the situation has changed in 2013, when the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the DSM-5, updated diagnosis of both conditions.
It extended the diagnosis of ADHD from children to teenagers and adults, and included several previously distinct disorders into a broader diagnosis of what it calls autism spectrum disorder.
Since then, there's been a social media trend about AuDHD, which refers to being diagnosed with both autism and ADHD.
Dr Tamara May is a clinical psychologist specialising in autism and ADHD.
She says it's difficult to get both an autism or an ADHD diagnosis in Australia, not to mention getting both.
"For ADHD, most people will see a psychiatrist who say, want to access the most evidence-based treatment, which is stimulant medication, and that's very restrictive. You have to go privately. It costs, you know, 1000 a few $1,000 so it's very hard to get an ADHD diagnosis. And similarly, to do an autism diagnosis, usually it's going through a psychologist who has expertise in the developmental conditions and diagnosing autism, and that can also, if it's done privately, can cost a lot, and for adults, it's generally just done privately."
Is it possible to diagnose both autism and ADHD at the same time?
According to Dr May, it's quite impossible.
"Often we try and, you know, conduct these assessments where we look at both conditions together. But typically, psychiatrists won't have that expertise in completing autism assessments, because it's, you know, previously been seen as it's a developmental condition, so it's the expertise of child adolescent psychiatrist and paediatricians. So often a psychiatrist will just diagnose the ADHD, but leaves the autism to be assessed by a psychologist, for example, for adults, and that becomes very costly for an individual seeking those conditions."
Nicole Rogerson is the chief executive of Austism Awareness Australia.
She also says people need to be careful about what they've read on social media.
"I think you just got to be really careful at understanding that the autism spectrum is very broad. In fact, it's broader than it ever has been before, and movements such as the neurodiversity movement have seen, obviously, a wider round amount of people now self identify as being on the autism spectrum and potentially having ADHD, whilst we want to embrace that idea that neuro diversity has got a positive message behind it, it's crucial to understand that these conditions are very serious, and for a decent proportion of the community, it will come with a significant amount of disability. "
She says the key is to ensure quality services are provided, whether it's for people with only one diagnosis, or both.
"It's not so much whether it's one or both. I think what's really clearly important is that we have good quality diagnostic services across the country, that people are getting quality assessments. So it's not merely ticking a box by seeing somebody you know online for telehealth, that we're doing proper differential diagnoses and making sure, because, for instance, if somebody has a legitimate diagnosis of ADHD, their life may be vastly improved with the help of medication. So it's important that we get the diagnosis right so we can get the right supports to those people."
Last year, the federal government launched a national road map to improve care for autistic people in the next decade.
Some states also begin looking at making ADHD diagnosis cheaper and more accessible for people.
Since 2017, Queensland has allowed G-Ps to diagnose and prescribe ADHD medication since 2017, but ONLY to children.
On Monday, the New South Wales government announced the state's general practitioners would be able to diagnose ADHD and prescribe medication for both children and adults.
Up to 1,000 G-Ps would first receive training before taking the new responsibility, but the details of the training as well as the roll out are yet confirmed.
Dr Rebekah Hoffman, the New South Wales and A-C-T Chair of Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, says the reform make it easier for existing ADHD patients to access prescription, while reducing stigma around mental health.
"What it also means is hopefully there's a reduced wait list for getting into paediatricians and psychiatrists if we're able to go on and manage some of their complex but stable patients that don't need to see them as regularly."
