Sources and Methodology
This page exists so you can judge how much weight to give anything here.
What we use
Published research. Cited with a link when a claim rests on it. Autism and ADHD research in adults is younger and thinner than most readers assume, particularly for anyone who was not a white boy at the time of assessment. Where the evidence is weak, we say the evidence is weak rather than rounding it up.
Public community discussion. Reading what people say in public forums shapes which questions we answer and which words we use.
Our own observations. If we ever publish a number derived from site usage, it appears with its sample size and its limitations attached, or it does not appear.
How community discussion is used — and not used
Public posts inform what topics matter and what vocabulary people actually use. That is where their role ends.
We do not reproduce anyone's words as a quotation. Where an illustrative example would help, it is written by us as a composite and labelled as one. Nobody's post gets lifted into our copy, and we do not store or publish usernames.
The reason is simple: people writing in a support context did not publish for our benefit, and being scraped into a marketing page is exactly the kind of exposure this audience has good reason to avoid.
What we will not claim
- That we can tell you whether you are autistic or have ADHD. No page or tool here does that, and any site that offers to do it from a questionnaire is overselling what a questionnaire can do.
- That any social situation is safe. We cannot know that, and the phrase "safe space" is a promise no website can keep.
- That a particular approach will work for you. Neurodivergent is a very wide category. Advice that helps one person routinely fails another.
- That we speak for the community. We do not.
Limits of self-report
The communication profile tool collects only what you choose to put in it. It does not measure anything. What you get out is a restatement of what you put in — useful for explaining yourself to someone else, not a finding about you.
Numbers on this site
Any statistic carries its source. If you find a figure here that does not, that is a defect — please tell us through the corrections page and we will either source it or remove it.