Key Takeaways
- Tisha Campbell revealed on Way Up With Angela Yee that she has AuDHD, a co-occurring diagnosis of autism and ADHD, describing herself as level one on the spectrum.
- Campbell reached the diagnosis this year after seeing two separate specialists and taking 12 assessments with each, ranging from oral and written tests to Q&As.
- Campbell said she has masked her autistic traits her whole life, including hiding stimming, and that acting and music have been her lifelong special interests.
- The diagnosis came after Campbell finished her memoir The A Word: A Mother's Journey Through Autism and Love, published September 15, about raising her autistic son Xen.
Tisha Campbell has revealed she's been diagnosed with AuDHD — but she didn't find out until after publishing a book about autism.
During a recent appearance on Way Up with Angela Yee, the House Party actor said she has AuDHD, the term used for co-occurring autism and ADHD. "I have AuDHD, which is a newer diagnosis where you have partial ADHD and autism," Campbell told Yee. "So I have a lot of autistic tendencies and I'm level one."
Getting there took two rounds of clinical testing. Campbell said her therapist pushed her toward testing after noticing patterns in her behavior and in her nervous system responses, and she went to two separate providers rather than one.
"I actually saw two specialists. And I took 12 tests each, and they all vary from oral tests to written tests to just Q&As," she said. "And so, I took all 12 twice, and I just got my diagnosis back."
Level one on the autism spectrum describes support needs rather than the intensity of a person's internal experience, generally applying to people who live independently but may need help with social communication, sensory processing, or adjusting to change. Campbell said she carries earphones to block out sound because of audio processing differences.
She also described a lifetime of masking, and of concealing stimming, the repetitive movements or sounds some autistic people use to self-regulate.
"No, I feel like I know myself so much better. And I do all the things and been hiding from everybody that I stem," she said. "Instead of, like, growing up in Newark, you couldn't be different. Like, you know, back in the day when I grew up, you couldn't stand out like that. So, I guess I've been masking my entire life."
Campbell named the two things that held her attention from childhood on. "A lot of autistic people have, they used to call them obsessions or fixations, but we call them special interests now," she said. "And my special interest was always acting and music."
The timing matters. Campbell's memoir, The A Word: A Mother's Journey Through Autism and Love, was published September 15 by Amistad and chronicles raising her son Xen, who was diagnosed at 18 months. Her own diagnosis landed after the manuscript was finished, according to Essence.
"I got the diagnosis after I wrote the book. So, that part's not even in the book," she said. "It's a newer diagnosis. This just happened this year."
Dual diagnosis of the kind Campbell describes was not always possible. Autism and ADHD were treated as mutually exclusive until the DSM-5 allowed both to be diagnosed together in 2013. A 2022 review in Frontiers in Psychiatry estimated that 50 to 70 percent of autistic people also have ADHD.
Tisha Campbell, whose career across television, film, music, and comedy spans more than five decades, co-founded Colored My Mind in 2011 to raise autism awareness in communities of color and later co-produced a documentary of the same name.
