There's a bunch of different sub-parts of EF, including "can't switch behaviours" (
cognitive flexibility; autists may struggle with it, literature is undecided) and "can't stop yourself" (behavioural and/or verbal inhibition;
people with ADHD struggle with both,
some literature suggests autists struggle with them too), but those aren't the only ones.
Other types include task initiation (may be shitty in autists, colloquially known as "
autistic inertia"), working memory, selective attention, and a bunch of other ones I can't remember because they keep coming up with different names for them/different ways of slicing the pie up. EF deficits in
depression and
schizophrenia are extremely well-documented. The "sensory filters being baibais" thing you're talking about is actually a
theory of autism which suggests autists are worse at filtering out irrelevant stimuli and therefore are generally perceptually overwhelmed, causing a lot of the sensory issues we see in autism. As for "psych dings are more of how much margin you have to spare", arguing whether symptoms occur because someone has reduced capacity or because they have normal capacity and it's partially full is an
extremely difficult distinction to make, but afaik ADHD is generally considered to be the former, not the latter, because
brain networks broke.
I know "clinical" means when treatment happens, I meant that no one gets referred to a psych/neuro with "executive dysfunction" as a named disorder (or generally even as a symptom; much more likely to see "difficulty concentrating on school work", "chronically unemployed", "difficulty preventing self from interrupting during conversations" on any kind of referral assessment). It's exclusively a symptom of other psych/neuro issues. Also re: consent, if we never let anyone consent to shit because their brain was kinda fucked up, anyone with depression/anxiety or ADHD or any level of autism would never be allowed to consent to anything, which is obviously retarded, so no. People with a given level of intellectual disability, or people under a psych hold, are incapable of consent; everyone else is fine and gets no excuses for their own dumb behaviour.
