@NatalyaD Yeah, that's the ADHD struggle for sure. It's easy to get frustrated with people for essentially avoiding things when it doesn't have an immediate consequence, but a lot of people have just recently discovered they have ADHD at all, and have basically spent their lives not having enough spoons to do everything they need to do. Going to university forces you to be an adult in a lot of new ways, and sometimes everything feels like it's on fire, so you put out the thing closest to you and then you have to fill up the bucket again before you can put out the next one. Sometimes you're standing between a red fire extinguisher and a blue one, and you can't decide which one to pick up first until the fire burns you. Sometimes people just make dumb decisions when they're barely an adult, and not reaching out to disability services feels like one of those. ANd that's without the sensory struggles and other things that go along with autism.
It really sounds like the material is all there. Students *can* catch up on missed classes as much as the university can reasonably allow. I think if someone is dealing with that level of executive dysfunction they don't just need help dealing with university, they need help dealing with being an adult with adult responsibilities they probably didn't ask for, and classes can easily become one of those. I also think the discourse around neurodivergence and mental health is a double-edged sword, because it's raising so much awareness and helping people find an explanation for life-long struggles, but it's also creating an echo chamber that normalizes avoiding discomfort completely, and so much of the ADHD peralysis is about dreading a task that might actually be very easy. Sometimes forcing ourselves to do something that feels difficult is the only way we can learn that it's easy, and that cognitive distortion is not something that's spoken about very often. So when people hear "You are not a failure" and turn it into "It's okay if I don't go to class when I'm feeling anxious about it", it becomes another ADHD thing-they'll-do-later, and they reinforce the perception that it's difficult, until the normalization of discomfort avoidance turns into the reinforced belief that nothing will ever get better. EDIT: And in case this needs saying, yes, sometimes going to class is legitimately difficult and I think at that point it's probably very individualized. But I'm speaking more about the "I can't make myself leave home" mentality that doesn't seem to have a concrete reason behind it.
All this to say, I think you have the right approach by working on those strategies, and if it doesn't translate to success, that doesn't mean you're not doing enough. A lot of this needs to come from the student, or other supports. JMO, of course.