Hello out there!

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Hello, I am looking forward to meeting you all.

I'm an over-50 female, love nature, animals, scifi esp. about alien psychologies, and computer program for a living.
I finally found info about autism in females just last winter; "masking" without understanding much of it, special interests of nature, people, etc., but what got me was... my childhood collections of model horses. I spent a ton of time with those horses, reading the same scifi books over and over... That was a huge realization, sort of a cascade followed, pieces still keep fitting in..

I am still a newbie to understanding autism, and my own related issues, as neither I nor anyone in my family was ever diagnosed. My dad really fits some Aspie descriptions made from/for males very well, mathematician, strong narrow interests, interpersonal troubles that he doesn't understand, often doesn't notice, anger issues. I seem to deal differently but am female. I remember that I was bullied a huge amount around age 8-11, was very quiet, played chess, then... I met some geeks! I imitated a few female friends, and I seem to have followed a pattern others figured out too. I have been reading about the different female and male fMRIs with ASD.

I'm learning now that I've missed a ton about myself though. I had been "blaming" lots of unusual issues i have, on PTSD, but some of it doesn't fit well.

I guess my issues might rate as "mild" now from the outside, but I've had decades to work on my "model" of people... I spent loads of time watching different people. I also researched social systems, read animal behavior and social psychology research, all sorts of stuff fascinated me and helped me understand people -- lots of motivation to do that, partly why they do some really negative things I experienced.

Since then I've slowly identified seemingly totally unconnected things as fitting perfectly into ASD (mild). Personal relationships haven't gone so well. Also I can't socialize in large groups with lots of talking, brain fries and I can't figure out how to talk within the fast conversation -- while they are all relaxing... I just get upset, used to feel shame after those things. I am lucky to have found several environments that are much easier for me. I have some sound sensitivity and verbal comprehension troubles, but I almost always snuck around that by taking immediate notes and learning visually by myself...

I'm having trouble with our U.S. diagnostic system. I found a research group, signed up to be a guinea pig, and took the ADOS etc. They didn't throw me out the door... However, there is no one that I can talk to who can or will tell me what my childhood behavior was, so my doctor is telling my I cannot be diagnosed with DSM 5. Has anyone else heard that confirmed? If true, that seems very unethical to me. There are still a lot of issues I am not dealing with well, relationships, emotions, depression... I avoided some major things I had not managed to understand like good relationships, for decades. Disorders like regular anxiety are considered "worthy" of support and assistance; why is milder ASD compared to the most severe, and dismissed? That isn't done for other illnesses, conditions, disorders, whatnot. (I saw some people on some sites pretty rudely dismiss milder but problematic ASD -- including the wonderful video with the women who "mask" it very well, when that video was posted onto the Autism Speaks site - because their relative has very difficult and more visibly disabling issues from ASD.)

There have got to be many, many undiagnosed adults out there. I've read a few places online that more adults are realizing similar things about themselves. It's really hard to connect all these things without reading about ASD, esp. ASD varieties more like one has oneself.

Well, thank you for reading, if you've gotten through all this! -- I look forward to talking to people here.

Welcome! Hope you enjoy it here.

Adult ASD is largely dismissed because nobody will pay for treatment. Most doctors assume that if insurance won't pay for it, you won't pay for treatment out-of-pocket. If you do have money, you can find access to services where the wealthy live. There are highly talented people who will provide services on a strictly cash basis--they have no time for dealing with insurance or Medicare--they want to use the time they spend working actually helping people.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/11/news/ec ... y-doctors/

what kind of services?

The cash healthcare business depends on referrals--you do good work and the word gets around that you do good work. It works the other way too--you don't want everyone to know you do good work--only the people can afford to pay you--as talented healthcare service providers don't want to talk to people who aren't going to be customers.

Put another way, once you start paying out of pocket for healthcare services, more services will open up to you.

Thank you for your replies and the welcome.

Even if there aren't well-developed "services" for some kinds of adult autistics, or funded services, why would they completely ignore diagnosing people? Improper diagnosis for some women, for instance, probably costs insurers way more due to treatments that don't work right since the providers have no clue.

Anxiety, depression, etc. etc. are really common in adult women, just as an example; being in "support groups" where the leaders don't understand that a woman might not be able to identify her own emotions, and doesn't know that's a big chunk of her problem, could just prolong service usage and increase the insurers' costs. (Just a teensy bit of personal experience there, from like decades. I just read that kids with ASD are now being offered some services that help them identify their own emotions. Well, I'm glad for them, but... )

Hey Greenleaf welcome.

Welcome to Wrong Planet!

Hmmm... I know my own situation better than I know statistics about other folks; I hold a job and pay insurance premiums, and over decades both the insurers and I have paid loads to my various therapists (am over 50). I don't know for sure, but it really feels like I've made more progress in a few months, since I learned more about the idea of serious difficulty identifying emotion, and really started paying lots of attention and making tiny bits of progress in identifying them, than I made in some whole years. Tiny bits of progress feels way better than absolutely no progress -- like with this one therapist I had for about 10 years, who I think thought I was "intellectualizing". No..., but my brain is weirdly uneven in abilities, including emotional processing and self-understanding of all that. Writing down concepts like this is not a problem for me once I have them; they can be incorrect though.

The same insurers that paid for all that, might have needed to pay way less for these decades of only partly helpful therapy approaches, were I to have been accurately diagnosed 30 years ago. (I know that many, many people don't get the right health care in many areas, but I'm just looking at this one.)

Then, there is the issue of lots of poor quality of life and missed major life chances, which I cynically think some insurers could care less about, but maybe the money wasted would get their attention...

Realistically, a proper diagnosis would have been more than 40 years ago--30 years ago would be your 20s where diagnosis is hard because that is when young adult mental illness shows up--unless you have a kid and diagnose you both at the same time. Accurate female diagnosis is relatively new. They knew I was different, but Aspies typically weren't diagnosed when I was a kid. 30 years ago you read about it in specialized books that suggested institutionalization for those unfortunate enough to have it.

Adult diagnosis is hard.

We become skilled in hiding it.
Mental disorders show up when we become adults.
The autism spectrum is highly variable.

But, once diagnosed, it may be easy for older adults to verify the diagnosis because many on the spectrum have excellent memories and can match up hundreds of faux pas in our lifetime with similar mistakes made by other Aspies.

Been there, done that.

@AdamLain -- I agree that feeling some pride, self-esteem or whatever is really warranted when we've managed to learn really difficult things with no instructors!

I would definitely call some of it coping and controlling our behavior. All adults need to learn lots of that, not just folks with ASD, and there are other neurologies that make it really hard too.

I would put some of it into "hiding", but this kind of hiding is a survival technique for me at least. 30 years ago I knew I needed to "fit in". I wonder if some females feel a little more strongly that "fitting in" is absolutely necessary for survival than some males? Or maybe evolution just resulted in many females with more motivation that way than the male "average". Or, none of the above... maybe the supposedly more-female Aspie "masking" that I spent so much time learning/doing is due to something else.

The reason I put some of this into a negative category is that it feels now, in my 50s, like I have spent way more of my life kinda lower on that "Maslow" hierarchy of needs than other people I know with similar education, test results, etc. When people talked in grad school about Your Research Interests, I felt really lost and just made up the best fit I could. (Not at the top of the Maslow pyramid, though maybe many folks aren't.) They seemed to have way more motivation though toward their topics; I just wanted interesting work, thinking about more difficult things was weirdly easier, and the choice to be around nicer people. I can't focus enough if I'm not interested, and nice people smile more -- which I can read really easily.

So, the "hiding" hit my own quality of life, I think... self-understanding would have helped so much too.