A symptomatic life experience

Post Reply New Topic

[edit]
wow..just found these posts are publically viewable without having logon..bye (this is configurable in phpbb)

You've pretty much summed up my life, except that I asked my sisters to double check the Aspergers symptoms. Found out they already had and had reached the conclusion that it fit me almost to a 'T'.

Trying to get someome with a degree to confirm the self-diagnosis just so I have somewhere to start. I know I have to figure out ways to work around the inherent social problems Aspergers can, and usually does, create but I thought it might be nice to actually have the piece of paper.

Welcome to WP!

I support young adults on the spectrum in university and at least half of my students receive diagnosis at university - there is a large group who manage to get through to that point and then can't cope when they leave home and enter a more self-regulated educational setting. The pattern is that they almost always "end up" in mental health where their AS is spotted and then they are referred on for diagnosis and support (at least in our university, not all universities have such good services).

The reason this is so common is 2 fold:

first, the more cognitively able you are and the better support from your family you have the more able you are to build your own strategies for survival so the later your traits become unmanageable and clear to people outside your immediate family - there are cluster of diagnoses at certain ages correlating to increases in social expectation (often linked with progressing through educational stages) and complexity at developmental stages (2-3, 5-6, 9-10, 12-13, 16-18 .....). This is something that will probably always be the case and it is particularly so for girls who don't stand out so much in their early years due to the different social expectations and culture they grow up with - they tend to focus on the same things as other girls and you can only see that the focus is of a different kind if you look very closely.

The second reason is one that will see fewer people coming late to diagnosis than we are currently seeing - historical awareness. Many people in your age group who we can now see are quite clearly on the spectrum were missed as children because the diagnosis only became available in the 80s after Utha Frith translated Asperger's paper into English. Diagnosis only started in the late 80s and the number of professionals able to diagnose was tiny and inexperienced; they did not see the more subtle signs and applied the criteria very rigidly.
30 years on and we are now seeing much greater awareness in clinical and educational circles, a much better understanding of the spectrum as a whole and much better access to services but we are still catching up with the people who slipped through the net in their earlier years.