How do I get diagnosed and get treatment for aspergers?

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I'm a 19 year old college student and I'm pretty sure I have aspergers. I've done a great deal of research and I have many of the symptoms. I would like to get a difinitive diagnoses and start treatment for some of the comorbid disorders of aspergers such as social anxiety, adhd, and generalized anxiety. I've never been to a physchiatrist so I have no idea how to go about finding a doctor who can help me. Any advice on how to get started? I feel so overwhelmed with this but I would really like to start treating these disorders because they seem to run my life. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

first off, your college probably has a counseling center. i'd start there. that's where i started, and then they can refer you elsewhere. other than that, if you have insurance there is a number on the back of you insurance card and you could call them to see what they have to say as to what places that they cover or where you could start looking.

i'd try the counseling center at your college first though, most colleges have them

i just got diagnosed this year (i'm a 19 yr old college student too ... yay for us)

its really really nice when you fnally find a reason that you are the way you are

Is there any treatment for Asperger's Syndrom? I know there is not a cure.

you need to talk to a neuropsychologist. but, do you know how your health insurance company will discriminate against you if you are diagnosed with Asperger's? If you don't know, I suggest you resist the temptation of getting tested for Aspeger's.

What do you mean insurance can discriminate if you have Aspergers? How do you mean they discriminate?

I just rented Michael Moore's movie Sicko the other day. He listed a bunch of health issues that would cause insurance companies to reject your application for insurance and I noticed Autism and Aspergers were listed.

I don't know if I'm on the spectrum or not, but I wouldn't want to get a diagnosis on record if I were. It would have drastic consequences in regard to medical insurance and potentially devastating consequences in regard to employment.

I do believe insurance companies can bar you from coverage for the syndrome once you change providers. Then there's the various medical privacy issues... There's also the possibility of being drugged.

No thanks.

A diagnosis of Asperger's is nothing to leave to a psychologist. It's something that takes testing, but more important, it takes a lot of experience on the part of the person reading the tests to decide what you really have. A good diagnosis helps, a bad one will drive you nuts!

How do you get treated?

You can't. There is no treatment. There are drugs, which sometimes (like in my case) make things better, but which sometimes make things a lot worse. And there is learning to live with it, which is kind of a better idea, because there are ways to cope with it, and if you've made it all the way to college without some of the horror stories that a lot of the people on this board tell (and the stories are real, believe me), you're very lucky.

Asperger's is not a disease. I don't like this analogy because the brain is not "wired," but Aspergers is kind of like being "wired differently." Take heart. It has its up sides. Some aspies are ordinary, but some aspies are brilliant men and women, and they make huge contributions to society.

So be very careful about who you listen to, and very careful before you let the idea that you have AS bother you that much. There are a lot of myths about it that just aren't true.

Good luck.
Beentheredonethat

Did they say WHY? I mean I could see hoiw some of my problems stemmed from the reasoning, demeaner, and strees of AS, but that could be true of ANYONE, and isn't definite for AS.

No, it didn't say why AS was on the list.

If I had to guess, I would say it is because of all the "experimental" treatments for ASDs on the market.

Except that experimental stuff is generally NOT COVERED anyway!

And does ANYONE accepting chelation therapy UNDERSTAND what it is? Once a person is wired, they are wired. chelation therapy has no chance of changing that.

beentheredonethat,

In a very real way, people ARE wired! There are connections that map the brain in certain ways. They may not be metal wires, but they work like wires, and DO carry a small electrical impulse. When people are born, they have VERY simple "wiring" that is almost like the BIOS and BDOS on a computer. HECK, it works much the same way even. Babies can't percieve things that well, and prioception is FOREIGN, let alone good. But babies DO know some things.

It is almost like my old apple II+ disk drive. It, like others, made a nasty noise when booting. WHY? Because it had to know which track it was on, and this was basically not possible. SO, it would move the maximum number of times in one direction to ENSURE that it was on a given track, and then count. In the same way, babies seem preoccupied with their movement, etc... Even on SLIDERS there was an episode where the sliders had to reboot an android, and she went through these funny gyrations for the same reason. Even my handspring when it was first turned on, or dragon natural speaking. Apparently, the BIOS and BDOS in autistic people is a bit different and THAT, and related experiences, cause the rest of the wiring to be different as well.

HECK, some neurons are so complex, that they have so many "branches" that they are called dendrites(from the greek word for tree)! Anyway, each branch is another connection.

Yes, but that is part of the problem. Because there are no "cures" for ASDs, the whole business of what and what not to cover is, from the standpoint of health insurance companies, very troublesome. Rather than having to deal with it, many insurance providers simply refuse to provide coverage for anyone on the spectrum.

Which is illegal.

But they do it anyway.

A general trend in the United States is that if you have enough money, the law doesn't apply to you, and the courts appear to equate law and justice. I don't speak from experience though, only in abstract.

The little guy gets screwed.

Didn't seeleah20 mean normal therapy?

Because I made an attempt at getting therapy to discover all the mysterious rules and social clues and everything that I don't know about social interaction and how non-autistic people are different from me. I don't know so much and learning about that there exists eye-contact and such is why I got therapy. It's speech therapy mostly and it's from people who're specialised on autism.

I figured since seeleah20 said something about comorbid disorders that she meant things like that, learning more about differences, overcoming fears from bad experiences, strategies how to cope with adhd and anxiety and such.