Sora wrote:
The psychiatrist no. 1 also claimed that she knew AS well and was able to diagnose it correctly and everybody told me to go there at first because they're experienced with autism. They may be with some types of AS/HFA or just with LFA (who knows, the opinion that they're good must stem from something) but they totally failed with me, deciding I didn't have it after one appointment of talking.
Could just be that they advertise well. Some places with absolutely horrible and incompetent care have great reputations because they advertise like crazy and publicize themselves. Sometimes that's the reason for the incompetent care; they're too busy spending time and money on their image that they can't be bothered with providing treatment. Sometimes if a place is good at first, once they start to publicize, they fall back and stop trying to improve their services, too.
Callista wrote:
No; the "problem" they peg me with is always anxiety. Apparently, being scared that people are going to mistreat you (when they often do), being scared of not knowing what's going to happen (when you tend to go into a total freeze when unexpected things happen), and being scared that the psychiatrist is going to tell you you are just lazy and lack moral character (when they have) is indicative of some sort of "significant anxiety presentation". Yeah, Dr. Shrink; let's dump you into the ocean without a life jacket and see YOUR "significant anxiety presentation", because that's exactly what I feel like.
Precisely.
Sora wrote:
I really believe that unspecified and traditional therapies or therapies from therapists who don't know lots of about autism don't work for those autistic people who need some help with their autism.
Exactly for the reason you said and experienced so often - those therapists without expereince in autism try to make sense of what you tell them by thinking you're a normal person with temporarily abnormal behaviour, not an autistic person with perfectly normal autistic behaviour.
Exactly. And no amount of stressing myself out with an hour drive to a therapist who wants to talk about my nasty ex is going to change problems that I've had my entire life. And no, the fact that I don't want to talk about it doesn't mean it's important, it means that it's
not important. Focusing on crap that doesn't matter while refusing to help me analyze my problems with communication is NOT going to help me, and coming in more often to talk about stuff that STILL doesn't matter isn't going to make it any more helpful.
02 Aug 2009, 2:35 pm
