How has being diagnosed with Aspergers affected you?

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I wonder if anyone has had trouble getting/affording health insurance in the US as a result of diagnosis. That is the one consequence that I'm most worried about.

Were you more at ease having an official diagnosis?

yes i understood why i was different


Did it complicate things between you and friends/family?

no


Did it make it harder to find a job?

No, it made it easier because i have connections.


Were you able to get better treatment?

Yes,i had speech therapy and a therapist in the past.

I mean people acting as if they have autism when they don't, primarily through talking about how they were on the spectrum and about all these traits they had. It's not a common occurrence, but it happens at time and between the point that I found out I probably had Asperger's and was diagnosed, I had to deal with it.

As to why someone would want to - sometimes when people have developed depression and anxiety from bullying plus somewhat poor home life, its nicer to think of themselves as autistic than facing what is really going on.

I don't know if I would call that faking because that would mean someone deliberately deceiving people into believing they have a condition in which they knew full well they didn't have. In the case of Aspergers I find it to be somewhat of a vague and confusing disorder in that it has so many different combinations of symptoms and varying severity of said symptoms depending on the person. This makes it easy for people, through no fault of their own, to perceive themselves as ASD either out of convenience or misunderstanding when in fact they aren't. Not even the professionals fully understand ASD so you can't really blame anyone for making that mistake.

Last edited by Descendant on 07 Jun 2012, 6:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I don't know if I would say they are faking it. Maybe they learned to adapt so they outgrew those traits. Were any of them actually diagnosed or were they just self diagnosed? Also symptoms over lap so they may have had those problems and they were caused by something else. To me, them faking it would mean they are faking their problems and they don't actually have them. Also it means to me pretending to have all these traits and saying they have it and they full well know they don't have it.

In the case I'm thinking of she did not have the symptoms as a child, knew she didn't, and was faking symptoms along with having some overlapping symptoms. She was diagnosed with anxiety and depression, was not diagnosed with an ASD (and she didn't have one). She later admitted, after therapy, that she didn't and that she had been misrepresenting people who did.

In this case it was complicated in terms of whether she knew she was faking it. She basically tricked herself into believing she did as a defense mechanism, so at times she truly believed she was on the spectrum, despite her picking up traits only after having heard that they were related to the spectrum at times. She /wanted/ to be on the spectrum so much that she was a combination of consciously and unconsciously faking it. She didn't want to deal with having been bullied and neglected. It was easier on her to say that she was just autistic than go through and face the anxiety and depression.

The reason this was problematic was that she didn't have many of the struggles that we do. She did have some of them - developed from her past, but the misrepresentation of saying the struggles she had were autism (despite them mostly being social anxiety), was leading to people judging badly others who were on the spectrum because of lack of understanding. Even as she was acting, she wouldn't have me the diagnostic criteria, and that was leading to people thinking that social anxiety was Asperger's.

Like I said, its not frequent, but it happens, I had to deal with it, and it made me unwilling to interact with others on the spectrum treating myself as I was because I was terrified of misrepresenting them. Despite the fact that we do all have huge differences and that autism doesn't always present in the same way, there are large similarities, at least around the diagnostic criteria.

Were you more at ease having an official diagnosis?
i don't really know as i think i was 5 when i was disgnoised with AS

Did it complicate things between you and friends/family?
don't know

Did it make it harder to find a job?

n/a as im not a adult

Were you able to get better treatment?
yes

Wow. I see you were only talking about one person then. I have never met anyone yet that did that sort of thing nor have seen anyone yet doing it. I have seen some admit they don't have AS after all nor are on the spectrum because they were misdiagnosed. Then I have seen people say they were told they have it or it was brought up to them but they don't think they have it so they don't claim to have it nor claim to be on the spectrum.

Yeah, it was just one person. It was just right as I was starting to share that I was self-diagnosed that this happened (because it was when I first really found a social group that it was at all relevant to), and that actually broke my self-diagnosis for a while. Its why I joined here in 2006, but didn't really start posting much until 2011, because late 2006 is when this occurred.

I've never met anyone else who's done that. I've heard of things like you have other than that, and I've seen people think they were on the spectrum because of relating to being an introvered geek (and then realizing they were BAP but didn't have a disorder), but nothing else to that extreme. It just happened to be quite relevant to my reaction to my diagnosis.

Descendant, I'm in mid-assessment. You might want to know about something else, too. I'm having to dredge up a lot of uncomfortable history, including by going to people who knew me back then, and some of it feels very embarrassing. I'm facing it because I truly believe I'll be better off once I know for certain whether I'm on the spectrum or not. Having this information to provide for the psychologist doing the assessment is vital for a proper diagnosis, so I'm just having to find the courage to get through it.

If you decide to get assessed, you may sometimes feel down, as you are reminded of additional ways in which you had trouble that you may have forgotten. You may be faced with feelings of shame as people tell details about you and recall stories that reveal problems that you may have worked hard to hide or overcome. I'm accepting that some ups and downs of mood and self-concept are natural to this process. If you get assessed and feel some of these things, I hope you'll remember my post about it and be reassured that you're not the only one. I have hope that things will get better. It's just really difficult right now.

I've been aware of my diagnosis for a long time. I was diagnosed at seven, and I became aware of my condition when I was ten.

I'd say that finding out about my diagnosis has had a mixed effect on me. On the one hand, it's given me a sense of belonging: I don't behave the way I do because I'm strange or mad or immoral, but because I have a neurodevelopmental condition that many other people share. On the other, it's led me to adopt a rather negative view about my future: I'm often fearful that the fact that I'm 'wired differently' means that I'll always stand out from other people, and that I'll never reach a stage of being able to fully adapt to NT society. I know, of course, that people with AS can develop coping mechanisms that make it easier to adjust to social interaction, and I'm no exception in that respect; it's just an ongoing worry.

Still, I'd say that receiving a diagnosis has been a good thing overall. If nothing else, being able to present evidence of my disability has allowed me to access vital support.

Were you more at ease having an official diagnosis?

Yes. I did some research into my illness and Asperger's came up. I took a bunch of online tests and all results were positive. I found this forum and was even more confident that I had it. Though I wasn't sure that I had it and I told myself I wasn't going to label myself until I got a diagnosis; I'm well aware of confirmation bias. When I got my diagnosis, I was ecstatic. I was relieved but also at the same time I was in denial, especially the weeks following. In fact I'm just now starting to accept it and not be disillusioned.

Did it complicate things between you and friends/family?

Some of my family members accepted it right away, while others it took time. In all, everyone supports me and cares about me. They want me to get better and succeed. I don't have many friends so it hasn't had an effect in that arena.

Did it make it harder to find a job?

No, but since I got sick, I had to drop out school. My sickness was a result of stress and Asperger's. Now I'm very anxious all the time and it makes me wonder if I'm disabled or not.

Were you able to get better treatment

Does not apply.

I haven't been affected by it at all because I'm not diagnosed with it, sorry.

Toward the end of 2010 and beginning of 2011, I was seriously worried that I was doing something like this, but I didn't know that I was. I was aware of defense mechanisms like denial so I couldn't be sure. It actually helped a lot to receive my diagnosis and have multiple people who have met me face to face or read my writing online tell me that it made sense or that they thought I might be on the spectrum for some time before I mentioned it to them. Also finding out that at least one person told my mother that they thought I might be autistic when I was 10-11 or so. I know this stuff goes back well into childhood, but it's still easy for me to start worrying that it's all a big mistake and I am probably something else.

I can guarantee that I am not trying to escape my depression or anxiety, though. Both are pretty real as well.