I think this is different for everyone as well. Some people respond well to treatment and therapy and people like that are those for whom an early diagnosis is actually useful. Some other people do not improve with therapy and for those an early diagnosis is kind of useless or not very useful. Others feel better off without an early diagnosis. Everyone is different and we can't judge their lives based on our own experience.
I was diagnosed when I was 6 with ADD but they also told my mother I could have had some form of HFA (but it was not officially diagnosed). My mother used to say during my childhood that I was "more autistic than my brother" (who has LFA); obviously an hyperbole.
I had little therapy at the time because my parents soon understood I wasn't improving. I was glad they didn't want to go on with it because it was just a boring and useless thing.
At 13 I was diagnosed with Asperger's and ADD by two counselors (the third one disagreed on Asperger's and said it was social anxiety disorder and ADD) and then when I was 14 another psychiatrist diagnosed me with some anxiety disorders. I had some therapy sessions and I decided to quit and not go to therapy anymore because again it was useless for me. The only useful thing I learned was how to slowly calm down during a panic attack.
For a person like me the early diagnosis was useless. It only put a label on me during elementary school where teachers thought I was stupid due to ADD and that I had to be yelled at to be "motivated". That resulted into me developing a sort of ODD in 3rd grade.
Therapy is useless for me, theregore the early diagnosis is useless as well. If I improved in these years it was thanks to myself, my parents and the few afults and peers I met that have actually helped me.
Same goes with my father. He was born in 1955 and was not diagnosed with anything. As a child he used to be quite low-functioning but he improved thanks to himself and his brothers. His mother seemed to have AS as well and she thought that he was perfectly normal because she had been the same and his father was almost always away at work so my father didn't have anyone to help him except his older brothers (he was the one born before the last, and the last one has mental retardation). He was told by psychiatrists that he might have had Asperger's or schizoid personality disorder but was never officially diagnosed with anything. He believes he is perfectly normal and that he doesn't have those disorders.
An early diagnosis would have been useless for him as well because he is not one capable of learning from therapy.
29 Dec 2013, 4:18 am
