Psychiatry is a joke

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My daughter, age 30, also has a combination of autism and post-concussive syndrome. It makes functioning independently extremely challenging, maybe impossible. What is saving her is a good relationship with her boyfriend and her various extended family members, a psychotherapist, and a social worker. She also goes to an adult autism support group, a brain injury support group, and a church. I rather doubt she will ever hold a job, certainly not a full-time job. She's smart and had several years of college, but the TBI makes it very hard to cope with stressors. She is well loved, however, and she knows it.

So I'm going to suggest you might do best if you can build some so-called "social support" - relationships that are helpful and supportive, and do not make you feel bad about yourself. Autistic people may not really want to have many social connections, but autistic-plus-TBI people may have no other choice.

Not everyone is the same, so perhaps this advice doesn't fit for you, but I was moved to let you know you are not alone, and the situation is not hopeless.

More often than not when I do understand the emotions and motivations of other people these are negative or disappointing ones.

Back on topic a bit.

One should strive to minimize the number of drugs one takes. Your purpose in life should not be to enrich psychiatrists and drug companies. Another way of putting it see a psychologist for autism, not a psychiatrist.

I recently saw an article on Facebook about symptoms of adult ADHD. Well, I clicked on it and it listed SEVENTY symptoms. 70. There were 10 each under 7 categories. When you have that many traits you can find it in anybody if you look hard enough. Also, only about 10 of them seemed to be specifically tied to AD/HD. The rest of them literally overlapped with 5-6 other disorders. Depression, Bipolar, anxiety, OCD, Aspergers even Narcissism. That’s why I think a lot of people with other disorders get misdiagnosed with ADHD. Also I think it explains that once you get one diagnosis, you are also likely to get more because there is so much gray area. We all know people that this has happened to.

I can tell you why. Us aspie have an extremely cold aura for all people who try to read us emotionally and we don't even know it. Many of us are totally rational and don't even develop emotions at all. We would be the best actors in vampire films because some of us have the nice aura of a grave stone. That is what makes other people rejecting us. We are just cold and not as emotionally as all other people. As long as you are in a good mood or show a smile it's not a really big problem. Otherwise you are treated as beeing cold and repellent. Men have much less problems with us because also most NT men are really worse in reading other people emotionally or just give a f**k on it.
But how is it if you aren't like this? I can tell you. I visited Brussels a week ago and used the metro. There where no seats left and I had to stand. A beautiful young girl - may be 19 years old - came in and kept standing opposite to me. After a while I tryed a smile in her direction and tryed to develop an emotion of feeling strongly attracted with my body to her at the same time. The normal reaction of a such a girl to me would be looking away and showing a dislike or disgust. But she started to like me as soon as I did and smiled at me in a way that showed that she felt really attracted to me! After she left I had to move a little bit for reading the station list on the side of the train. There was an other young woman about 20 years near who showed no emotions at all towards me as it is quite normal in a metro. I tryed again to develop a strong emotion of being attracted just looking on her. I recognised her becomming also positive to me and to like me. I think I'm not nasty but I'm not used that beautyful young girls and woman start just to like me and smile at me in a way that shows that they feel attracted to me! It's a quite different kind of smiling to that of woman who just want to be neat. At the weekend I was in a bar and started to flirt with the waitresses. Two of them got a crush on me. It's a different world now. I'm not only able to read emotions but also to develop emotions in a way that woman feel attracted to me. That's why we should try to get rid of the problems instead of hiding them. You can't really hide to feel no emotions.

Moving back to psychiatry again, I recall a fellow student on my course who had two bad breakdowns, a lot of sick time and finished a year after I did. A year or so later he shared a dislike of psychiatrists because they had a prescribing pad.

I have little doubt we were both on the spectrum, fellow student I think with more noticeable traits and who had more social isolation, which I think possible was a source of some distress.

But indeed a bit of a joke that in earlier references it was thought one could not have both Autism and ADHD. There is overlap. On the other and, the prescribing pad can write out something for ADHD's symptoms.

Back in 1984 I don't think many professionals would associate autism with people who were accademicly able and chomping successfully through a demanding course such as Applied Physics and Electronics. Indeed my fellow student was turning in better coursework grades than I was, but in 1984 I don't think Autism as a spectrum was a commonly understood ides either.

Psychology I agree to be a more appropriate discipline. That last bit of the name, from Greek "Logos" meaning "Understanding" is a big clue.

What I hate about psychiatrists is that I always get the feeling that they look down on their patients as if they are subhuman, even when it seems like they are being nice to you.

In the old days people with ANY kind of mental problem including Autism were locked away in asylums and stripped of their rights. The doctors and other staff who worked in these places took full advantage of that and mistreated these people worse than a prison would treat it's criminals.

Psychiatry seems to have, in practical terms, taken the "therapy" aspects out of their profession, and, instead, relied solely on the dispensation of drugs.

Yup I agree. I don't feel like my doctor ever really listens to me all she ever does is push more and more pills on me

^^^I find that to be a typical experience with many people.

All this shrink-bashing is unnecessary and misplaced. My fear is that people won't get help they need because psychiatrists (and medication) have been given such bad press.

People with autism often are poor advocates for themselves, and also are poor at expressing their feelings and history. This is not the ideal type to work productively with any doctors, but perhaps especially psychiatrists. Yet we still need them, for a variety of reasons.

I have had some crappy psychiatrists but most of them have been well intended, well educated, and respectful of me. And my life has been improved in a major way by the use of antidepressants. YMMV.

I guess you're right. I have Bipolar Disorder in addition to Aspergers and I have had a lot of terrible doctors but if it wasn't for the medication they gave me I know I would be either homeless or dead by now.

But it took 4 trips to the crisis center for them to even realize what was going on with me and I certainly didn't understand what was wrong with me. They never even told me I had Bipolar Disorder I found it out later when I was staying at a group home.

My parents sent me to zillions of shrinks. They varied widely in compentence. But none ever gave me meds. So my vast and varied experience is out of date, or not typical, or something.

But I am sure all of us have a mix of good and bad experiences with shrinks.

The first shrink my parents sent me to was when I was nine and ten. He was the only one who was an actual psychiatrist (as opposed to psychologist or a psychiatric social worker), and he was utterly worthless.

At that time I loved t draw pictures and would draw my crudely drawn cartoon strips of adventure stories about imaginary characters. And I would call each installment of the stores "episodes".

Decades later mom and dad told me that when they met with the shrink and his minions about me and told them about my hobby the shrinks would get angry and would intimidate my parents by saying "YOU TWO are LYING! NO CHILD would EVER use a word like 'episode'!".

What gets me about that is that that shrink and his assistants could have simply (1) taken their heads out of their asses, and (2) sat down in front of the TV set, and just watched the kind of cartoon shows, and live action prime time shows, that a kid my age would have watched at that time. They would have seen how every Saturday morning cartoon show I would have watched, and how every live action prime time TV show my parents watched ended with the announcer telling you to "tune in next week for the next EPISODE of Bonanza, Batman, Get Smart, The Man from Uncle, the Green Hornet, Beanie and Cecil, Mighty Mouse, Popeye Cartoons, etc etc etc.". And they would have seen exactly how my nine year old self had gotten the word "episode" into my vocabulary. Idiots!

So YES. Sometimes psychiatry DOES seem like a joke!

One of my doctors tried to tell me that I have no empathy and she was very rude about it. I told her straight up that I DO have empathy! (and she also tried to tell me that uncontrollable anger isn't a symptom of Bipolar Disorder).

I don't understand where people got the idea that people with Aspergers have no empathy. I mean if we really had no empathy or compassion we wouldn't be any different from psychopaths right? As a person diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome I know that I am able to relate to other people's emotions even if I don't express my own emotions very well.

She should have be clearer about it. There is a difference between having empathy and feeling empathy. But not feeling it is often caused by a lack of emotions. You can't empathically feel emotions that you just don't even have at your own.

Because in a very few countries, like the USA, they are able to receive a payment from any one drug company for each prescription of their product. The monetarisation of prescribing is a silent scandal in the land of the free...

Well the way she worded it was like this: "It's called emapthy!" like she was implying that I am some sort of monster who is incapable of understanding a basic human experience.

She could have been more polite about it, but she wasn't, and that's why I despise her as my doctor. That and the fact that she doesn't seem to understand Bipolar Disorder.