Are you self diagnosed or diagnosed by a mental health profe

Post Reply New Topic

I'm self-diagnosed, but I ain't a hypochondriac; I researched the condition properly and my officially-AS friend says that he thinks I have AS. I can tell from my thought patterns that I think like the people on WP, as opposed to the NTs in my class.

I am in the process of getting officially diagnosed, but there's a two year waiting list. The mental health worker said that I don't seem AS-ish (sounds like a case of a person with little experience expecting the Rain Man), but then I took one of those "tick the statements that apply" tests, and she said that judging by my answers I am AS. (Plus I completed the half-hour test in under five minutes, which apparently is most abnormal.)

I personally believe I have AS, but I don't tell that to anyone, not even my husband.

I first heard about AS 6 years ago, when my son was diagnosed. I've spent a large portion of those years reading and researching AS, from all angles. I've read a lot of books by people with AS, about their experiences, and so much of it resonates with me. AS explains so much of my own experience.


I don't feel the need to tell anyone what I think, though. It will always be possible for people to find other reasons why I am the way I am. I was a loner at school, and rarely played with anyone, but my mother saw nothing strange about that, because she's a loner as well. I got good grades, so that wasn't an issue. In high school I got terrible grades and had no idea how to organize my time or work, but no one noticed or cared. I've had a hard time in every job situation, despite being creative and intelligent, because I tend to get confused about what I'm supposed to be doing. I need clear, unambiguous directions for every task, or I become nervous and unsure about whether I'm doing the right thing. AS explains that. If I don't have AS, then what is it that makes me that way? Who knows?

I haven't sought a professional dx, because we have other things going on in our family now, and satisfying my personal curiousity about whether or not I'd official qualify for an AS dx is way, way at the bottom of my priorities list. There are bigger fish to fry.

No one else is affected by me thinking I have AS. But I relate to AS people a whole lot, and it's a useful, meaningful way for me to understand myself a bit better. It fits.

That's my story, and I'm sticking with it.

professional dxed me, I never even heard of it before, my mum just told me one night when I was 11.

I was diagnosed by a psychiatrist, at the age of 33.
Until that time, I suspect that no psychiatrist in my
home city had a background in Autism Spectrum Disorders
as we know them today.

Originally assessed at two years by paed. doctors in hope hospital [a specialist hospital in neurology],they avoided autism because their scans had shown up no damage [they believed autism=brain damage],was given a long list of severe behavioral terms instead,as well as blame on mum and dad from them and the gp.
late teens-diagnosed by a mental health pysch who had no experience in developmental/learning stuff -his experience is in actual mental health/illness [even stating this himself] the gp had said he was the most experienced he knew of with autism in manchester,was in and out quick-walked out with a diagnosis of the wrong ASD,ADHD [am dont have ADHD,the parts that look like are clashes from outside of body with autism],he diagnosed 'multiple learning disabilities' as a label to stop using MR.
Adult-diagnosed as severely autistic by autism specialists in traffords learning disability services.

I really hope you're being sarcastic.

I made a film about her years ago.

If I were still Self DX'ed I would find this suggestion really offensive.

Why offense at something that seems to be more common than once thought to be the case. Self-diagnosis of any condition can be potentially dangerous. It's almost as bad a self-dentistry.

this is true.

Self diagnosed.

Autism isn't the super exclusive "invite-only" party a slight minority of you make it out to be.

I was! I was being sarcastic.

Sabbra maybe you're just dillusional since you are not a professional and you have something else otherwise it seems that you would fit in here to this forum but it seems that you don't for some reason.

I am personally very leery about self-diagnosis for the reasons previously mentioned - I am human, I make mistakes every once in a while, and I also have a tendency to obsess over things to the point where I have difficulty escaping from them (This is why I plan never to gamble or use drugs/alcohol/tobacco).

When I read the book about Asperger's syndrome that led me to Wrong Planet, I felt as though I had finally found people I could relate to after a life of knowing that I was in many ways different. However, reading further, I realized that there is always a possibility that I could just be imagining things, and since I don't trust my parents enough to talk to them about this, I am really stuck at a dead-end and trying to stop obsessing over autism and take my life back to the way it was before.

My status on here is "Not sure if I have it or not", and if you ask me about it I will say that I am "NT until proven otherwise".

~SOS

Actually I am self diagnosed but I hope to get a diagnose from an pshycartrist this year.

OTOH sometimes it's essential. If I hadn't done my own research and argued a cardiologist into doing a test he didn't want to do (and was sure would be negative), I'd probably be homeless and maybe dead. The professionals will say "trust us, we know what we're doing." Well, that's not always true.

Dr. Bryna Siegal, director of the San Francisco Medical School autism clinc considers marriage a rule-out for Asperger's (link). How many people on this board does that un-diagnose? (She's also proud of frequently "un-diagnosing" people.) So it's not even as if the professionals are consistent among themselves about this stuff. And she's the director, which means she sets policy for the entire autism department at that medical school.

Also, the professionals and 'experts' are (but one case I've ever heard of) looking from the outside in. Maybe they own the label, but their understanding has limits because it's not first-person. Autism existed before they gave it a name.

On an autism list I was on years ago, before AS was a dx, there were people dx'ed 'HFA', 'LFA' and ux'dx and people with strings of misdiagnoses. Since there were people who related and seemed to fit but didn't meet the autism dx criteria, a term was invented. That term was combined with "autistics," and the resulting term was the one that was basically always used to refer to people there. There didn't seem too much concern about precisely where someone was on the spectrum, or their dx status. It was basically how much people related to other's experiences, and they pretty much got to be their own judge of that.

Then Asperger's became an official dx, and concern about fakers cropped up. I remember a guy arguing that all adult dx's were suspect and to be rejected, because the evaluator couldn't have made direct observations of childhood behavior. (Ironically, that person was dx'ed in adulthood. Go figure.)

Yeah there may be some misguided people who aren't on the spectrum and 'try' to be for emotional (or whatever) reasons, but OTOH over-concern about fakers strikes me as emotional as well -- being, saying "my pain, and my struggle, are real, and I don't want that soiled (by people who haven't suffered as much as I have)." That's a legitimate point (I'm not saying it means "poor me"), but it's an personal, emotional issue, and probably hits a raw nerve for a lot of people, and therefore is likely susceptible to over-concern for reasons that might not be as rational as people think. I wouldn't want to see a free-for-all, but this issue often strikes me as just a turf war.