The undiagnosed - do you hope you have AS?

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I have a question for those who aren't diagnosed yet but suspect they can have AS/HFA/PDD-NOS: do you actually hope that's it and would like to hear from the doctor that you indeed are on the spectrum or is it rather like that you don't want your difference to be AS and hope that it will turn out that it's something else?

I am not sure what I hope for, but my expectation is that I have AS and that this will be confirmed.

I would be happy if she were born in another era.

I've been told I have a social anxiety and depression, I'm depressed because it is so darn difficult to live life as an outcast.

All I hope for is to get help and to know what is actually wrong with me. So I can learn to accept me as me and help others to accept me, because at the moment I make nil sense to anyone but myself.

I'm in the process of being tested etc but I kinda don't hold much hope of ever finding out what is wrong with me.

I asked my family doc. about my suspicions , and he said he didn't think so. He commented that it's the quality of communication that we have is different than his Asperger patients, but added: "we can go thru the Asperger criteria on the next visit, if you want to."

My wife though, thinks there is definitely something going on here with me. She's in the medical profession herself and is careful not to self diagnose anything . She sees the Asperger criteria easily being met, but on the other side of the coin thinks that it's cultural ( the way I was raised) and I can change that/this. She vacillates on this because she says I'm smart and have a gift , and its hard for her to imagine the word "syndrome" and functionality. She read the "criteria" and said, "that's it?" I thought Asperger people couldn't drive?

Interestingly, our first daughter told my wife about 9 years ago, that she thinks that I have some form of autism.

Do I hope it is? I guess the big challenge would be to explain what parallels this . Is it entirely cultural ,as my wife hopes?

I dont care about a diagnosis.
1: ALL symptoms can also a NT experience, so it is a question of where the line is.
2: a name like AS or anything else wouldnt change anything.
3: why hope? -because it sounds to me that you expect somebody to relax and sit back when somebody else has diagnosed them.
4: psychology is pretty mixed, I can understand problems of people with completely different mind set as myself, so for me is getting an overview over my own "issues" the only thing that matters.

Not hope, really...but if I don't have AS, I have something that's close enough to it to where the coping strategies are exactly the same. So it wouldn't really make a huge difference.

But I know if I paid good money for an evaluation and they came up with the usual old "depression" or "bipolar", I'd be pretty upset.

Hope is not quite the right word.

I need clarity. This is not just about 'fixing' myself, but there is something deeper in me that is obsessed with finding answers. I actually think this thing with answers is an autistic trait. Getting an official diagnosis has a few practical implications, but there is also this unsettled question that my obsession with answers will not allow me to ignore.

So do I hope that I am autistic? I suppose in some way I do because I hope that I have finally answered one of those questions that has to this point not yielded.

Well for me it is not a matter of hope. I have sought help my whole life, been diagnosed with all kinds of stuff.

As a child I was told I was ADD and dyslexic. As a teen I was diagnosed again and I was no longer ADD or dyslexic, I was bipolar. I never researched this as a teen just took my meds like a good sheep. At around 17 I stopped taking meds and began to self medicate.

As a adult, I again sought an explanation, also was self medicating too much. So I stopped self medicating. Again I got different answers. Now I was no longer bipolar, now I have antisocial personality disorder and major depression.

Now after reading about all these things, none of them made sense. Nothing fit who I was or what I experienced. So again I went for a diagnoses, and guess what, I am none of the previous things. I have Dysthymic Disorder…

So maybe you can see my frustration….

I started dating a wonderful intelligent woman who told me she was aspie, and gave me a book to read about aspergers. She was a contributing author in the book. She said she wanted me to read it because I have an autistic son…

Well to make a long story short, she told me I was more aspie than she. We laughed and we took the aspie tests together and I scored much higher than her on all of them. So I immersed myself in information on aspergers and it has been eye opening. I can look at my life, and myself and say it all makes sense now. This is the only thing that makes any sense.

So I don’t care what you call it I just want a proper diagnosis that I can look at and say yes that’s it! I am not going to believe someone just because they have a phd in front of their name, and just because I only have a 6th grade education doesn’t mean I cant read and understand the DSM. Although the doctors seem to think it does…

I honestly don't know.

I haven't persued an official diagnosis because I don't think it would particularly change my life in any way. I know that most of my family are quite possibly on the spectrum. Only my cousin is officially diagnosed. Autistic behaviours are normal to me.

I don't want a label either. So I'm not sure I want to know one way or the other.

Can diagnosed people post what they hoped for before they were diagnosed?

If so, I was mostly hoping for a positive DX simply to get my employer to stop hurting me with Aspie-unfriendly demands. I already knew I had most of the traits. There was also the hope of getting the world to realise that I'd been under more of a strain than they'd thought. But I never really hoped I'd got AS, only that I might find out and be able to prove it if I had. And I already knew that I'd never know for certain whether I had it or not, with or without the DX. Really I just needed confirmation that my suspicions were not groundless.

I am unofficially diagnosed, so it's not quite the same, but if I were to seek official diagnosis just to be told that I did not have Asperger's or some other form of autism, I would simply lose any faith I may have in (the individuals involved in?) the diagnostic process. Hope is not an issue one way or the other--there's not really any question about it. And at any rate, the label (whether it be Asperger's, PDD-NOS, HFA, or "we don't know") changes nothing.

Yes, because I like things to be explainable by logical reasons or logical categories.

But no, I don't hope for a doctor to say unto me, "Thou art aspie." I love life and have no need for any help, so I don't care to waste my time with a doctor. I am also extremely skeptical of the profession because the criteria are so subjective, so I'm confident that my self-diagnosis would be just as good or in some cases better than a professional's, especially one who doesn't deal with Asperger's all that much.