It took me my whole life till i was diagnosed with aspergers

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Ever since i was FOUR MONTHS OLD my mom was trying to diagnose me but the people in charge of diagnosing autism in my state kept on losing my papers and almost half my life's worth of important papers are gone (almost 7 years worth) I finally was diagnosed only a week ago BUT its not a specific diagnosis yet. im not autistic enough to b anything other than Asperger's, why is it so hard for me to get diagnosed?????? was it that hard for anyone else?

Maybe this will provide some perspective? A lot of us here have not been and cannot be diagnosed. Why? We grew up in a time that has computers (now, anyway) but before a diagnosis was recognized. Most of us fell through the cracks. A lot of us managed, we had help, support, coping techniques. I am 43. With no formal diagnosis I still welcome my amateur diagnosis because I am now "home." I have a context in which to place all the heretofore-errant-data.

I, for one, am so, so glad that even if it's difficult to get a diagnosis, at least you have the context in which you are "not crazy" for being different. Power to you. Power to everyone who knows that they are different and yet are harmless.

47 yrs old and completly sliped thru. My truck is 17 yrs old

It must be a relief that you finally have a Dx after all those years.

i'm 18 and undiagnosed. my mom doesn't care to help much, it seems... just yells when i get confused.

it is hard to get diagnosed it seems. i have been diagnosed with a lot of different things. i just went to my doctor today and diagnosed me with add, bipolar, ocd, anxiety and depression. i have also been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder before. and i have talked to people about asperger's which has always felt the most acurate, especially when talking to people who have it, or hearing people talk about it. in fact JUST WATCHING someone with asperger's makes me chuckle to myself, because i see them doing alot of the things i feel myself doing and feel awkward about.

after studying this for a few years, and searching for answers on my own, and with the help of close friends and doctors, i have come to the conclusion, quite outside any other input, that there is not only a spectrum to autism, but that alot of other disorders overlap. in fact i believe that many if not all of the conditions listed in the DSM are over lapping. actually, i believe that the human psyche is one massive field that has infinite networks, like rhizomes, and that we ALL fit into these categories in varying degrees.

the fact is, and this is my own opinion, (i am not a doctor, but i plan on becoming one to devote my life to the study of the mind) that when scientists started to formalized their field, often times they were doing so without the input from other scientists in other fields, or even from colleagues in their own field. as formal societies and universities started to become common, the empirical arts began to be formal classified and codified and standardized somewhat, and thus began the preoccupation with myopic classification. fast forward a century or two and psychology is a new science, the mind is begining to be explored and categorized as if each brain cell was responsible for a specific task in the body or mind. this is of course a very Classical and archaic understanding of the mind (not to mention of everything else). it wasnt until the past 10-20 years that neurologists where starting to realize that the brain exemplifies what is know as Plasticity...in other words, it is maleable, it changes, it can even rewire itself. and this new information is helping to reshape not just our understanding of the brain, but the way we understand everything in the universe.

essentially, in the scope of our understanding of the human brain, we have barely progressed beyond that ancient medicine still used in some parts of the world im told) that requires holes drilled in the head to release evil spirits, or blood letting to ease the bad humors.

we have a long way to go.

i think forums and communities like this one are likely the best thing you can do for yourself (in addition to seeing your doctor, et al). that feeling of being misunderstood that i think we are all familiar with is what we need to combat. sometimes when you are so often misunderstood, it seems like it is so easy to misunderstand why we can be misunderstood. it breeds a sense of understanding of others which may be misplaced. perhaps we all misunderstand each other?

anyway hope that helps. maybe that response was a little too autistic.

My mom asked doctors if I was autistic when I was very young and they told her I wasn't because "I spoke...........I spoke well. An autistic child is a mute child in a corner banging their head against the wall and rocking" A neurologist actually said that to my mom! I was diagnosed when I was 13 like you!

Psychologists have acknowledged the fact that the majority of disorders can be qualified on a spectrum, and, in spite of opposition from other doctors and insurance companies, are completely rehauling large sections of the DSM because of it. Most disorders, from autism to OCD, are getting adjusted in the manual to accommodate the change in the way psychology is being viewed.

I see this as a very good sign of times to come.

I was diagnosed when I was 22.

i was 37 or 38 when i got diagnosed, im almost 40 now. i grew up in a time, the 70's, of total ignorance of aspergers. my mum had known i was "different" since i was a child and particularly noticeable around age 11. But aspergers wasnt even heard of in Australia at this time.

while it is a relief to know why i am how i am, its also been hard because finding out that the way youve seen the world for over 30 years isnt how everybody else has seen it. that messed with my head quite badly for about a year after i was diagnosed, and im still getting used to it even today.

Last edited by aspyoz on 06 Apr 2011, 11:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I was constantly meeting with my high school counselor all through high school because of stress, depression, etc. It took this same counselor the entire 4 years to finally come up with the idea that I may have Asperger's and got me tested during my final semester of high school. Of course this was back in 2002 when AS was practically unheard of.

Still, I can never understand how school teachers, well in the presence of my autistic symptoms and meltdown, failed to pick up on anything or at least put the pieces together. My parents never even believed I had any problems and just thought I was being a fussy brat. I dont know whose ignorance angers me more.

You've got plenty of life left to live. If I was diagnosed at 13 that could have changed a lot.

It was hard for me to get diagnosed too because of my hearing loss I had when I was a baby. It took my psychiatrist two months to decide what label to give me. I guess PDD-NOS wasn't a good enough diagnoses for me so he used AS for "closest match" for a diagnoses.

I was 12 when diagnosed and mom had always known I was different but I think she figured I would get over it so that would explain why she get mad at me for not acting my age and why she got mad at me for taking "stop that teasing" literal when I was 11 so she thought I was being a brat but she was smart enough to figure out my mind worked different and things had to be explained to me and she had to be careful what she told me and taught me because I could end up getting the wrong information and learn my lesson wrong. But when I was diagnosed with ADD, mom knew that wasn't correct because it still didn't explain all my problems so she knew I had something else.