Living in the shadow of my diagnoses

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I have been assessed multiple times in my life and people from everywhere failed. As a child, I was diagnosed with Tourettes and ADHD. But that didn't seem like enough, because I had very little interaction with people and barely smiled or talked at all in my life.

However, there was one girl in my special ed group. She bore a similar demeanor on our classmates and she was diagnosed with high-functioning autism. This got all my assessors thinking, "Does BeggingTurtle have that too?" So after going to more state psychologists, I was still "undetermined" until I was diagnosed with Aspergers and ADHD (again). Recently, I was diagnosed with dyscalculia, OCD, and a potential dyslexia. I'm hyperlexic, but I don't know if I have dyslexia.

Every month, it feels like a label is slapped on me over and over. I'm not sure if I can take it anymore. Soon, it's going to be for stupid reasons like "He fell down the stairs; he must be PTSD." Argh! I don't ever want to see a psychiatrist again.

Have you ever lived like this?

Not to the degree you've experienced, by any means. With me it's mostly been psychiatrists always being confused as to what to do with me and each having their own kooky theory as to what treatment would fix me, though I've always failed to respond especially well to anything they've tried besides anti-anxiety and sleep meds. Their diagnoses of depression and anxiety were certainly correct, but I didn't get diagnosed as AS (which I'm convinced is also correct) until age 30. But then I'm an old geezer ( ) and high-functioning autism wasn't on most people's radar until I'd already hit young adulthood.

I wasn't in contact with psychiatry until I was 18 and hit a serious depressive episode, though. I'd hit another when I was 14 and possibly had others earlier, but my family was pretty anti-psychiatry - with some good reasons, based on their and their parents' experiences.

Awareness of autism, ADHD, lysdexia and various other such phenomena is unequivocally a good thing, but perhaps it does cause people to overreach at times and be overeager to slap diagnosis-of-the-week onto anyone failing to conform.

Up until about a year ago. I didn't believe any thing that the psychiatrists or my mother would say. I got diagnosed with every thing under the sun like ADD, ADHD, dyslexia and schizophrenia. You name it. I got so feed up with it that when I grew up. I just walked away and never looked back for more then 20 years.

Yes, this was what I went through as a child for a decade, then theres the even worse part were they turn you into a lab monkey and try to treat you for all those disorders and most often against my will. AS was one of the last labels I got, had it come first like it should have it could have saved alot of likely incorrect diagnoses and harmful treatments. AS as a whole really covered for most of the issues they were trying to diagnose and treat. Becouse of the meny diagnoses I eventually begain to have a hand time beleaving that they were real.