Did you have to force diagnosis?

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I don't know if I have aspergers or not, I've sort of self diagnosed myself. I go to a therapist now and I see my regular doctor often enough but I've never been diagnosed with anything on the autism spectrum. All I know is today I took a call from a customer and our phones are pieces of s**t so after the third or fourth time they said they couldn't hear me I through my mouse at the monitor and it being an LCD monitor it's now ruined, has lines of colors and everywhere. So basically I was sent home after talking to my managers manager and they're going to review it with human resources to see what they recommend which as far as I know could include firing me. Of course it's not the first time I've had an anger moment at work. Last summer I got written up about my outbursts, this guy laughed obnoxiously when I told him he had the wrong department for his situation and I hung up on him and swore loudly and just stepped away from my desk but someone heard it to report it. I'm 31 years old, never had a girlfriend, am probably going to get fired from. Job that is already way below my education level But I can't get anYthing Better. I'm typing this on an iPad and I keep hitting the wrong buttons to explain my typos. I just feel like I'm goIng to get fired and not be able to get another job because of my problems that are beyond my control but the doctors I have around me are too f*****g stupid to see wHATs really wrong with me and it's destroying my whole life because of it. Any suggestions on what I can do to get the diagnosis I need to keep mY life from basically being over?

Honestly the best therapy I ever found was here on the site.
Your experience is not unique.
The job is maybe not optimal for someone with frustration issues - which I have been fired for too.
But what job is? I don't have that answer unfortunately.

I've been looking into my skills/abilities and trying to come up with "out of mainstream" job ideas / online editor?? / board game creator?? / Unfortunately, all the things I come up with are things I know I could excel at, but that I don't have the formal paperwork/training for - nor the means to acquire such. Is your training formal? Are there branches of the profession that don't require you to work UNDER someone - can you make self employment out of it? Yeah - I know - the problem is probably the same one I encounter / customer service / finding customers, or people to believe in the project is the main trouble... or following up with potential (existing?) clients, self marketing, etc. Not sure how to overcome that particular set of issues myself - would need a business partner / but who? where? how?

As for a formal diagnosis, I still don't have one. I was lucky (?) enough that I got disability help for a physical defect / not that that was easy in this world of doctors who aren't paid to learn (or investigate) your medical history...

Ask your shrink about job and social skills trainings? I dunno. But I empathize with you.

The first thing to do is to find a qualified specialist to perform the assessment; you can get a referral from your GP, or, if he doesn't know anyone, you can find people through the Psychology Today website, just put in the city where you live and see what comes up. If you live near a college campus, you can call their psychology department and see if they have anyone who can do it for you; I'm a college student and doing it that way, but my campus will accept non-students, so that might be an option for you too. If it is, it's going to be way cheaper than the "professional" option: outside practitioners can cost upward of $2,000, but some do take insurance. I got mine done on campus for $500 because they do a sliding scale fee based on your income. If you visit a college campus, they may do it differently.

Once you've found someone qualified to do the assessment (that is, someone with a lot of experience working with adults on the spectrum, not just children), you may be in for a wait. I had to wait eight weeks for my intake appointment, but I've read of people waiting six months to a year. During the waiting period, you can put together a comprehensive list of your past and present traits to give to the doctor. It took me about three weeks to create a ten-page document detailing my social and emotional behaviour, restricted and repetitive patterns of behaviour (including rigidity and special interests), fine and gross motor skills, sensory sensitivities, and miscellaneous traits that might be useful to the doctor such as past diagnoses, skills and deficits that may or may not be related to AS, suspicion of other co-morbid problems such as OCD or ADHD, any difficulties or accommodations you had in school, etc. I covered the age range between three and 21 (my current age); if you have no specific memories that far back, either have a parent help you, or you can just go back as far as you remember. Along with my self-made document, I provided the results of the online RAADS-R test I took (one of the most comprehensive and reliable online tests for pinpointing autism currently available, easily found on google), as well as a list of AS traits that relate specifically to females, on the off-chance that my diagnostician had not previously worked with a woman on the spectrum (we can demonstrate symptoms differently than males).

The day of your intake assessment will probably be fairly generic; the doctor will ask you about things like thoughts of self-harm and harm to others, any substance-dependence issues, your relationship demographic, family history, any history of trauma or "signifcant life events", and at some point, why you think you have autism. Depending on the length of the document you prepared, you don't have to go over every detail, just cover the most important parts and tell him he can find the rest of what he needs to know in the paperwork you gave him (make sure to mention this, so he doesn't forget about it.) After that, depending on your age and current contact with your parents, you may be given some paperwork for them to fill out about your early history (I was given the BASC-2, but it's only used on clients up to the age of 21) then you'll probably set up your next appointment, at which point the testing will begin. I was given the WAIS-IV (IQ test), a brief dysgraphia test, the WIAT-III (a reading/writing/math abilities test, though you may not get this because I was simultaneously being tested for dyscalculia) and probably the most important test, the ADOS 2, module 4, which is the "gold standard" of autism assessment tools, in which you basically have a conversation and play around with a few fun activities. I took all of these in two-hour increments (except the ADOS, which only took an hour) over the course of four weeks. Upon completion of the last test, I was told it would take roughly a month to go through and score all my results, and that was a week and four days ago.

Anyway, I hope everything works out for you. Finding someone to do the testing is probably the hardest part, second hardest is all the waiting around. Good luck, and keep us updated on your progress

Completely irrelevant to the thread but I had to say, OddFiction, I love your Styracosaurus avatar, dinosaurs are a special interest of mine

No I didn't have to force it, and in fact was taken by surprise when I was also diagnosed with ADHD, because years ago I thought I had ADHD, then I thought Aspergers and thought 'naaaa, I don't have ADHD', then I was diagnosed with both xD

I went to my GP, she referred me with no quabbles to local Autism specialists. They gave me an appointment for an assessment which had just gone on Friday, and I was diagnosed there. It was a very easy process.

In fact it was a lot easier than getting diagnosed with BPD.
I moaned for years from the age of 17-19, where I was finally listened to by this new doctor about my mental health struggles, got an assessment with CMHT to see if I really was 'unwell', then I had an appointment with psych 2 months later for diagnosis of BPD.
From there I waited a life time for any kind of therapy.

I'm glad it's all over now, diagnosis wise. The main things I wanted diagnosed, have been.