Would a early diagnoses benifit you or not

Post Reply New Topic

hi, i was a late diagnoses, (actually average for a girl) but i am glad i wasnt diagnosed at two, because i think my parents wouldve sheilded me and my autism would be worse, but i also think it wouldve been nice to have because i wouldve gotten more support.

so, if you are an early diagnoses, do you feel that its good you had the diagnoses at a good age,? how did it benifit you and how did it cause more issues

or if you were a late diagnoses, how are you happy that its late, and how do you wish it were earlier?

I wish I got my around 20 years old. It would have make a big impact on my career choice. As I've said in other posts. It took having a psychiatrist walking up to me and telling me what I had otherwise I would have never got a diagnosis.

Last edited by LupaLuna on 07 Apr 2014, 6:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

i feel my age is perfect for a diagnoses, but it was also a huge issue when i was 7, i got diagnosed at 14

It's possible that I was "diagnosed" with autism around age 3-4 or so. My mother discounted the diagnosis; the prognosis for people with autism, from the viewpoint of clinicians, was extremely poor during the 1960s. She refused to institutionalize me. Autism was quite a different disorder then.

Perhaps, it's good, in a convoluted sort of way, that I was "diagnosed" at that age. This provided the impetus for my mother to assist me in transcending that "diagnosis."

At this point, I believe I'm on the Spectrum--but I don't want to spend the money for a formal diagnosis. I cannot foresee the impact a formal diagnosis would have on me.

The reason I say 20 and not earlier is because it was faith( A false faith but still faith none the less.) That someday I would outgrow this and get on with life. If I had known earlier. I might have committed suicide.

I would have made my life so much easier if I had been diagnosed with AS much younger. This is mostly because I misdiagnosed with oppositional defiance disorder when I was 6 because I was having several meltdowns a day. I was treated as being bad and having temper tantrums for which I was punished which of course did not help me calm down or stop having them. It took 11 years until I was finally diagnosed with AS at 17. Now things have gotten sooooo much better, but not nearly as good as it could of been if I was diagnosed with AS when I was 6 so my meltdowns and the things that lead to them could have been addressed. I actually feel that I would have had a much more normal childhood if this was the case, but there really is no going back.

I probably would have had a better life if I had gotten diagnosed with ADHD instead of autism. I would still get support, but I wouldn't have been babied as much. I also think that ADHD describes me way better than autism does.

I was diagnosed at 20.
I really wish it had been way, way, way earlier.

That way maybe I wouldn't have spent my entire childhood being deliberately goaded/tortured into meltdowns characterized by completely uncontrollable rage and subsequent striking out at the source of the torture (or flailing at whoever else was closest if they weren't reachable) by my older sister, and she wouldn't have had been able to claim to all her classmates that I beat the crap out of her on a regular basis for no reason.

Would you believe the crazy b***h has a Master's in psychology, still doesn't believe my diagnosis, and hasn't talked to me in over 14 years because she truly believes I'm a bad person prone to what are still in her eyes unprovoked, deliberate fits of rage and violence towards people which she believes I have complete control over?
She refuses to accept the truth, which is that she tortured me for my entire childhood, deliberately goading me into clearly (to everyone including her because it was explained to her multiple times in different contexts by different people, she just cose not to believe it) uncontrollable rages which always left me in tears & shaking, even when we were teens and I would quite literally beg her to stop, for no particular reason other than she could and she thought that my mother should somehow step in and stop me, even though it was clear to everyone involved, except apparently my sister due to her willful ignorance, that once I was pushed edge neither I nor anyone else had the slightest chance of stopping it.
My mom tried that once, but just she ended up getting hit instead of my sister because she got in my way.
After that she told my sister that if my sister deliberately goaded me into a rage that she'd be in her room with her door locked and that my sister was on her own.
That happened when we were very young, and my mom kept her word every time after that.
For some reason, that never sunk in for my sister, and so she continued to pointlessly torture me & get the crap beat out of her for her trouble and to this day she still believes that I'm the bad, violent, sociopathic brother who abused her.

Because there was no diagnosis, there was no way to convince my sister that I wasn't just deliberately choosing to become violent and just pretending to be in an uncontrollable rage when she deliberately did things that she knew would trigger that state but herself found innocuous.
Essentially, in her eyes I was a lying bastard who used actions of hers which were clearly (to her/normal people) innocuous as an excuse to hurt her, I was in control the whole time every time, and I should have been arrested and thrown in jail for being the violent, unpredictable, angry, physically abusive sociopath she cast me as.

Interestingly, lacking any deliberate goading I'm almost completely non-violent, and I'm willing to forgive her for torturing me and be family again, even though she hardly deserves it.
She, on the other hand, refuses to accept the fact that I'm autistic, that I was her victim, not her abuser, and that I'm actually a decent, caring human being who would, barring very extreme circumstances which are very unlikely to occur, never deliberately hurt someone, and in general hasn't actually done so.

Being diagnosed was the single greatest vindication of my entire life, but yeah, I really wish it had come soon enough to help ameliorate and improve my quasi-nightmare of a childhood.

Of course, that's no just about my sister.
I was bullied, ostracized, made fun of, given a really mean nicknamein school that stuck so hard I had to resort to simply not acknowledging anyone who called me by it, and I was in a certain amount of constant pain & sensory discomfort the entire time all of which I was basically chastised about if I said anything and generally told to stop being so sensistive & to just suck it up because they were sure that I was just being a melodramatic whiner & complainer.

I'm nearly postive I would be much further along the road to full independence, a stable career, and a healthy, long term relationship that I am now, just a few days shy of 35 and having achieved none of those things, if I had been diagnosed & recieved treatment & support for my condition from an early age.

However, to be honest, what's past is past.
Do I wish it could have been different? Yes.
Do I dwell on what might have been in terms of that? Nope, not in the slightest.

I'm way too busy trying to forge myself a future to worry about what-ifs and might-have-beens.
I was born in 1979 and raised in the 80s and 90s.
There wasn't even a diagnosis for Asperger's Syndrome in the DSM until 1994, and it didn't start to actually get diagnosed on a regular basis until the late 90s.
My mother tried to find out what was wrong with me and what to do about it on many occasions while I was growing up, but no one had any useful answers other than treating the various symptoms individually as they became more obviously problematic in terms of my functionality and interactions with others in general.

Given the timeline involved a really early diagnosis would have been impossible and dwelling on something which could, practically speaking, never have happened is the ultimate in futility.
The earliest I could have gotten diagnosed was around 16 when a psychiatrist very tentatively, and as it turns out erroneously, diagnosed ADD & perscribed me ritalin.
Perhaps if the shrink had been more familiar with Asperger's Syndrome, I would have gotten diagnosed then instead of 4 years later after a roommate deliberately goaded me into a meltdown which got me kicked out of on-campus for a semester.
Unlike my sister, he got the hint and promptly apologized to me for the torture about a week later.

Still, being diagnosed at 16 vould easily have radically altered my life-path, although I can't be entirely certain of that since a lot of the pivotal stuff happened when I was 16 & 17, and it's impossible to discern how much having the diagnosis at that point would have have changed the choices I made.
Since that's the case it's pointless to dwell on that earlier diagnosis scenario as well, plausible though it might be.

Learn from the past.
Plan for the future.
Live in the present.

I was diagnosed in 8th grade with Asperger's, but I had gotten services for developmental delays when I was a toddler/little kid without an autism diagnosis. My records state that I was first diagnosed with "non-specific developmental delays".

I had speech and occupational therapy, which I think benefited me, especially the speech. Although my family jokes that they wish they hadn't put me in speech therapy because now they can't get me to shut up .

Hah! Serves them right for teaching you what talking is all about! Aspielecture incoming! j/k, communication is important...

Yeah, an early diagnosis would have helped me a lot. I was obviously unusual from infancy and had serious problems, but my mom didn't want me "labeled", so I didn't get a diagnosis. I think it's just because my family is scared of disability--ironic, because my mom is an occupational therapist--and thinks that it's basically a death sentence, or worse than death. To this day she seems convinced that disabled people can never do anything useful, or have talents, or be happy the way they are. She tried to convince me that my autism was a character defect--that I was lazy, rebellious, and overly sensitive. And I am still trying to work through the fallout.

If I'd known earlier, I could've learned how to do some of the things that autism makes it much harder to learn to do. I could've gotten some therapy and been more independent.

On the other hand, at least it means I know what it's like not to be diagnosed. There's some insight into the non-disabled world that you can only have when you think you're part of it. Even though I did have to work through quite a bit of internalized ablism, it did help me understand why people feel that way.

There was no option for me, but I wish I had been Dxed for AS or something before I hit 16. My life choices would have been different if I KNEW something was "wrong" with me.

I was told I was smart and "normal." So I tried to do as everyone else....only to repeatedly fail because I couldn't do like others could. Knowing how I was different would have empowered me to make better choices.

The best moment of my diagnosis would be 13 year old. It was the time of my life I was looking for an answer "What's wrong with all the people around, why won't they be my friend? What I am doing wrong? I can't understand!" and deeply depressed. I was more than ready to accept I am different than most of people and I can never really fit in. If fact I come to this conclusion myself - but instead of being an aspie I called myself an alien/demon. What I did after was not different of what I might do knowing I am an aspie - I was looking for a way to fit in in a society I don't really belong to. I was smart enough so I learn the survive strategy myself and lack of diagnosis was not such a big deal although getting some advice would be nice.

A diagnosis before being 18 year old (what a shame... I got a chance to get diagnosis at 17 year old but I missed it by using my survive strategy and misleading the psychiatrist because I was afraid of being ret*d - it was a bad time, my "strategy" didn't allow accepting any health issues on my side) would help me much on my college entrance exam though. I got a shutdown at the math exam due to being in an unfamiliar environment (they decided to change classrooms right before the exam to a classroom I have never been before with really weird shape) and I didn't have enough time to finish all of the examples since I lost first 20 mins of the exam reading exam directions on 1st page over and over and not knowing anything from them instead of going straight to the examples. In fact I had no idea the exam already started! After the 20 minutes I got my head up and realized everyone around is doing examples for a long time already.
As far I know changing a classroom right before an exam is against the rules if there is an aspie participating because it leads to anxiety and there is also a rule aspie students can get up to 30 or 40 mins more time. If the school have known I'm an aspie I would do much better on the exam and get to a college I liked. The examples were very easy. I just had no time to finish them.

I was diagnosed when I was 14 or 15, it was good at least for the fact that I got accommodations which allowed me to graduate high school even tho they didn't help me transition at all. I don't know if any earlier of diagnosis would of made a difference but later or none at all then I at the very least don't graduate high school on time if at all.

I didn't get my diagnosis until my late 40's and I would have loved to have received a diagnosis earlier. For starters they could have actually DONE SOMETHING about my autism instead of just accepting the fact that I was 'quiet' and then leaving me alone with my books. It would have also guided my career choice, sending me into a job better suited to my talents.

I wish I had been diagnosed when I was still in grade school. Then I may have gotten help instead of just getting yelled at for not doing well in school.

I was diagnosed 2 weeks ago but I wouldn't want to be diagnosed earlier than one year ago. Without the diagnosis I learned to pass as NT and learned lots of skills that are proving to be useful. With the diagnosis I would be like: "people have to understand, I have aspergers". I was more like: "why am I like that? everyone feels the same and don't react like this! I have to deal with it like they do". This is me personally, I am not saying you guys are like that. I would be much harder to deal with, probably socially isolated, with much worse symptoms, more dependent and more spoiled.
I went through a hard time in my early teenage years that could have been spared if I knew about aspergers back then, but now I think it was worth it because as I said I learned important skills and this situation made me stronger. I wouldn't be who I am today without it.
I am with the OP here.