Meowpurr wrote:
Alright can people PLEASE quit saying they have aspergers if they are self diagnosed/undiagnosed?
Quite simply, no. What does it matter to you what people say? Most of us older people never had the opportunity to be diagnosed. Most of us keep our self-diagnosis to ourselves & anonymously on these boards, so why would you even have an issue with that? Why on Earth would we want to pretend to have a condition which, for many of us, has totally screwed up our lives
without the benefit of being able to get any answers or support? Some of us are even old enough that if we
had had some form of diagnosis of a "mental illness", we would probably have been thrown into a secure mental hospital.
Besides, with the ability of many GPs
not to be able to diagnose psychological conditions correctly, combined with a set of diagnostic criteria which are purely subjective, how can you be sure that everyone with an official diagnosis
really has AS? Doctors have been known to be wrong (I had 5 years of being diagnosed with "none specific back pain" until finally a doctor discovered I had a joint eroding disease).
MrMark wrote:
Should we disregard all of us who are over 40 and will never have the official diagnosis? Do we think we have nothing to contribute to the autism awareness movement? Do we think that we have nothing to offer younger autistics?
What he said.