I was very lucky in my choice of parents - they didn't think my being weird was in itself a bad thing. Then again, they'd already had to get used to dealing with my younger sister, who was quite plainly autistic, so that may have helped.
When I was 10, I was going to see someone who I deduce must have been a psychologist. All I knew at the time was that I was going on Wednesday afternoons to play parcheesi and talk with some guy that my sister's therapist introduced me to. By then, I'd given up trying to figure out why people do what they do, and was just riding with it. (I can place the year precisely - it was 1974 - because the local radio station's afternoon DJ, "Emperor" Smith, was changing jobs, and the station decided to do a cover story of sorts. They held a mock trial, and impeached the Emperor for snorking in his coffee cup on the air. He was "sentenced to sorting records in the back room for one year," the idea being that by then we'd all forget he was supposed to come back. The psych didn't listen to that station, and thought I was talking about President Nixon, not Emperor Smith. I had to explain to him that Nixon had not yet been impeached, a process of receiving a formal accusation of malfeasance from the House of Representatives. [This was a month or so before Nixon resigned in order to avoid exactly this fate.])
That was about it for services, though - after all, when I was a kid, there was no such thing as AS. Then again, for quite a few years of my youth, homosexuality was a mental illness, and Dissociative Disorder was just a special case of schizophrenia...
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Sodium is a metal that reacts explosively when exposed to water. Chlorine is a gas that'll kill you dead in moments. Together they make my fries taste good.
Last edited by DeaconBlues on 31 Mar 2009, 12:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.