Anyone else feel angry for not getting an early diagnosis?

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^ That sounds rough too

I feel angry at not being told as soon as mum knew.

I was told in the middle of being bullied. 4 years later.

That was like victim blaming.

If instead of that, I had been told as a kid, 'look, you think differently to some people, this is how they think, this is how you think' I wouldn't have experienced feeling as if it was my fault and as if the bullies were right that there was something 'wrong' with me.

And my light sensitivity wouldn't have been such a mystery either.

I was not diagnosed until the age of 44 years of age.

I have contemplated in terms of how much the lack of diagnosis has had on my life.
I was a bit unusual as a kid, but no so unusual that i stuck out too much, apart from having big blue eyes.

When i was a kid i did get bullied a lot, especially by my older brother (who was 3 years older), and a ginger kid of the same age as me who used manipulation to get others to bully me.

Fed up with being bullied, i started "Ed Parker's American Kenpo Karate" at the age of 11, and although a bit of a fat kid, i took to the system and routine found in karate like a duck to water, and lost all the excess fat, becoming one of the fittest kids at the school by the time i left secondary school.

I also quickly picked up loads of karate skills that helped stop people from bullying me, I also for the most part stopped my older brother bullying me.

The reason why i picked up karate so well i believe is due to having ASD.
I still got some grief at school for not paying attention to teachers, getting detentions etc. or for talking too much.

I wonder if i had been diagnosed earlier i would not have been punished so much, and perhaps less bullied (by the teachers too).

Although, perhaps i would have been bullied even more. As school yard bullies look for any weakness or difference as an excuse to pick on people. So having a diagnosis may have separated me from the normal kids which would have made my life a lot harder.

Actually, after fighting off all the bullies at school, and protecting the weaker kids, i was fairly popular at secondary school level by the end of school, apart from being unpopular among the bullies who didn't like me protecting the weaker kids (and thus trying to make people think that i was the bully.... that's the problem with being a hero... spider man and bat man had the same problems with bullies in journalism, bent police etc).

One thing that does make me angry however is how little help people give to help "late diagnosis" ASD people
getting any financial assistance in helping late diagnosis people start up businesses and find suitable employment.

Instead we are regarded as losers who should take what we are given, which i think is a real injustice, especially when considering how talented, intelligent and how specially skilled many of us ASD sufferers are.

We like suffer from a persuasive neurological developmental disorder that affects our entire ability to cope with life in all areas generally, and are given very little help in such areas as employment or forming relationships.

I sometimes look at the news, and see people who once saw an adult expose themselves get given loads of money in compensation, but i really cant compare the amount of trauma us ASD people have had to endure all our lives without compensation.

I also am a little fed up with big national and international charities that make a big song and dance about raising funds for autism, but very few of them actually do anything to help people with ASD but "raise awareness", with many of the employees getting paid high salaries to run such great raising awareness campaigns....

while the people who have ASD are left to rot, unless you are 5 years old and low functioning (no offence to children or low functioning / considerable support ASD people)...

diagnosed at age 68, finally had an understanding of all the "whys" of lifelong struggles believing all that pain and misunderstanding was "all my fault" on many many levels. After all, I was told that for 67 years... a lot of stuff was explained by my diagnosis. I am mostly just feeling relief to finally understand what happened all those years and so glad I can make my life better with accommodations now I am beginning to understand how autism affects me (and how it has all my life without my knowing). I do wonder what things might have been like if I knew, but I have also seen numerous diagnosed kids being blamed and told "you are autistic" as part of it. Different words, same blame and punishment, etc etc... so maybe life would not have been different after all, especially in the same circumstances with the same family that raised me in those days. Not angry, relieved! Now I have the tools to make a difference in my own life.

^ pretty much that.

It's nice when you finally know not only what is going on, but something is going on. Knowing what to do, how to better handle things, it makes life a lot more comfortable. There's so much to be said for that, I think.

Angry for not getting diagnosed earlier? Well yes and no. My father was an Educational Administration PhD, but he got his degree in 1969 and Asperger's didn't hit the American DSM until what, 1996? By that time I was 36 and much damage had already been done. So I can't really fault him for that oversight. I can get royally POed that my mother made a habit of threatening me as a child with commitment to the state mental hospital and was quite serious. The same could be said in my father's case in that his chosen way to "try to get through to me" was long intense lecture sessions with the always present threat of physical violence to "break through". By the time I left home in late 1977 I was already deep into PTSD. After a stint in the navy and surviving two murder attempts in civilian life I finally self diagnosed in 2001 and got a professional diagnosis from the state vocational rehab. in 2002. I guess the department felt I had insulted them or something because they simply stopped responding to me and offered nothing in the way of training or counseling. (backtrack a little) I went back to school in 1994 and got an electronics degree (2 year). Unfortunately it was geared toward consumer electronics. The degree became all but obsolete almost as soon as I got it as flat screens and surface mount components got big and it became less expensive to buy a new whatever than to have the whatever repaired. I've spent from then until now working factory floors just making ends meet. Never able to advance beyond "floor worker" because I wasn't and am still not social. The workgroup parties and kissing backsides was never my thing and so no acceptance, no promotions, long periods of unemployment, and short job stints has been the norm until the present day. Now at age 60 I've been married three times, divorced twice and widowed once, have no retirement set up, and staring into the black hole of old age.

So, no. Just after the diag I was a bit upset. Now I'm just disappointed, in the fatalistic, Edwardian sense of the word. I can't say that knowing why is or has been of any help or use.

For those of us over 40, remember that the attitude in the schools and with our parents was "He's just shy, he just needs time to come out of his shell" and/or "He's getting good grades so he can't have a problem with his brain." Today, we know better. Being angry about what happened 30 years ago doesn't solve anything. And if you have parents in their 70s or 80s, what purpose does it serve to send them on a guilt trip? The focus now should be on understanding your brain and how to get the most out of it.

I was diagnosed in fourth grade, but I hadn't the faintest clue what it meant until nearly a decade later, and my parents thought it pretty much just meant I was shy and smart, so I really didn't get any benefits from diagnosis until much later. No explanation for being "different," no accommodations, no treatments, nothing, until one day in high school I remembered that hey, don't I have something called Asperger's syndrome, and decided to Google it. And even after that, I've always been stuck in between - not quite disabled to qualify for any sort of assistance or accomodations, but too disabled to meet the NT expectations I was held to. As a result, I grew up constantly being told that my best isn't good enough, because no one would believe it actually was my best, and I'm still fighting the label of being a slacker who can't be bothered about anything except whatever her current obsession is and won't do anything she doesn't want to do, even though that's very much the opposite of the truth.

What baffles me is how other Aspies under about 35 managed to go through school life without being noticed that they're different, and then receiving a diagnosis in their 20s. How did you manage to do that? And I'm not just talking about how you were at school, but how you were at home too. I was so hyper at home when I was a child, and also like a problem child, and it wasn't due to my upbringing. It was because I had ASD and ADHD. Maybe things would have been different if I didn't have ADHD.
But those of you who grew up in the '90s or 2000s and never got diagnosed until adulthood couldn't have been a problem child to the point where their parents were tearing their hair out (metaphorically) and needed support from a social worker to cope with tantrums and hyperactivity. And it wasn't like I was severe, I was only level 1, which was known as Asperger's syndrome back then, because of how social and articulate I was. I didn't have many of the key symptoms of autism like repetitive behaviours or special interests. But I did get anxious a lot.

Unpopular f.or parents to have a autistic child .. besides , it made extra work for them .

I'm less angry about not getting an early diagnosis for AS and ADHD, though I was fairly certain that I had Asperger's since I was about twelve just from reading about it, and more angry about being misdiagnosed as bi-polar by an overzealous pharmacologist and overmedicated with drugs that couldn't possibly do me any good for almost 14 years. I finally found a good doctor about seven years ago who realized that the over 65 different medications that I had been put on by other professionals at different times for bi-polar disorder were not helping any of my symptoms, and since he finally understood me when I told him that I never had manic episodes [other doctors had always ignored this fact completely]. I lost almost 100 lbs when my metabolism returned to normal, I stopped having unexplainable mood swings, my depression became manageable without any drugs [it's purely situational, the worst of it stems from isolation anxiety and a childhood sexual assault incident], my skin cleared up, I had better balance and presence of mind [I couldn't even do simple math in my head when I was on those drugs, now at least I can figure out a tip without paper and a calculator], my memory returned. I always kind of figured that I was autistic, but seriously, what made me angry [and still kind of does] was being misdiagnosed and doped up by legal drug dealers. I'll never be able to make up for all of those lost years, it really destroyed much of what chance I ever had of a semi-normal life.

Still, I am very grateful to have my mind and body back to normal. A big turning point for me after being weened off of all of those medications was three doses, over the course of a year, of psilocybin and casual cannabis use during those first couple of years. I haven't smoked cannabis more than a few times a year since then [It's much easier to find coke, meth, and heroin in this area. Most of the people my age and younger around here are drug addicts, alcoholics, married, or a combination of these.], but I really wish they would legalize medicinal use down here. It helped prevent my shutdowns and panic attacks, allowed me to deal with NT's without quietly hating them, and is the only medication which helps my back, hip, and knee pains without undesirable side effects. Even aspirin, which is the only pain medication I take daily, gives me stomach issues sometimes.

I spent 70 years not knowing why I was different’: What it’s like being told you’re autistic as an adult

I got told off by a speech therapist for waiting too long to diagnose my daughter. The irony was we started the process of testing when she was 3 and she didn't get a diagnosis till she was 5.

No, not angry. I got the diagnosis in my early twenties when I was being treated for other conditions. Neither did I resist the diagnosis, I just took it as a kind of "oh, okay"-experience.

I was offered various kinds of assistances such as weighted blankets, housing support, and social coaching, but it proved impossible to arrange practically as I was studying abroad at the time and only returned to my hometown in between terms.

In retrospect, I think I'd be better off staying in my country of birth and accepted the help offered to me. My current psychiatrist doesn't believe in Aspergers/high-functioning autism ("I think of it as a kind of personality"). In either case, there are no medicines for it, anyway, so as far as the psychiatrist is concerned, his work is done. Ironically, he did give me an ADHD test which came back negative. Maybe the awareness for that is higher here ...

In any case, there's no point thinking in "what if..."-terms because there's just one reality and that's the one you're living in now, in my opinion.