What led you to discover...?

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How did you come to find out about autism and aspergers? And if you are diagnosed or seeking a dx, what led to that?

My family thought I was gay. The only girl I ever loved broke up with me multiple times. My family consistently poked fun at me and said I should "get tested." Then in college I couldn't concentrate on things I didn't care about (Like NT's sometimes can do).

I've always known I was different and learned how to deal with things on my own; I didn't have a supportive family. I thought I was uniquely weird.

Several years ago I went to a psychiatrist for some Valium. (It's not something I take regularly, only when I have to deal with the rare social situation). I didn't see her regularly, but one day I asked her if she had any diagnosis for me. She replied Asperger Syndrome like it was no big deal and went on with what she was talking about. She was so nonchalant about it that I forgot. It was something I'd never heard of.

The reason I didn't bother was that I had become pretty jaded. I sporadically went to psychiatrists when I was younger. None of their diagnoses fit; I had become very cynical. Besides that, I was basically content. I had come to terms with my strengths and limitations.

Maybe a year after that--last year--I was reading a political essay written by a psychologist for whom I have great respect, and he mentioned Asperger Syndrome in the context that this person thinks differently than normal people. Then I recalled the doctor's diagnosis and went to Wikipedia. At first I was stunned as I was reading, then I literally burst out laughing, hardly the kind of thing I'm prone to do. (my employees must have thought I had lost my mind).

Though I had long before made peace with who I was, this was the best day of my life. Since I'm alexythemic, I had problems understanding myself. It was an epiphany of sorts; it all instantly came together. And though I'm anything but a people person, there was something very comforting knowing I wasn't some kind of freak, and I wasn't alone.

Last edited by Dunnyveg on 15 Dec 2011, 10:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I had always felt different too as a child. I felt as if I were supposed to turn into a mystical dragon one day and fly away from everything.

Isn't everyone alexythemic? The scores just varry in each individual. According to wikipedia.

I had a burnout, and I went to get therapy to figure out my burnout and where to go from there. The headshrinker suggested ASD to me right away, but we decided to work on specific issues instead of diagnosing disorders. After a few months of working on issues, all issues except the ones related to ASD were resolved and all disorders except ASD were ruled out. At that point, two headshrinkers got together to diagnose me with ASD, and I made the decision to get diagnosed for school, because I am working on going back to graduate school after I had to leave during my burnout.

I think that I lucked out with my therapy clinic, because I was assigned to see psychologists who understood ASD and had worked with a lot of autistic people before. I was not misdiagnosed with anything, and I was not prescribed any unnecessary medications for anything that I did not have. It took about six months to work on issues, then about three months to go through the diagnostic process.

I always felt different from everyone else and didn't know why. My son had been diagnosed with ADHD and we were still trying to get meds straightened out for school and his teacher mentioned Asperger's to me during a conference. Asked me if I had heard of it and said that she had previously taught an Asperger's child and that she believed that Ron (my son) showed signs of it. As I was researching to find out about it for him, and now watching him since he's had the diagnosis of Asperger's, the puzzle pieces of my life started falling into place.

I actually found out I had AS before I knew anything about it. I heard my mum telling a friend I had it, when she hadn't even told me, and that was the first I'd heard of it. I remember reading about it on Wikipedia a while later, so I could find out about this newly discovered part of me (Well, newly discovered to me at least. I was diagnosed about 5 years before I heard about it)

When I was 13 I was brought to see someone for reasons I'm unsure of. She worked with me for a while, diagnosed social anxiety caused from being bullied in school, and ended up saying that she didn't think she'd be able to work with me any more because she thought I had Asperger's and she was unskilled in working with patients on the autistic spectrum.

I did a role-based-assessment at our office... The results were that I was an Aspie... I had read the wikipedia page at least 3 times befor that, and never clued in. The results of the test made me dig deeper. That was about 4 months ago, i've been obsessively researching ever since.

I always felt different too. I had never heard of Asperger's and didn't really know much about autism until I took a special education course in college in wrote a paper on it. When I was researching for it I felt like I was reading about myself. That led me to do more research on my own and I found out about Asperger's Syndrome. It was a really strange "ah-ha" moment because it explained everything that I ever though was different about me. And now, as of today, I am officially diagnosed. Yay!

My nephew turned out to have it.

Then when reading stuff about AS to understand and help him, I was reading myself in the words. (Before that, I just thought I had OCD.) I had not a single iota of insight into such before that.

Kinda funny, really.

The simple answer: My sister has two children on the spectrum, one classic autism and the other aspergers.

And, she will never let me forget the way they were diagnosed, too. This happened over 20 yrs ago.


TheSunAlsoRises

My mother told me I had it when I couldn't understand why I was so different. I knew nothing about it then and just assumed what it was. Then finally I started to ask my mother about it when I was 14 and I was always talking about it asking what I be like if I had more of it and she tell me things like I be hurting peoples feelings and not care, I be acting like a valley girl when she tell me to do things because I wouldn't understand, and I was told I wouldn't be in choir because I wouldn't know what is going on. I was also told I wouldn't be talking as much and I be very quiet. Then finally mom pull out some printed papers on it and gave them to me to read. I read about it and understood it better and realized I wasn't that bad. It also helped me understand myself better and it explained things like why having friends was hard and why socializing was hard and why I had obsessions. I always assumed having obsessions was normal. It is technically but we just get extreme with it and get stuck on it and can't stop thinking about it. But after being in the community for years and talking to people with it, what I had been told about AS when I was 14 was inaccurate and BS.

If I weren't so damn stubborn I would have learnt about it a year earlier and not gone through the pain of an awkward and confusing relationship. Still, it's our experiences that shape us into who we are today.

When I started to talk to people more I realised that my words were coming out all wrong and it was a real hassle to get them out clearly. Most times my words sounding better in my head than out of my mouth. A teacher said I could have dyslexia (he had it himself) and so I looked it up and related to the symptoms. The way they displayed the symptoms online was that they didn't have the more significant symptoms but it was all combined in with other symptoms that have similarities to ADHD and Aspergers.
While I was looking up dyslexia 20 hours a day even though I already knew enough, my mum suggested I look up autism. I did for about 10 minutes but I thought as long as I would hang out with people (even if I wouldn't talk to them) that my social skills were fine.
Then I had my first relationship which was confusing because I didn't know much about what to do. I didn't even realise the guy liked me as much as I liked him. I felt so young and couldn't be intimate and I felt jealous of his friends who he could talk to more, and I tried to talk to more but developed social anxiety.

Then after my dyslexia assessment (IQ test) I was diagnosed with severe depression which was a shock because I didn't even feel the usual amount of depression. Later on I would learn this is PMDD.

Then I kept hearing Asperger's being mentioned on Yahoo Answers so I people does this sound like me. They said it was a possibility and I should join a community called Spectrumites. I joined WP while I was going through my first diagnosis process.

One thing that made me want to get diagnosed is my confusion at my inability to get a job. I have a really stunning photography portfolio and I became such an expert at writing cover letters because I applied for so many jobs and when I thought the interview went well I'd never hear back.

My doctors focused on helping me get jobs or going on disability. For the latter I needed to have an official diagnosis so after another 7 months I got an official diagnosis.

I was not a terribly bright child and people had no hope in me (teachers, parents) so it feels good to know why I'm like this and that I have a community to relate to and share with. I have ADHD as well which could have impacted my learning problems.

I went through over a decade of applying for jobs, interviewing, and not getting hired. I didn't know why this was and came to some easy conclusions that weren't actually true (or maybe they were partially true). I remember one of the last jobs I applied to was one where I had several friends working, so I asked one of them to check on my application, and what I got back was that the interviewer didn't want to hire me because I was "strange" and something seemed "off."

For whatever reason I never really thought I was different from other people. Socially, I didn't really question a lot of confusing situations as my 20s were a lot better than my teens (significantly less bullying, for example, but I was also much better looking than in my teens, which may have contributed). I did have people say things like "I like Verdandi okay, but I can only take her in small doses" as one example I clearly remember.

I'll say I kind of had two tracks going on this, though.

On one track, I'd notice that some behavior of mine was autistic or aspie, and I'd try to quash it. Not because I thought I was autistic, but because I thought I wasn't. This was a gradual process that started with watching Rainman and ended about four years ago.

On the other track, I was really unaware of my cognitive difficulties as legitimate difficulties. I thought things were harder for me because I was lazy or stupid or whatever. I never really stopped to wonder why simple instructions were confusing or why I had a hard time understanding things or why I was the only person to complain about certain loud noises in some situations. I was kind of aware that emotionally and in other ways I seemed less mature than other people my age, which I didn't really have an explanation for.

Anyway, the first track stopped about four years ago after I read an autistic woman's blog and realized that what she described was very much like what I experience. So I had about two weeks of panic, meltdowns, and shutdowns trying to cope with the idea, and worry about not being able to get a diagnosis, and doing some research, and then just sort of forgetting about it. I never fully forgot it, I mean it was in the back of my mind all that time. But I was sort of hoping for an alternative explanation, which ADHD served as for about four months, when it started falling apart because it failed to explain everything. And over the next few months I suspected autism again, but not very openly or consciously (I did start asking an Aspie friend of mine about their perceptions/etc to see if I related to anything, but I dropped it quickly - later I mentioned to another friend that I thought I w might be autistic and I misinterpreted her response as shooting my comment down - she was later very supportive, and still is), and I didn't really start taking it seriously until early December of last year, at which point I started comparing notes with Pensieve and several autistic people I've known for awhile and finding points of similarity was astonishingly easy given how hard it was for me to see myself as autistic.