I used my Aspergers diagnosis to get out of certain Aspie-unfriendly responsibilities the management had been trying to lay on me. Of course it was an excuse in some sense of the word, i.e. a genuine reason. The only alternative would have been for me to keep trying to do a job I couldn't get my brain round, which wouldn't have been good for anybody. I often wondered if they thought it was an excuse. The work they wanted me to do was very unpopular and there was something of a war going on to force a lot of us to start doing it. Sick leave was rarely challenged openly but it was clear they didn't always believe it genuine, and they were probably sometimes right. Attitudes were often pretty hard and closed-minded on both sides. But either they believed me or they didn't dare risk their equal opportunity image and the courts by ignoring my legally-registered disability.
I think the special problem here is that making adjustments for an invisible disability demands an awful lot of trust in the word of the disabled one. We can't prove that our batteries willl go flat if we try to do a job that most people would merely find uncomfortable. Even the diagnosis is mostly a rubber stamp on what the client said about themselves.
09 May 2018, 1:07 pm
