what do you think of the psychiatry profession?

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aspergers was first discovered around 1944 by hans asperger and simultaneously by leo kanner who lived on a completely different continent. they were unaware of each other.

but aspergers didn't enter the DSM until 1994 -- 50 years later. thats when aspergers started being diagnosed globally.

i was born in the early 1970s - but i got diagnosed just this year. i know for a fact if i'd been trained as a kid with social stories and some of the material they use today that my life would have been far happier. so why didn't aspergers enter the DSM 30 years before in time for me to be diagnosed??

autism professionals seem so incredibly far behind -- i think the knowledge on these forums is far more sophisticated.

has anyone felt the same? almost like we're on our own to figure this out because they have no clue?

Psychiatry as a whole is pretty new. At least they don't just throw all the "different" people into an asylum. I'm at least grateful for that.

I believe it is a field of educated guesses, scams, quacks, etc. This is not to say that all or even many psychiatrists are unethical, but it is to say that there so many treatments and diagnosis based upon unproven theories.

I prefer psychology to psychiatry. I guess they could be useful sometimes, but I would never willingly go see a psychiatrist again. (I would go to psychologists though).

I was Fifty when I was diagnosed, just last year, and I'm neither surprised nor disenchanted with the development of awareness of Autism in general. It really isn't any surprise to me that it took as long as it did. It actually surprises me that it happened as fast as it did. Asperger Syndrome was at first, because it was associated with Autism, considered a severe disablement. It came, as did full-blown Autism, with stereotypical views of what it "looked like." Psychiatry and Psychology in general was at first focused mainly on severe disabilities that were easily recognizable and diagnosed. Part of the reason I think most of the focus on all disabilities was on only the most severe cases was pretty simple. The severely disabled are more easily identified and diagnosed (1), and there weren't as many people involved in the field as there is now (2). When you don't have that many people dedicated to studying something, it stands to reason that prioritizing has to come into play.

50 years really isn't that long. You're 40, right? You were twenty only just a short time ago from your own perspective I bet. Wait until you see how fast the next ten years pass!

I've thought about how much more of an advantage I would have had if they had known when I was a kid too. They didn't though, and dwelling on what might have been doesn't help me one bit. What might have been wasn't. It's a done deal. What is, is, and I'm just grateful SOMEBODY pushed to have more attention drawn to Autism, especially high-functioning types like Asperger Syndrome.

I look at it this way:

Why didn't I know way back then?

All the reasons I didn't, are more than likely the exact same reasons nobody else put the puzzle together too.

EDIT: We all know Doctors are human beings, don't we? Why should we expect so much of them? I know I don't, and I only respect those that admit to their own human limitations. It's only those who act as though just because they went through more training than I have, that means they know more and/or are smarter than me. All it means to me is that they get to put some letters after their name that I'm not allowed to.

Last edited by MrXxx on 11 Aug 2011, 2:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.

My so called psychiatrist told my parents that I was acting out to get attention (early 1980s) and that my behaviors could be "cured" through positive reinforcement.

I have a very bad opinion of psychiatrists and psychologists. When school first requested us to seek professional help for our kid because they thought she had ADHD, we took her to a psychologist. The psychologist said all she had was that she was too intelligent, and that intelligent people was peculiar. She said she will get better. She did not. The second psychologist said, basically, that our kid was spoiled. Tried the "tough hand" solution that did not work. Referred us to a psychiatrist for medication. The psychiatrist refused to put or kid on medication because she could be handled without drugs, but refused to treat her because we were referred by the psychologist and that created a "conflict of interest". The third psychologist said our kid had ADHD and put her on meds (the psychiatrists prescribed the meds). The forth psychologist referred us to a endocrinologist searching for a physical explanation to her problems. The endocrinologist only found that our kid's bone age differs from her chronological age. According to him her bones are the ones of a 10 years older person ??? We finally met a therapist specialized in autism and she told us according to her experience our child was Autistic and she showed all the signs of Asperger's Syndrome. She referred us to a neurologist to get a diagnosis. She was finally diagnosed with AS at 8 years old, after 3 years wasting money on psychologists and psychiatrists who only caused all of us pain and suffering. She's being receiving therapy from this behavior modification therapist for the last 3 years and she is a complete different child now. I do not want to know anything else about psychologists and/or psychiatrists.

From what I've seen around here,
If you aren't in line to get drugs, you aren't worth a doctor's time.
Bye bye - solve it yourself.

The experiences I have had with mental health professionals has not been good. From one's who are completely clueless, to the one who spent the entire session trying to pick my mom up I don't like shrinks. I'll need to see one to be diagnosed, but after that I plan to never see another as long as I live.

I don;'t think much about the psychiatry profession, though I do regularly interact with it. I have a psychiatrist, take worthless drugs for bipolar disorder (lamictal, remeron, and risperdal). the only thing I have ever really had addressed was the hallucinations. drugs successfully got rid of that. but my mood is still all over the place, though I do have more good days than bad lately. I question my diagnosis a bit. I tend to think I am just mentally f****d, you know? like being messed up in the brain is my norm.

but I don't like medications. they have made me gain over 80 pounds in two years. I now weigh more than 340lbs thanks to pound packing meds.

A good one is worth his or her weight in gold. A bad one can ruin lives.

Hans Asperger's writings were not taken very seriously because they were written during World War II, when the Nazis were using humans as experiments. And the school he built for "autistic psychopathy" was bombed because of WWII. Also, his writing was written in German, and finally translated into English in the 1980s, and that was when Asperger's Syndrome was first known to the rest of the world.

Both Asperger and Kanner called what they found "autism", but Kanner's work was only on "severe" cases, not AS.

interesting, informative post. i checked into kanners syndrome and it almost seems like its in the middle between aspergers and classical autism.

so hans asperger figured it out in the 1940's and nobody else managed to rediscover it out later on? yet now autism is an "epidemic" being diagnosed everywhere?

Actually, Kanner did not focus on "severe" cases... some of his cases were a lot like people with AS are today. All of his subjects had either a speech OR language delay, but some proportion (in the neighborhood of half? can't quite remember) were verbally fluent at the time of his evaluations.

Thanks. I always thought Kanner's subjects were the "one-in-ten-thousand, nonverbal" cases.

My life was really screwed up by an utterly incompetent psychotherapist. It took me years to understand how she had subtly mentally abused my dim-witted social brain. And she was very "nice" and "supportive" seeming when I went to her. She denied me knowledge of my actual diagnosis, given to the insurance company and mis-informed me about an incorrect self-diagnosis I had stumbled on in an effort to heal myself or a horrific, suppressed sexual abuse in adolescence.

There are some out there who are helpful, and I have seen some of them. But there are a lot of narcissists and idiots and if you have AS you will have a hard time sifting the wheat from the chaff.