Late diagnosis (>25)

Post Reply New Topic

If you got your diagnosis after your 25th or something like that... Why didn't your parents/school seek help? Or did they but they didn't find what caused the problems? Or did they see no problem at all? What was the moment you decided to get a diagnosis?

Not got my AS diagnosis, but my mum thought everything's my fault, and the school went with it.

I only knew what some definitions/disorders meant at an older age. I suppose my mum doesn't know. And my sister doesn't think I have it, though she was the one who started calling me obsessive, saying I'm stubborn, etc. My mum was influenced by her.

I'm still not diagnosed.

When I was in school I had lots of problems and the school knew something was wrong with me. They put me in special classes and special schools and even made me do a 30 day evaluation in a mental hospital but as far as I know I was never diagnosed with anything.

I was diagnosed in a haphazard way at age 47. I did go through all the mental health rigamarole back in the late eighties and early nineties, but that was before there was any such diagnosis as AS. After that, I pretty much gave up, as I saw it as doing nothing but wasting time and money.

When I was little I had a period when I was behaving particularly weird and my parents threatened me to go to a shrink if I didn't stop. I was so scared of being labeled as crazy that I started hiding my quirks and here I am - now I do want to see one, but I can't just tell them "hey I've been hiding under your nose for 14 years", can I.

My parents started dragging me into therapy in the middle of my teens, and I was misdiagnosed with social anxiety for years. Everyone knew that this didn't exactly fit me, but nobody knew of anything more accurate. It wasn't until relatively recently that I got a psychologist who was astute enough to recognize what I was and diagnose me after many sessions.

My parents don't believe in anything that can't be proven with a blood test. My teachers would contact them all the time for my "weird" behavior. I got in trouble for it so much that I did everything I could to mask it. Doing that for so long messed me up even more. I was diagnosed a month ago at age 27.

I finished school about 12 years before anyone was given an Asperger's diagnosis. I was ridiculously good at schoolwork ( being a closed system of finite provided information) so guess they just let me get on with it:-/

i was 45 and another worker at the place i worked doing annoying surveyes over the phone told me he thinks i've got asperger, and the shoe fit right away.
as a child, i'd pace back and forth and flip my fingers. my parents themsevles commented i sound like i 'swallowed an encyclopedia'. that's how they put it. that's how i talked, like a professor giving a lecture. i never made friends. i had ocd. i related better to animals. my mother says i was a year old when my father was gone for about six days and came back bearded, and i didn't recognize him. i had problems with motor skills. i didn't recognize my mother when she put on a wig, and i was old enough to remember that. i stared at blinking objects and things that moved in a monotone like treetops like i was hypnotized. i was reluctant to talk sometimes. my parents say i clung to my brother at kindergarten and didn't talk to anyone else. in first grade i walked over a hole in the ground that had a pole over it. i walked it back and forth over and over and over again...
and my parents, my father is a professor and my mother a teacher, still didn't realize something was wrong!! !! !
unbelievable. my parents like to see what they want and don't see what they don't want. i've noticed that on many occasions and many different subjects. they just screamed at me to be like everyone else and make friends, which of course i didn't.
if my parents asked for help, they would be admitting i'm not like everyone else.

For me, the reason I was diagnosed at 28 was that while people could tell I was different, but I was too high functioning for an autism diagnosis. In fact, when I was in high school in the early 90's, a psychologist said that "if there were such a thing as a little bit autistic" that would describe me. When I finally got diagnosed, I was in therapy for depression and PTSD, and it was that therapist who suggested I might have Asperger's. She wasn't qualified to diagnose me, but she did send me to someone who was more qualified who finally made that diagnosis.

I wasn't even suspected of being Aspergers until my late forties. I went all through school and young adulthood without knowing. One reason my parents didn't intervene, was that they were very dysfunctional. Another reason was that Aspergers was unheard of when I was a child.

I was diagnosed late last year, aged 28. I'd had problems at school - very bad socially, bullied, obsessive interests that made me not fit in with my peers - but my parents just ignored them and made me try and be like everyone else. They'd make me go to social things even though I hated them.
I went to see a psychiatrist for help with panic attacks and depression, and he diagnosed me as Aspergers. It explains a lot of my past, so I'm glad I got the diagnosis. My parents, however don't accept it. They see what they want to see and ignore the rest!

My school did help sort of. They misdiagnosed me as having ADHD then placed me in special education. They also put me in speech therapy. I was diagnosed with Aspergers when I was 40 in 2010 they also found no sign of learning disabilities so their misdiagnosis cost me a proper education special education in my school was just a place to warehouse the weird kids. They did not diagnose for Aspergers until the mid 90's I was first examined in the mid 70's so I got screwed.



My parents noticed problems with me since birth. I would scream non-stop when held. I would avoid all contact such as holding hands or hugging. I took a long time to learn to walk. But I was an early talker and reader so there were some high points. But I was far from normal growing up.



I never heard of Asperger's syndrome until I watched the tv show The Doctors. They were discussing autism spectrum disorders. Everything they said about Aspergers sounded like they were describing me. They even said some kids in the 60's, 70's, and 80's were misdiagnosed as having ADHD.

That's almost my story exactly except it was at age 35. I learned early on to not do things that called attention to myself, possibly because I also have social anxiety. I think my dad is an Aspie too, and my mom is so used to him, I think she probably just thought I was eccentric like him. She did a lot of things that "enabled" me, like letting me get out of the spelling bee, which I would have won, but didn't have the ability to cope with. There were numerous situations like that.

(I still don't have a diagnosis but, at the age of 20, I am now on track to getting one.)

I think the main reason my parents didn't spot anything unusual was that they used my older brother, their first born, as a benchmark for what was "normal" in child development. They didn't know, however, that my brother also displayed many typically autistic characteristics. (This was the late 80s, so before internet or public awareness of ASDs).

I was 14 before Asperger's became a valid diagnosis. I was always a teacher's pet in school. At home was another story. I don't know why my parents never sought any in depth psychological testing on me.