Is There Valuable Help For People With Aspergers?

Post Reply New Topic

Okay, so now that I know I have Aspergers, I'm trying to figure out, what am I supposed to do to make my life easier and to start moving forward? My goals would be to live independently, and to make friends WITHOUT having to fake like I'm normal all the time! But when I've looked into it, all I can find is services and supports for people who need a lot more help than I do. I don't need someone to treat me like a little kid and supervise me and stuff. But some guidance and support would be good.

What services and supports have helped you? Or are we just meant to flail around on our own and hope for the best?

So far. I've never found any services out there that help with asperger's for adults. The reality of it is, is that most NT's out there think that asperger's is not real and that it's just another excuse/license for bad behavior.

The best thing you can do is learn more about it and learn to manage it. It's all you can really do.

First, maybe, learn all you can. Self education is really important, and most people here recommend Tony Attwood's "Complete Guide to Aspergers" as a very good place to start. It certainly helped me.

It's good that you have clear goals - you want to live independently. From what you wrote, it's not clear precisely what stands in your way of doing that. A lot of people on the spectrum live independently, plenty of WP members do.

Wrong Planet is a peer support site, where people can ask for and provide support; it helps if you can define what kind of support you think you need and are looking for.

I have found valuable help both on WP and elsewhere though what's available varies between different countries, and what would suit you depends a lot on what your specific needs are.

Nope. All the resources are for parents and children, all the therapy and medication is designed to make children more manageable for their own parents. Depending on your age and location there might be resources available.. there's few in salt lake city, I know that much.

Your best option is to educate yourself.. read books. Read up about it online. Learn how you can grow as a person despite your diagnosis, and learn how you can grow with it too. There's hope for you, the only problem is it has to come from you and not an external source. It's not like most other things where people will go out and seek a therapist or medication, we just don't have that option, really; education is our only tool. But it's a very useful tool if you're willing to use it.

I've not seen anything much in the UK. There's the National Autistic Society, though their help always seemed pretty limited. They gave me a good list of AS diagnosticians. They said that a range of services were available to diagnosed people, but when I asked them what services, they didn't reply. Their help wasn't enough to get me the "cooking component" of the Disability Living Allowance which technically I qualified for. I believe the application failed because I didn't have a note from a member of the Great And Good backing up my claim to be unable to cook with multiple saucepans, but nobody warned me, and all the adjudication officer would say was "you do not need help with cooking."

I heard of some inexpensive group sessions somebody was running for Aspies with relationship problems, but I suspect that group sessions are of limited value for Aspies.

The National Health Service wrote to me saying that they'd sent some information to my doctor about how to deal with Aspies, but I haven't noticed my doctor behaving any differently, and all I've been offered is sedatives and antidepressants, and it's not my policy to go that way.

My employer cut me some slack but wouldn't get involved in any detailed adjustments. On receiving my diagnostic report, the Occupational Health division interviewed me briefly, and prescribed follow-up meetings which never happened because they completely dropped the ball. I asked the head of department to appoint an autism expert to work out some specific adjustments, but he said he couldn't see how that could do any good. He told me that if I wanted to try to set up something like that myself, then I was free to do so. Given the difficulty Aspies usually have with self-advocacy, I think that was pretty ridiculous. He didn't even talk to Occupational Health to get them to get those follow-up meetings going. I contacted them but they didn't give me a useful reply. Oh well, I'd already been planning to quit for some time.

So I don't believe there's any free help out there. I guess there are plenty of private shrinks and life coaches out there who would talk to me for a price, but with no idea who is any good and who isn't, it could be an expensive experiment. I'd like to see some kind of email service for autistic people, as written communication is often better than face-to-face.

You brought to my memory an old Greek proverb:

"there is plenty of free cheese in the mousetrap".

Sometimes no help is better than help from any source on offer; and sometimes help is just the sunny side of control. Good help does exist, but it's hard to find, and there are many traps along the way for the unwary. So self-education and increased self-awareness is vital, I think..