Was anyone else ever misdiagnosed with depression?

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before I was diagnosed as autistic, I was diagnosed with depression (My mom says severe, I think it was mild) However I'm not and never have had depression. Horrible anxiety but no depression.

it was after I had a meltdown at school and shouted, "sometimes I wish I could just die" so they made be talk to a school physiologist that I refused to actually talk to.

They used the above along with me being a highly withdrawn child with spurts of anger and some self harmful stims and misdiagnosed me with depression.

Anyone else have a similar experience?

Yes. Diagnosed with (or misdiagnosed with) depression.
I really think that alexithymia is more accurate for me, though.

If you met diagnostic criteria for depression, it was not a misdiagnosis. They may have missed the larger problem, but often first clinical impressions are later modified when the psychiatrist or psychologist has more information.

Depression is a frequent co-morbidity with autism. When that is the case, both disorders should be addressed.

I wasn't depressed, I had signs that could be misinterpreted as depression, but I have a very hard time relating to depression or even understanding it beyond what it means medically.

Any symptoms I had/have were explained much better by my later diagnoses.

I'm curious - what signs were those, and how are they better explained by your later diagnoses?

This is just a matter of curiosity for me, and you are by no means required to answer.

I do suffer from, mostly mild, depression and I think most medical professionals that I saw before I received my ASD diagnosis immediately latched onto things that sounded like depression and therefore didn't consider the need to dig any deeper.

Difficulties coping with everyday tasks and finding it hard to get started on anything, withdrawal from social interaction, flat affect, meltdowns that involve lots of tears; are all common with ASDs but can also look a lot like depression. I found that doctors tended to conveniently ignore things which didn't fit as well with a diagnosis of depression, such as continuing to enjoy my interests with the same intensity as ever.

They also could not understand that whilst I struggled to cope with stuff at home, I could still come to work and do my safety critical job to a high standard. Rather than recognising me as someone with an extremely uneven cognitive profile, again something common with ASDs, they just saw me as someone who couldn't cope at all. They sent me away with pills and therapy whilst never getting at the real underlying issues and I very nearly lost my job.

I think nearly all of my own problems are better explained by my ASD diagnosis although I can understand that it is probably very difficult for non specialist medical professionals to disentangle some mental health conditions from ASD symptoms.

I don't entirely remember but I'll go over some good guesses.
First off, the fact I was evaluated right after being in an autistic meltdown and yelling that I sometimes wished I would die - For me, the few times I can talk at all during a meltdown, though I could better then, nothing should ever be taken to heart. However no one knew I was autistic yet, so a staff member thought I was serous about it and I had to see a school psychologist.

Out of ODD I refused to talk with him at all, so all he got was some anecdotal reports.

I was most of the time in autistic shutdown, and as such was often not very responsive. I was withdrawn in general, for instance in preschool I refused to talk to my teachers for months. I got better about that as I got older, but it was probably like talking to a brick wall unless they got me talking about something I liked and stopped talking down to me. I was also nervous of adults with a burning hatred of authority, and talked about killing people a lot (I wouldn't of actually done it).

I technically self-harmed, pulling out my hair (Not so far as to call it trichotillomania) scratched my hands, cut my hair, chewed on my hair and that's about it. But those were all stims, my normal stims I somewhat repressed and as such I got desperate a lot - I was having nearly daily meltdowns.

I got angry a lot, and used to get into fights sometimes.

I didn't make eye contact at all.

My cognitive dysfunction always caused me trouble.

And my evident anxiety.

I would say I have times where I am anxious, but never had clinical depression, which is completely different from a feeling of sadness. True clinical depression is where the body shuts down to the point when one cannot get out of bed and is accompanied by severe physical symptoms.

I think I am with Bea on this one. I have both anxiety amd mild depression. There are several drugs that can take care of both and anxiety amd depression often go hand in hand. Did you get a diagnosis later on that disproved that you have depression?

I wouldn’t say I was misdiagnosed with depression.

I would say once I was diagnosed with depression, my medical providers didn’t delve any deeper than that to discover the root cause.

I definitely fall into the "missing the larger problem" category suggested by BeaArthur. I don't doubt that I have experienced periods of acute depression, and those were always the times that I sought help, but despite dozens of referrals over the course of three decades, no-one ever tried to scratch below the surface to determine why these episodes were so recurrent and regular. I had the sense that there was some deeper cause ever since childhood, but talk about what I now know are my autistic traits was so often misinterpreted as aberrations in my thinking caused by the depression and anxiety.

I do agree with Arganger and elbowgrease that there are some aspects of autism which are terribly hard to pick apart from symptoms of depression, both for me personally and for the professionals trying to help me. A few examples that come to mind are:

- A monotone voice, slow prosody and limited facial expression are taken as flattened emotional affect.
- Alexithymia incorrectly read as resistance to facing up to a painful emotions, apathy, or lack of co-operation.
- Alone time taken in order to avoid autistic overload being read as being innately anti-social.
- Honest descriptions of my social impairments being treated as imaginary figments of negative thinking.
- Difficulty enacting plans due to executive impairments taken to be apathy.
- Looking for non-existent psychological causes for things which are actually neurological.

I've had talking therapies both with therapists very well trained to understand autism and many more who simply hadn't a clue. The difference can be truly astonishing. Working with a therapist who is determined to view all of your autistic traits as depressive symptoms (or consequences of them) can be extremely frustrating, and can even make self-esteem problems worse when autistic impairments make the given psychological exercises too difficult to put into action, or lead to excessive rumination.

On the other hand, working with a therapist who correctly identified my alexithymia, and helped me to manage that, led to some welcome improvements. Dealing with depressive episodes is much easier now that I have some tools to help me read my own emotional state and can more easily identify what's causing it - a prerequisite if any of the other psychological treatments are to be effective.

I worked with a therapist in the 1980s who said two things that indicated, apart from actual diagnosis, that she understood some things about me that were new ideas to me.

1. "I am curious why you are so unable to take advantage of support."

and

2. "You will always have trouble finding the right balance between too little stimulation and too much."

Of course Asperger's was not in common use at that time, and I was clearly too high functioning to have classic autism. She did, however, notice areas that were problematic for me; and I am grateful that she didn't misidentify the problems as part of some syndrome or other.

No doubt I was depressed, I was depressed because I didn't accept myself and I was frustrated with other people. Depression isn't always caused by a chemical imbalance. I was never actually given the depression diagnoses probably because it was explained by other things. Disability, environment; treatment from peers, and being misunderstood.

I don't think I was ever diagnosed with it at all, even though I've had many of the symptoms and was put on antidepressants that made me much worse and unable to function at all. The mental health care where I live is horrible. Most of the psychiatrists and therapists have gone to the major cities in Canada or to the States, the latter of which is where the real money is and they don't have to treat patients like they're actual people.

I've only been diagnosed with Schizophrenia Form Disorder (wrongly), a learning disability, and finally, after half my life was wasted and the other half almost completely ruined, Asperger's Syndrome.

Partly, and yes...it seemed to be bipolar once I was given an SSRI without a mood stabilizer (it caused me to hallucinate, supposedly), which at one point turned into feeling both depressed and hypomanic (without medication at the time, with sleeping at odd hours and not eating right for me) instead of it alternating quickly...not. fun (and scary). Another time, a mental health counselor diagnosed dysthymia (as the main concern, instead of the autism) but I wasn't depressed, I also wasn't acting depressed.

So true.