Anyone else feel angry for not getting an early diagnosis?

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People try to do the best for their kids, which unfortunately doesn't always play out as intended. If you don't understand a problem well and some organization that many people claim are experts who are working to advance the best interests of people with that issue, offers help, you might be gullible enough to fall for them.

The main problem is still the quack, not the dupes who didn't know better.

Ahh ... but until the dupes are fully educated and relieved of their fears, the quacks are hunting in a baited field!

I won't argue that. I might not have worded that in the best way possible.
They don't cease to be a problem, I just don't assign them blame. I feel it's unfair to expect people to be better than they are.

If it is unfair to expect the victims to be any better than they are, then it is also unfair to expect the quacks to be any better than they are.  I believe there is enough blame to go all around.

I have had many "I told you so" moments with people that I've warned against quacks, con-games, pyramid schemes, religious leaders, and politicians.  Not only do the victims not know, they refuse to accept the knowledge of what is really going on -- by ignoring the unpleasant facts if favor of the pleasant lies, they are only fooling themselves, and they have only themselves to blame.

Of course, the quacks are not blameless, but who can blame someone for taking what has been given to them?

Unfortunately no matter who we place the blame on, there's a blameless person at the mercy of uninformed idiots.

But hey, it's not all bad, eventually they'll join us here.

Me? Very angry and bitter about being diagnosed thirty years too late to be remotely useful.

School was a complete struggle/nightmare because I just could not understand what was going on nor keep up. If I'd had that diagnosis I could've had actual support and maybe not been Ungraded in multiple subjects.

I'm not sure.
One of my querks is that I procrastinate, I think that maybe a diagnosis would have had me do that even more.
In any way, I didn't get diagnosed, and I don't know how it had been if I had.
Perhaps better, perhaps worse, no way to know.

/Mats

I wasn't diagnosed until the age of 44, and I'm still grateful I discovered a framework to understand what made me different all that time. I don't think I was ready to hear a diagnosis much earlier; I wonder if it may have made me give up on my dreams. Back when I was a child, there was no diagnosis of Asperger's anyway. It may be natural to be angry about aspects of our past or what might have been, but not poisoning ourselves with that anger is a noble challenge.

I'm glad I didn't know when I was young, because not knowing meant I wasn't afraid to stretch myself and try doing the things I wanted to do. I lived most of my life assuming that if I tried hard enough and for long enough, I could learn to do the same things as everyone else. This has served me well and helped me learn how to function OK in society.

Of course, after a while I started getting burnout issues, which led to me getting a diagnosis. And right now I'm grateful for the diagnosis, as knowing this is just the way I am and that I can't keep "trying to be normal" lets me take some of that habitual pressure off myself.

If I'd known when I was younger, though, I don't think I would have become the same person. With more support, I might not have tried so hard or developed the level of persistence and independence that I have now. A basic level of support for kids who are struggling is good, but aspies are always going to struggle in life to some extent and it's good to be ready to face that on transition to adulthood.

I don't know if "angry" is the right word. I'm more just frustrated. I'm 45, and I just figured out I'm likely Aspie. When I was growing up there just was not much awareness at all around autism yet. So I can't really be angry. Who am I supposed to be angry at? My parents both have their own mental health challenges and never knew about autism either. I do wish that I had known though. There is a ton of things I wish I had known. I have struggled with bouts of severe depression since age 19. I have an extremely harsh inner voice. A large amount of my depression is this inner voice beating me up for my various failures, especially failures in social situations. If I had known that a ton of my social failures were due to me just being bad at reading people or picking up on sarcasm (and other various social traits associated with Asperger's), it would have saved me a ton of grief. It would still suck to fail in social situations, but at least I'd know WHY I was struggling, and I would not compare myself to other people so much. I would have given myself more slack. And I might have even been able to work on some of the things I'm really bad at, such as reading body language. So yeah I wish I had known but I'm not mad at anybody. I'm mad that our society still largely sucks for people on the autism spectrum, even after years of improved awareness. I will say that.

I'm frustrated that I DID get a diagnosis when I was only 8 years old, and as I'm female with only Asperger's (level 1 autism), it baffles me how other females who grew up in the 1990s and 2000s (when Asperger's was heard of) managed to slip through the cracks.

Getting a diagnosis in childhood makes me feel like I'm severe, and I find it weird when I read everywhere that girls with less severe autism (Asperger's) don't get a diagnosis until adulthood when I got a diagnosis in childhood.
I didn't have any speech delays at all and I had reached all of my milestones at the average stages when I was a baby/toddler. I was even fully potty-trained before I was 2.

As soon as I got a diagnosis it somehow got blabbed out to the whole class and I started getting bullied by one or two girls in my class. It's like the kids were all afraid of me because of having a label that they didn't understand, and I just felt singled out.

Even my little cousins knew. One time when I was 9 I was playing with a dolls house with my 5-year-old cousin, and we were pretending the dolls were ourselves. I made the doll that represented my mum say, "Joe90 is a very bad girl for misbehaving!" and my cousin made her doll say, "yeah, she's got Asperger's syndrome." I was rather alarmed to hear that from a 5-year-old, but I pretended I didn't hear and just carried on playing.

And I loved playtime (recess) at school and I wasn't reluctant to play with other children or join in games, but all I kept thinking was, "hang on, I have this Asperger's syndrome thing, doesn't that mean I wouldn't be wanting to play with other children? Shouldn't I be standing by the wall on my own flapping my hands every day instead?"
Plus I was like a bug under a microscope with the teachers.

It was like I wasn't me any more, I was the diagnosis. It made me feel disabled and even dehumanized. If I hadn't have been diagnosed at such a young age I think I would have felt differently about myself.

I was diagnosed even earlier.

I don’t feel I’m “severe” now.

And you’re not “severe,” either.

Yes but you say you didn't speak until a later age than normal. Usually if a child doesn't talk by age 3 it's a big sign that something might be wrong, and the parents will want to find out why, even in your generation time.

I didn’t talk till age 5.

But my point is that early diagnosis doesn’t equate to “severe.”

It was because of your overt behaviors that you got diagnosed early. You drew attention to yourself with those behaviors, like I drew attention to myself with mine. But your Asperger’s probably wasn’t seen as being “severe” even then.

The people who were diagnosed late didn’t draw attention to themselves. Their symptoms weren’t “caught” within an overworked school system. And because of school budgets. One had to display disruptive symptoms in order to get assessed.

This wasn’t meant as any sort of criticism of you.

This was meant as a factual statement. People who are quiet and have autism “inwardly” are just not noticed in classes of 30 or so kids.

It’s the kids who disrupt the class who are noticed. The teacher wants to stop the disruption, so the overt kids are referred for assessment.

I was diagnosed before I went to school. But I would have been diagnosed during my time in school, too. Because I was disruptive.

I know you wasn't criticising.

It's not just a child's behaviour at school, it's also their behaviour at home. The way I behaved for my parents was enough to notice that I had emotional issues, as it was nothing to do with my upbringing or home environment. Other Aspies my age who weren't diagnosed in childhood couldn't have been a hellion for their parents like I was. I know all kids are a handful to an extent and can have their moments, but I was REALLY bad. I don't know if it was because I had ADHD as well. I was hyper, tantrum-prone, demanding, whiny and difficult. In one day I could be pleasant, to suddenly throwing myself on the floor and start having a tantrum because of not getting my own way, to being really excitable and hyperactive, to be whinging and crying. It was more worse than just ordinary kid hyperactivity, I had more tantrums than the average kid, and I whined and moaned so much that people started calling me Mona.