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Officially diagnosed. Now what ?

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Austinfrom1995
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16 Jan 2016, 8:57 pm

zkydz wrote:
Austinfrom1995 wrote:
zkydz wrote:
Austinfrom1995 wrote:
zkydz wrote:
Austinfrom1995 wrote:
Yigeren wrote:
I just was diagnosed today. I feel almost like I don't believe it. I'm afraid that it's wrong, even though I feel like it's correct.

I don't really know how to explain it.


Welcome to the club! We don't have t-shirts yet, but the snack table is to your left. :)
Can I reserve mine in quadruple idiot size?

I'll skip the snack table....I'm a double dipper and that seems to just piss everybody off.......


Sure.

Ok, you sure? The chips are good.

Like I said, I'm a double dipper. No germ phobia here, but that's not most people......


Ah, ok. :)
Backpacked a lot while growing up. I learned real quick to pick it up and dust it/wash it off if it fell in the fire or the ground. Go a meal or two when walking all day with a pack up and down hills and mountains.....food takes on a different meaning then LOL


Lol.


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GodzillaWoman
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16 Jan 2016, 10:17 pm

black0441 wrote:
GodzillaWoman wrote:
I've been addressing things bit by bit, mostly by priority, and it's still ongoing.

Thanks for that post! That looks like a great roadmap that's very similar to what I've been thinking. Except I'm only a tiny bit of the way through Step 1 :)

I did start seeing a therapist with experience with autism, even before I got diagnosed. In just a few weeks, it made a huge difference in my life. It really opened my eyes to a lot of behaviors/feelings/beliefs I had that were hurting me without any benefit, and I didn't even know it. Even though anxiety has been omnipresent in my life (I remember the first time I collapsed from anxiety I was maybe 6 years old), I literally didn't know I experienced it.

I had always been terrified of any sort of mental health treatment. I was pretty sure I had everyone fooled into thinking I was normal, but I was also afraid that someone who was trained would see through all that and have me locked up for being insane. It was such a relief to find out I could get help without spending the rest of my life in a straitjacket.

Thanks!

I've been doing therapy on and off since college, but never felt like it was really dealing with this mysterious issue that was bothering me. I'd go in there and unload my problems, she'd say "how do you feel about that?" and I'd feel like I was wasting my time. I started out with a deep fear of talking to mental health people too--I was badly frightened as a child when I saw The Snake Pit with Olivia DeHavilland, in which her character was locked up in a very bad mental hospital. I thought that's what happened to anybody who wasn't normal. It took a college acquaintance to convince me that I could get some help and not be locked up just for feeling different.


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Diagnosed Bipolar II in 2012, Autism spectrum disorder (moderate) & ADHD in 2015.


GodzillaWoman
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16 Jan 2016, 11:59 pm

Yigeren wrote:
Yes, I am going to get a therapist soon and start learning :) I have to find one that specializes, or at least is familiar with, ASD. Because the last one and I couldn't communicate effectively. She told me that I was just like everyone else, that I was assuming people thought I was weird but that I was wrong, and that she had many clients just like me. She didn't believe me when I told her how I just knew I was really different my whole life. That I could tell that I was putting people off. And we had so much trouble communicating.

When I told her I thought I had AS, she basically told me I was imagining things. When I told her I thought I had an auditory processing disorder, she sort of laughed and said I'm trying to label myself. Well guess what? The psychologist just suggested that I probably have an auditory processing disorder. Sometimes I really dislike medical professionals, because they make assumptions that I know nothing, and never realize how smart that I am.

So first step: find a therapist. Second step: maybe join an ASD group? Who knows. I'm still really confused and emotional.

Wow, I got this from several mental health professionals when I first started thinking I might have ASD. My first psychiatrist laughed at me (I fired her), the second psychiatrist told me that there was no test for autism in adults and that "we don't do labels", and my therapist said I couldn't have it because I didn't act like the two autistic men she was counseling. I convinced the second psychiatrist to give me a referral by showing her research on how autism manifests differently in females, and pointing out that I had been getting labels all my life: ret*d, stupid, ugly, freak, weirdo, Carrie (like in the Stephen King movie), and Wednesday Addams (of the Addams Family). "Autistic" was mild by comparison, and might actually lead to something useful.

Doctors have a bad tendency to make snap decisions if they can't diagnose something in a 10 minute consult. I think some of it is because of their overloaded schedules, but some of it indicates a doctor who is used to being dismissive of his patients, and is burned out--all odd cases look like hypochondria to them.

There's an old doctor's saying: "If you hear hoofbeats, don't look for zebras." This means, when reviewing symptoms, they are more likely to be from a common disease or condition than a rare one.

I have a corollary: "If you don't see horses, the hoofbeats are not necessarily unicorns." Meaning, if the symptoms can't be explained by a common condition, that doesn't automatically mean that the patient is making it up.


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Diagnosed Bipolar II in 2012, Autism spectrum disorder (moderate) & ADHD in 2015.