My experiences lead me to think that there are many more Aspies in the world than the statistics suggest. I has only been recently (by my time view) that children on the high functioning end of the autism scale have been diagnosed accurately. I would say that most with AS from my generation (I'm 47) never get an accurate diagnosis. The diagnostic focus has been on children in the early developmental stage, so adult criteria for AS are less clear. I believe that many adult aspies are diagnosed with OCD because of the overlap and there are plenty of adult diagnostic criteria.
Growing up in San Diego, I spent several years in special ed classes for Educationally Handicapped, Gifted children. There were two criteria to get in, an IQ test result of over 142 and extreme difficulty in school. Many of my classmates were diagnosed with ADD. At least one of those, I believe was an Aspie based on his physical manifestations (near constant hand flapping and body twisting). The only psychological diagnosis I can remember getting back then was Paranoid Schizophrenic, Childhood Type.
In my mid-thirties, I ended up in the hospital with severe depression and anxiety caused by stress at work. (I can cope with the depression, but the anxiety is unbearable.) At that time I was diagnosed with OCD and discovered that SSRI antidepressants like Zoloft and Prozac just make matters worse and I had to take the old tricyclic antidepressants which have a lot of very unpleasant side effects. OCD explained quite a bit, but it never quite fit. 12 years later and I find myself back in the hospital. Work stress again, but at least this time I saw it coming. This time, a diagnosis of Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder. (Never let a doctor give you a formal diagnosis of a personality disorder if you can avoid it. Medical insurance mental health parity laws usually exclude personality disorders from protection. Most doctors will change the diagnosis to a related disorder that does provide protection without batting an eye if you raise the issue.) After getting out that time, the psychiatrist I was seeing for meds, changed my diagnosis to Bipolar Disorder (I have no idea where that came from, since generally I have abnormally low mood swings.). She started me on different drugs for that. First it was Seroquel, which made me manic in the afternoon, so she put me on Abilify, which turned out to be a disaster. Within a month of that I was back in the hospital, worse than ever. It took nearly a month to crawl back out of the hospital this time, but Cymbalta had come out and it works on the depression without screwing up half of my parasympathethic nervous system. Darn good thing as the work stress only escalated steadily after getting out of the hospital.
It has only been recently after reading article after article on the preponderance of AS in IT, that I started in researching AS. After consistently scoring between 38 and 44 on the AQ test and seeing results from the Aspie-quiz online that I seriously considered AS and started to try and get a formal diagnosis. Big problem is that AS specialists invariably don't know what to do with an adult.
Well, it looks like I've run off at the keyboard as usual
11 Oct 2008, 7:47 pm
