as small as a world and as large as alone, ramblyyorkshireman: ...

4:10pm April 29, 2014

richies-blog-of-rage-and-bile:

selfdiagnosedautistics:

protomagicalgirl:

Do not fucking self-diagnose autism

Do not take it as a joke

You’re not autistic if you’re “super socially awkward!! XDD”.

It’s not fun. It’s not a fucking joke. If you exhibit signs of a mental illness go to a doctor or therapist.

s t o p

I am autistic.

After months of research, talking with autistic people, self-observation and introspection, this is the conclusion i came to.

This explains everything i have ever wondered about. All my confusion, all of those “why the fuck does no one get it” moments. All the things that make me sister hate me, all the things that got me odd looks, all those times when my teacher pulled me aside for a talk.

This explains my entire fucking life.

Autism is everything about my life that has ever made me different, that has made it impossible for me to truly connect with other people in the same way everyone else does.

Please don’t tell me that i am not allowed to use this to reassure myself that i am not wrong, that there is an explanation, simply because i have not been able to get a diagnosis.

If you think you’re autistic, see a doctor and get tests. Do not relegate your personal issues to a mental disorder.

What the fuck, is that “selfdiagnosedautistics“ even real?

You are NOT a doctor. You are NOT a trained medical proffesional. You are NOT able to give an accurate diagnosis.

And let it be clear, I fucking will tell you that you can’t use this to reassure yourself that you are ‘not wrong’ (sic) because you are not a medical proffesional. You have no experience or formal education. All you doing is blaming your own personal issues on a lifelong developmental disability. A lifelong developmental disability that I have had to cope with all my life. If you think you have it, visit a specialist. Until then you are just like every cunt out there who thinks things like social anxiety is cool or think that depression makes them look deep and brooding. All you do is trivialise struggles, my fucking struggle.

No, it’s more like you right here are projecting all your personal issues onto people who’ve done nothing to hurt you at all. You don’t even know this person, and yet you are so sure you know they’re the same as someone who thinks depression is cool. Which they haven’t said at all.

It’s like you don’t even want to know them. You don’t want to know what they’ve been through. You don’t care. You’re just going through a script. You think you know what they think of themselves, and what their motivations are, so you don’t even try to listen to them. You don’t know why they think they’re autistic, because you haven’t asked. You’re just so certain they are a little socially awkward and think it’s cool or something.

Simon Baron-Cohen once said that most people who self-diagnose with autism are likely to be correct. I believe the figure he gave was over 90%. I may not give a lot of credence to his views on autism and gender, for instance, but I think he’s a little more of an experienced professional than you are when it comes to diagnosing it. Like a lot more.

So basically, you’re talking to someone who probably has just as much of a lifelong developmental disability as you have, and telling them that it’s a lifelong developmental disability. As if they don’t know that. They may even have more problems related to autism than you do. You don’t know. You don’t know anything about them. And yet you’re so content to judge.

I'm fortunate that when I ended up in a psychiatric institution, they randomly assigned someone to me who was able to rapidly recognize that I was autistic and go through the diagnostic process. Not everyone is that fortunate. Not everyone has the ability (for too many reasons to list) to go to a professional and get diagnosed. And in the context of finding support from one autistic person to another, nobody should have to have a professional diagnosis. It does nobody any harm for an autistic person to go undiagnosed while they learn about themselves and learn strategies to help them in the world.

Autism isn’t a thing, anyway. It’s just a word someone came up with to describe a wide variety of people, who sometimes have a lot in common and sometimes have almost nothing in common. The concept of autism is only useful so long as it helps people understand themselves, get support from each other, learn about strategies that can help them, or get services. And unless you need professional services, you do not need a diagnosis to do any of those other things. Nor should you. It shouldn’t even matter whether a person seeking out community relations with other autistic people falls on one side of the imaginary line between autistic and non autistic people or not. All that matters is that we can benefit from each other.

In some ways, I think self-diagnosis can be more important than professional diagnosis. I was professionally diagnosed several times, but I got no usefulness out of that diagnosis on a personal level until I went through the same sort of research that people go through in order to self-diagnose. I’m glad I have the professional diagnosis, because I need pretty extensive services in order to survive in the adult world, and I needed SSI/DAC benefits. But the professional element of the diagnosis is not what helped me understand myself, and if you don’t need the services, then you don’t need a professional diagnosis.

I feel obligated to stand up and defend self-diagnosed people because they are not hurting you but you are hurting them. There is nothing about self-diagnosis that takes away from your struggles. Nothing. There is nothing about self-diagnosis that harms me in any way, and I’m far from mildly affected by autism. The only thing it does is hurt your ego, and I can’t make myself give a crap about that.

Meanwhile people who need to self-diagnose are often extremely vulnerable, more likely to fall through the cracks and end up homeless, starving, or worse, because they can’t easily access services even if they need them. You can’t know how severe someone’s issues are by whether they have a professional diagnosis or not – there’s people who function perfectly fine on their own who are professionally diagnosed, and there’s people who are barely able to function at all who are self-diagnosed. And self-diagnosed people need autistic community much more in many ways, because they don’t have access to more official means of support. So I will be damned if I will stand by and watch people try and drive them out for the sake of their own ego and the specialness of their own suffering.

Mind you, I’m not saying you haven’t suffered. I’m not saying you haven’t been through hell, for all I know. Hell, I’ve suffered and been through hell too, both as a result of being autistic, and as a result of the way people have treated me for being autistic. But someone else’s self-diagnosis does not change that in any way. It does not trivialize it. If anything, you’re automatically trivializing what they’ve been through, given that you haven’t even stopped to figure out what they have and haven’t been through.

And you can’t do that. You have to take people as individuals. You can’t generalize about people who are self-diagnosed any more than you can generalize about people who are professionally diagnosed. So unless you’ve taken the time to genuinely get to know each person that you denounce in this way, then stop with the denouncing.

I will always be one person who is professionally diagnosed with Autistic Disorder, sometimes with qualifiers like severe added, who will stand up for people who are self-diagnosed. Because someone frigging has to. And because I’ve actually gotten to know enough self-diagnosed people on an individual level, to know that this "they’re trying to trivialize our suffering” crap is BS.

Notes: