as small as a world and as large as alone

9:29am May 26, 2014

dubiousculturalartifact:

Me getting ‘officially diagnosed’ with ADHD after asking my psychiatrist if it was a possibility: “ADHD, huh? Oh, okay. Let me look up the diagnosis for that. Oh, here’s a one and a half page checklist of possible symptoms. Why don’t you fill that out? Oh, yeah, you ticked ‘yes’ or ‘probably’ to most of them? Well, I guess you’ve got ADHD, then. Hold on a second, let me google which medication I should be prescribing you.”

Me ‘self-diagnosing’ myself with autism, and having my psychiatrist tell me that I ‘shouldn’t worry so much about labels’: Talking to multiple people with autism about their own experiences, taking multiple online tests and getting a positive on all of them, reading message boards and blog posts and articles written by and for autistic people, finding the section on autism in my university library and reading or at least skimming through well over a dozen books on the subject, making detailed explanatory lists of the ways that my own behaviours matched up with various versions of the diagnostic criteria, recalling the way I identify strongly with characters many autistic people consider to be autistic, stimming a whole lot from the stress of thinking about it all, finally recognizing my stimming for what it was, remembering the two or three separate instances in my life when an autistic person (unprompted) asked me if I was on the spectrum), carefully considering my personal history and experiences over the entirety of my life, and coming to the conclusion slowly over the period of a number of weeks.

So can we please stop acting like psychiatrists know everything and anyone who self-diagnoses does it on a foolish whim with zero thought put into it?

Seriously you know how I was (mis)diagnosed with schizophrenia?

My shrink, who had never met me before, went down the DSM criteria and asked me to give him examples of how each one applied to me.  He didn’t even ask whether they applied, he just asked me to give him examples.  Given the way I communicated at that age, I didn’t stand a chance of saying “No, this doesn’t apply.”  And he wouldn’t have given me a chance either.  (He skipped the part of the criteria where you have to say that various other conditions don’t apply, of course, because they knew damn well I fulfilled the criteria for some of those other conditions.)

There is no way that doing that is a better way of figuring out if you have something, than the research people put into self-diagnosis most of the time.  I mean both can be right and both can be wrong but come on people.  (And the idea that being wrong about yourself is such a horrible horrible thing, too, what’s up with that?)

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