as small as a world and as large as alone

10:59am May 26, 2014

chavisory:

youneedacat:

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?)

“…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.”

YEARS.

It was about 2 years between between starting to realize it was a distinct possibility and admitting to another person that I even thought it could be true.  It was another four years of self-searching and ruling out other possibilities before I went to get an official confirmation.  Granted I’ve taken the longest of practically anyone I know.  But I know no one who self-identifies as autistic, who either took one online quiz, or read one article, and went “Oh hey I’m autistic!”  Although those things often provide the spark of recognition to look deeper.

(Are there a non-zero number of people who have done that?  Probably.  But having met not a single solitary one of them, I’m skeptical that this is some kind of epidemic of uninformed self-diagnosis going on.)

But everyone I know has gone through some kind of intensive process ranging from weeks to years long in order to fully accept that this is the only frame of reference in which their life makes sense.  Because the stigma against autism and the stigma against self-diagnosis are both actually still really high.

(And I’ve also been professionally misdiagnosed with other things based on a single checklist, if even that.)

More than that… I was officially diagnosed with autism when I was 14, and I went through a years-long process of learning to understand autism, that exactly mirrored how self-diagnosed people do it, and only after I did all that could I truly accept that i was autistic, by the age of maybe… 23.  So yeah.  The official diagnosis counted for nothing without the self-understanding.  Aside from helping with services.

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