as small as a world and as large as alone, Thank you so much. Yes, it was a serious question....

10:37pm August 15, 2014

Anonymous asked: Thank you so much. Yes, it was a serious question. Right now I have an asperger's diagnosis and a bunch of diagnosed mental illnesses. Do you know ways I can get documentation of catatonia and autism (which I fit better than asperger's) if my parents won't support me in that? And... is it good to get those diagnosis, if I maybe could live alone, but not in a way people would call "unstable" and probably would institutionalize me if they saw it? Will people use them as more reason to lock me up?

I don’t know the answer to any of those questions. And I don’t want to lie to you and pretend like I do. :-(

I found that having an autistic disorder + catatonia diagnosis was very useful to me. In my day, it was autistic disorder, then Central Nervous System Disorder NOS with Sensory Integration Dysfunction and Catatonia. That’s how they wrote it. Because they didn’t have tags for sensory integration dysfunction or autistic catatonia. Or they’d say “autism with associated movement disorder”, which may be a better way for you to go if you want to avoid the psychiatric overtones of catatonia.

Again, unfortunately, I’m going to have to ask my followers if anyone knows good advice in the situation described above? This is the same person who was wondering about the Lanterman Act and getting serivices in California. Please don’t give them the kind of advice that assumes that the world is a wonderful place where everything always turns out okay in the end and the system has everyone’s best interests at heart, because that’s not the world we live in. But any lived experiences, anyone you know who’s been through any of this, that would be really helpful, as long as you’re clear it’s your experiences and that things could go much better, or much worse, for someone else. (I’m putting the disclaimer here myself, because I know how true that is, two people in the same situation can get two very different outcomes just by tweaking a small number of factors, including what their diagnostic interviewer had for lunch that day.)