11:06am September 18, 2014

More diagnosis frustrations

Diagnosis is something that gets talked about a lot online. You’re not really autistic if you’ve self diagnosed. You don’t get to talk about it, or vent about it, or share about it, or self identify until you’ve talked with a licensed professional. You just don’t have the background, knowledge, or expertise to do any of that yourself.

Sound familiar?

So here’s the thing. I did all that. I went to a specialist, sat through hours of testing and evaluation, and she handed me my handy dandy diagnosis. Then I walked into another therapist’s office and he told me “you don’t seem like you’re on the spectrum”.

I wrote it off as a first impressions problem. After he got to know me, he would obviously see it too. Three sessions in now though and he’s still telling me the same thing, which leaves me at a crossroads.

There are clearly therapists out there that will diagnose me and treat me as autistic, and there are clearly therapists out there that will diagnose me and treat me as neurotypical. Which ones I choose to see is entirely up to me.

In the end, it still comes back to how I view myself and which judgement I think is more valid. In other words, my self diagnosis. Even after seeking and receiving an official Dx, it’s still an incredibly crucial component of how I view myself, how I deal with my problems, and where I look for resources and support.

So please, don’t harass or exclude those who have self diagnosed. It’s a much more important part of the process of understanding ourselves than you probably realize. And it doesn’t stop being important after we’ve been to see a professional either.

I am totally agreed with this.

I was professionally diagnosed before I knew what autism was. The idea of autism was totally useless to me until I went through the same process of research and self-discovery that people go through who self-diagnose. Yes, it helped me get services later on, but that’s all the official diagnosis did, beyond set me on the right path to eventually learn that I was autistic and what that meant. But the real information was in the research I did and finding out things from other autistic people, it wasn’t in the fact that my shrink looked at me and my mom’s description of my developmental history and instantly saw autism.

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