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If your friend's got a diagnosis there's a solid chance the school can/has to do something to accomodate him. It might be possible to have him do all theoretical work by himself, not in class with the rest of the students. There's a few students at my own school with that arrangement, but they started out in class and were granted leave to work on their own because they were clearly a cut above the rest. It's asking a lot of the school to do it like this from the start, though.
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Jan 23, 2022 10:06
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signalnoise posted:For me that's been because when you have more people to satisfy, it can feel like you need to find one way to act that satisfies all of them. Not only can this be a really big hangup because for me, for a long time, I ended up trying too hard to please everyone and felt like I couldn't be myself to the point that I felt like I didn't even know who I really was anymore, but also, you can't please everyone anyways, so I ended up routinely getting frustrated and disappointed. One of the harder things to deal with, which has been talked about in this thread, is dealing with "professional" types because it's like there's some expected way to act or something, whether it's doctors or whatever, and it's like you're trying to give the *right* expression for the amount of pain or whatever. If they wanna learn to deal with more people, it's gonna take practice, and it's gonna probably take some thought actively thinking about it IMO. But that's just based on my own experience. I dunno see what other people think too. Practice/Experience goes a long way. I don't put much effort into fitting expectations and I just stick to being direct and limiting need to interact. In some settings it's ok to just pay attention and ignore the setting. I default to being quiet and polite in settings that I'm uncomfortable in just to minimize chances I say something that makes me look wrong. New jobs have always been weird and I just focus on the job and ignore things until I have a good comfortability with what I'm doing and the people I need to interact with. I have a sort of suggestion for the trade school thing, if the setting might be awkward then some warm up things could help. I dunno how similar it'd be, but things like painting/art classes are a good way to get used to group things that are unfamiliar. That might just be a me thing.
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Jan 23, 2022 10:10
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nesamdoom posted:His friend was a great rep for how people should be though. Dude let him get away with extrensicities and just focused on being a good friend, he didn't cut him slack or anything and I liked the dynamic shown. Well it's also the premise of the show that Sheldon, underneath that prickly facade, is incredibly vulnerable and this whole rigmarole is for his protection. Which is why, we're led to believe, Leonard puts up with everything from Sheldon because he actually understands this. If they stopped there, it wouldn't be so bad. But the show completely undercuts this potential character bedrock by ascribing their characters emotional centres to their mothers. Leonard is a doormat and a case-study for his mother, and Sheldon, while refusing to be a god-fearing country boy for his mother, can only be consoled by the Soft Kitty Song. I have never cringed so hard than the episodes where their mothers are featured, it's loving awful, particularly Leonards because his character is intentionally more "real" than Sheldon's. To be the sympathetic centre of the show but actually because he's a victim of his parent, that's how the show unmasked its real intentions. After that, it was downhill. Domineering mothers, are in fact the feature of the show, and fathers are absent. It must be something the writers are obsessed about. Perhaps they think that's how nerds are made or it's another dig at nd people.
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Jan 23, 2022 22:05
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I’m confused with masking and what makes it so Autism specific? Don’t we all kind of mask part of ourselves? Oscar Wilde once said “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” Most autistic people I know have never mentioned masking and mostly talk about having no filter which I assume is the complete opposite. One of my coworkers on his first day announced he was autistic, Jewish, and a Polygamist in an open marriage where another dude is banging one of his 2 wives. He has no filter which makes it okay to say terrible things too…sorry not sorry! He’d sometimes talk in a fake accent for absolutely no reason. He’s probably a goon and probably the worst person I ever met….mostly due to his obsession with his adopted teenage daughter sounded like grooming to me, and he threatened a woman in the office by accident and then threatened her for real after the miscommunication.
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Jan 24, 2022 05:19
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King Baby posted:I’m confused with masking and what makes it so Autism specific? Don’t we all kind of mask part of ourselves? Oscar Wilde once said “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” AFAB people are mostly likely to mask due to being socialized as female for however long IIRC. Also your coworker sounds like a lot of yikes.
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Jan 24, 2022 05:42
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Yes, everyone masks to some extent, but autistic people have to work harder to look "normal" for whatever social situation they're in than neurotypical people to, and it takes a specifically heavy toll. Or I guess they just don't ever learn to do it and burst out with inappropriate poo poo all the time.
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Jan 24, 2022 06:01
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Organza Quiz posted:Yes, everyone masks to some extent, but autistic people have to work harder to look "normal" for whatever social situation they're in than neurotypical people to, and it takes a specifically heavy toll. Or I guess they just don't ever learn to do it and burst out with inappropriate poo poo all the time. Or at some point get tired of it. There was only so much trying to fit in for me before I just was more comfortable being weird.
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Jan 24, 2022 06:56
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King Baby posted:I’m confused with masking and what makes it so Autism specific? Don’t we all kind of mask part of ourselves? Oscar Wilde once said “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” When Oscar Wilde talks about masking, he is talking the concept of the self and being "true". In that sense, the mask is a change of the persona you simply put on and the change is made. When we talk about masking just day to day as an autistic person trying to get along in a neurotypical world, that is not really the type of masking we're talking about. To use a different set of analogies, it's not about changing a pen stroke from blue to black, it's about keeping your hand steady. We don't mask to be understood as someone we are not, we mask to be understood as who we are. It is an accommodation for people who we think might expect a kind of social etiquette and cadence of social interaction, because if we don't, then what we say to them will be even less likely to be interpreted as we intended it. Not everyone is going to bother masking, hell some people use autism as an excuse not to mask or even to be an rear end in a top hat. However, for people who do mask, there's different amounts of effort required. Generally speaking it'll take more effort for an autistic person to effectively mask relative to someone who is the same but not autistic. This is because it requires more active thought to accomplish it. It's not about hiding terrible things about yourself in this kind of masking, it's about choosing phrasing that doesn't stick out as "off", having the appropriate amount of eye contact instead of too much or too little, making sure you have natural body language, and so on. So, for those of us who want to fit in at work and have nice, casual friendships and not be seen as a weirdo, it becomes a constant source of stress and fatigue when we are doing it. If we have to keep our guard up for some company meeting or interviews or whatever, that kind of masking, where it's all about mannerisms, is tiresome on top of poo poo like the lights being very high contrast, the smells being overbearing, not being able to hear who we're talking to very well amid all the noise, that kind of poo poo. Personally I have started to just be willing to burn some bridges and tell people if what they have to offer me is "you are the one who misspoke actually" then they can eat my poo poo when I'm dead
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Jan 24, 2022 07:24
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A YouTube video that explains Neurodiversity 101 by comparing neurodiverse traits and experiences to the character of Spider-Man. It touches on masking, among other issues. I like it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah1h3jTkpBU
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Jan 24, 2022 07:31
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For me, part of masking is about just not immediately saying what I think, and that takes a mental effort and definitely does not always work, IRL or online. I can say really stupid poo poo seemingly out of context and it's hopeless to even explain. It's obscure pattern-matching that only makes sense to me but is socially inappropriate. It's autistic Tourettes without the swearwords. As a child I didn't know how to mask, so it was a lot worse but later on I got better at it. And I'm sure I'm not alone in this, but I get the PTSD flashbacks of those episodes when I'm depressed, it's like the calling card of my brain trying to tell me I'm having a bad time. The problem with masking is that it's emotionally exhausting and again, it doesn't work. People figure out eventually that it's not really you or there's something odd going on. And I dread getting to the stage with people where I have to decide "is this person going to be a friend I trust with my real self?" because of course I've masked to some degree and am running out of my conversational strategies and the dead end is looming. Well before I had any idea what masking was but knowing I was to some degree "putting on a face" I already knew I had to get away from people and recharge, but in my 20's when I was living in share houses, that wasn't easy sometimes. And with the masking for me came the paranoia because if you're trying to act like a neurotypical and matching the signals, you're hypervigilant about the signals coming back and hyperanalytical about them and that leads to a lot of bad thoughts, low self-esteem and so on. Now I have to undo that stuff, which will be difficult, I've masked for so long, it's at least partly habitual. Sorry about the wall of text, thinking out loud 
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Jan 24, 2022 21:25
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There's also the fact that we are forced to mask because we are expected to understand and empathize with neurotypicals, but neurotypicals are not obligated to understand and empathize with us. Rejecting the mask means rejecting this double standard.
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Jan 24, 2022 21:51
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ewe2 posted:The problem with masking is that it's emotionally exhausting and again, it doesn't work. People figure out eventually that it's not really you or there's something odd going on. And I dread getting to the stage with people where I have to decide "is this person going to be a friend I trust with my real self?" Yes. And people ask me, "What do you think?" There's emotions in emotions and it's so hard to give a straightforward neurotypical acceptable answer. It's hard to get my thoughts down on paper (or screen in this case) because there are so many of them. They bounce around in my head all day making it impossible to do anything if those thoughts are bad and destructive (like when my anxiety thoughts get loud).
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Jan 25, 2022 00:26
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nesamdoom posted:I just thought of something. Does anyone else use bracketing in text communication? Commas are sort of built in, but they are a pain and I think I'm the only one I know that will nest tangetial thought lines into parenthesis and I would love to know if something in my head makes me want to type things, sometimes, the way I'd write maths into a program or calculator(for example(not a decent example, but rather something easy) I'd be typing this and need to nest sidenotes in the sidenote(and then sometimes it also gets deeper(like at some point of time I'll hit having nested so much stuff, but it works to go back through my line of thought while typing when I proofread))). lol i do this a lot if i don't stop myself, i dunno what it is but i think it's me trying to communicate little extra bits of information in case the other person just doesn't get what exactly i'm getting at or something because i'm used to people not immediately getting what i mean a lot of the times. i'm not a maths or computer guy though but i do get what you mean i do academic proofreading sometimes and i actively try to weed out brackets because they either convey something that needs to be in the main sentence or it's something totally irrelevant that should be cut
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Jan 25, 2022 01:55
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dingu! It looks like you're writing a reply to an announcement. Would you like your AuTZM plugin to determine the appropriate amount of verbosity, flowery language, and expression of concern that should be applied to this response based on your relationship and the nature of the announcement?
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Jan 25, 2022 06:01
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signalnoise posted:dingu! loving Bill Gates and his Autism plugin.
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Jan 25, 2022 06:33
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Not gonna lie, if it got results I would use the poo poo out of it
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Jan 25, 2022 08:03
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I finally watched Encanto last night and I've decided that a bunch of Madrigal family members are neuroatypical. Here are my armchair diagnoses: Abuela Alma: PTSD Tia Pepa: Anxiety Disorder Tio Bruno: OCD Luisa: Anxiety Disorder Dolores: Autism Camilo: ADHD Mirabel: Autism My rulings are final. No appeals
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Jan 26, 2022 23:35
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How do y'all afford to get diagnosed as adults? How do you feel being diagnosed affected how people view you? I'm in Canada, where healthcare is mostly free, and an assessment still costs 2-3K out of pocket (i.e., not usually covered by healthcare). My doctor and my therapist both suggested I get assessed, but I cannot afford that right now. I'm also wondering if I should even bother. I'm in my 30s and I'm worried about how my behaviour might affect my job/career prospects. I've had some traumatizing experiences in the past that have led to me leaving jobs (I can provide details if people are interested, but I don't want to be too long-winded at the moment). But, I'm also worried that if I get labelled as having ASD that people will be even more negative towards me (again, based on past experiences).
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Jan 27, 2022 12:54
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Dr.D-O posted:How do y'all afford to get diagnosed as adults? How do you feel being diagnosed affected how people view you? I waited until I had a good job and didn't mind spending the money on it. The therapist I found had a conversation with me first where she explained that we don't actually need to go down the diagnosis route if I didn't want to, she could just help me with whatever my issues actually are without needing to put a formal label on it. That might be something to explore if you don't feel the need to be assessed and would rather spend the money on actual therapy rather than hours of being interrogated about your childhood (it was not a process I enjoyed). You also don't have to tell anyone about it if you do get diagnosed, you can choose who to share it with.
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Jan 27, 2022 13:04
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Dr.D-O posted:
Is that kind of a diagnosis not kept private? Like, getting the diagnosis doesn't mean you wear it around on a sash with the rest of your comorbidity badges for everyone to look at. You just have it on record somewhere that requires a level of access that your neighbor likely doesn't have. Here in the US, when I worked as a pharmacy technician, if I called out a name to pick up medications at the pharmacy desk, that'd be grounds for a fine. If I knowingly disclosed information about a patient's medications within earshot of someone who should be excluded from that conversation, like some rando who was behind them in line, then that's like a 10000 dollar fine, if you're being inspected at the time, which is when anyone would fine you. If you want to go get that autism diagnosis for your own understanding, that's a good reason to pursue it, in my opinion. Avoiding it because of what your friends might think, though... Well that just opens a whole bag of hosed up poo poo that I have to really address here. This *bothers* me. So in this scenario we are presented, option A is that we find out, and if we find out, there is a possibility that our friends do not like us afterward Option B is that we do not find out. What we can assume from option A though is that there is a possibility that our friends would not like us if they knew we were autistic I'm looking at this choice of like well on one hand, I find out about myself, and maybe my friends turn out to be shitheads. But, if I don't find out about myself, then they can still be my friends. That is ultimately the way it goes no matter what context it is, unless you're talking about a diagnosis being forcefully shown to people without your consent. That's total bullshit, we should have privacy still. Anyways though, you finding out that you have a diagnosis is not a catalyst that turns your friends into shitheads. If they turn out to be shitheads, then they always were, and you just didn't have an opportunity to see it yet. But as soon as you do see that opportunity and it's not about you, it's someone else they're loving with, but it could have been you, will you still want friends like that anyway? Because that's what you're risking it for. The upshot is that the winning bet is to be good enough friends to talk to them about it like it's not even weird because they know you as a person in a more complete way than a simple diagnosis could tell them.
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Jan 27, 2022 14:08
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signalnoise posted:Is that kind of a diagnosis not kept private? Like, getting the diagnosis doesn't mean you wear it around on a sash with the rest of your comorbidity badges for everyone to look at. You just have it on record somewhere that requires a level of access that your neighbor likely doesn't have. Here in the US, when I worked as a pharmacy technician, if I called out a name to pick up medications at the pharmacy desk, that'd be grounds for a fine. If I knowingly disclosed information about a patient's medications within earshot of someone who should be excluded from that conversation, like some rando who was behind them in line, then that's like a 10000 dollar fine, if you're being inspected at the time, which is when anyone would fine you. Sorry, I should have been more clear. It's not so much about friends or neighbours not liking me. I'm very worried about employers having an issue with it. Maybe I should give a little context to help explain. Hopefully, this story won't be too long. Several years ago, I was in a graduate program being trained to be a healthcare provider. A full half of the program was an internship where you had to work in the field being supervised by a licensed professional in your role. Essentially, it was an apprenticeship where we would work in the job but have less responsibility than in a real, paying position. The supervisor you were assigned was essentially random. I was assigned to a woman who had extreme biases against anyone with mental health problems, but especially against anyone with anything neurodevelopmental (e.g., ASD, ADHD, LD). This is slightly ironic because she worked in the mental health sector. Anyway, this woman did not like me from the get-go. Not because I was bad at my job, but because I occasionally became visibly anxious (e.g., become a little flustered in a new situation, take extra time to prepare for a meeting or presentation, sometimes stutter when speaking). She saw this as a weakness and told me as much on a daily basis. She would also openly mock me during meetings with colleagues. Then, one day, she turned to me and told me that she was going to fail my internship. Not for any reason related to my performance, though. As I said, I wasn't bad at the job. She just felt that I was "lacking" some of what she thought was crucial to doing the job. So, she lied about my work, claiming that I had suddenly made a lot of crucial mistakes and that I was unfit to work in the field. It tanked my career in healthcare and I'm just now (nearly 7 years later) recovering from the psychological damage the whole experience caused. I just don't want that to happen again.
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Jan 27, 2022 14:58
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Holy poo poo dude someone should have advocated for you. That sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.
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Jan 27, 2022 15:15
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That's a really awful thing to have happened to you, no one should be treated like that and that person should not be in that kind of position. Having said that, getting a formal diagnosis or not doesn't change the likelihood of that happening again, because it is still something that only you will know and which you can choose to disclose or not disclose to whoever. You will still be the exact same person so if they're going to have a problem with you they will whether you have a diagnosis or not.
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Jan 27, 2022 15:20
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FilthyImp posted:Holy poo poo dude someone should have advocated for you. That sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen. At the time, the administrators of the graduate program were trying to advocate for me. They went out of their way to produce evidence that I was good at my job and confronted the internship supervisor with it. I really appreciated it. However, due to the way confidentiality works, my internship supervisor could just make up whatever bullshit she needed to get rid of me. There was no way for anyone to actually prove what she was saying since only she had access to the records. So, anything I could say in my defence would be countered with a lie that would deny my experience and make me look worse. A couple of years ago I looked into getting a lawyer, but this would fall under "education law" and no one near me practices that and I can't afford an out-of-province lawyer.
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Jan 27, 2022 15:28
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Organza Quiz posted:
Good point. I guess I'm just being paranoid because of my past experience. Thank you for your kind words as well.
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Jan 27, 2022 15:30
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That is some "batman villain backstory" poo poo
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Jan 27, 2022 15:35
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That is extremely lovely but unless you're forced by law to tell your employer, your colleagues, family, friends, whoever that you're autistic, the option is there to keep it private. And that's what I'd recommend, anyway. A lot of people have a lot of lovely takes on autism. I was open about it for years and responses have been mixed, to say the least.
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Jan 27, 2022 16:46
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I'll admit, even on these forums, I've seen a lot of these "ask me about autism" threads come and go and this is the first one I've seen stick, and not get incredibly gross. Until this thread, my advice in those threads for fellow autistic posters was to simply never tell another goon that you were autistic, because that's the culture we had for a while. It's gotten so much better in such a short amount of time, really. Unfortunately, we can't say the same everywhere.
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Jan 27, 2022 17:38
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signalnoise posted:I'll admit, even on these forums, I've seen a lot of these "ask me about autism" threads come and go and this is the first one I've seen stick, and not get incredibly gross. Until this thread, my advice in those threads for fellow autistic posters was to simply never tell another goon that you were autistic, because that's the culture we had for a while. It's gotten so much better in such a short amount of time, really. Unfortunately, we can't say the same everywhere. I noticed this too and I'm glad for it. I normally lurk on SA (been here since 2005) but since I'm going to start the autism assessment process in April, this thread has been really comforting to read. I'm in my 30s and trying to find community with people who in my age range and/or information that doesn't center (mostly cishet & white) kids has been really discouraging since I'm in none of those demographics (as a Black Latinx, agender person.)
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Jan 27, 2022 17:44
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SetsunaMeioh posted:I noticed this too and I'm glad for it. I'm going to preface this with 1) this is not based on any professional opinion or basis in data, 2) my mom was an occupational therapist and I worked with her a lot growing up. From what I have observed, "high functioning" or "low impact" or I don't actually know what the lowest offense term is now, that kind of autism diagnosis seems to be somewhat socio-economically oriented. As a kid, I remember seeing psychiatrists in a big office complex for specialist stuff, and I remember it being a place where your clothes were important. Most kids in the waiting room seemed to be high functioning, whatever their diagnoses were. This was before anyone thought I had autism, so this was for ADHD. Working with my mom (not great, but that's a different story) I experienced working with a variety of special needs kids, and I can tell you there are certainly options for help for a lot of backgrounds regardless of your position on the totem pole, but on the other hand, my mom ran her own practice because she thought her last practice was screwing the patients, so she didn't get paid much. Around this time, I was 14, and they suspected I had Asperger's, so they had me go to a guy. I went to the guy and turns out, Asperger's. I had this reconfirmed later in my later 20s as part of a broad screening of things. Anyways, yeah every single other patient I ever saw with that guy was and upper middle class white kid. I only had a couple group sessions because I gave no respect to the entire process, but each time they were all upper middle class white kids. I think that I am an extreme data point in having been diagnosed early in my age group because I am not even close to upper middle class. Anyways yeah my age group, in my tiny data point of experience, saw nothing but other white boys my age who were diagnosed for the same thing. I would rarely meet a girl with that diagnosis, and over time I've heard of more, generally with younger women. I think that for the kids who weren't diagnosed who perhaps could be diagnosed now, they may just not have enough difficulty in their lives to question it. They would be gen-x after all.
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Jan 27, 2022 18:13
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signalnoise posted:I'm going to preface this with 1) this is not based on any professional opinion or basis in data, 2) my mom was an occupational therapist and I worked with her a lot growing up. Yeah, socioeconomic and cultural differences definitely delayed any kind of diagnosis or treatment I could've gotten. I didn't learn this until much later, but I went to preschool which served I/DD or otherwise disabled kids. As I'm from NYC, it was mostly a black and brown student base and unless you were "low functioning" (support levels seems to be the appropriate phrase for that now,) you were basically ignored. I had a language delay, I was/am hyperlexic, have a lot of sensory issues related to scent/texture/light, and I was assessed but in a half-assed "We know something is abnormal about her but she's not severe enough to be worth treating" (I go by they/them now & this was happening in the early 90s.) On top of coming from a Dominican family and a lot of Latinx cultures not being great about disability, I suspect my parents (especially my mom) were deeply in denial. At least now they acknowledge my being autistic but there's still a lot of imposter syndrome I'm feeling (hence why I'm seeking my diagnosis, mostly for my own confirmation.) Edit: Forgot to mention that my mom worked for that same preschool for most of her adult life after I graduated from it, so it's extra egregious that she worked with autistic kids but refused to see it in her own child for so long. SetsunaMeioh fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Jan 27, 2022 |
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Jan 27, 2022 19:12
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signalnoise posted:I'm going to preface this with 1) this is not based on any professional opinion or basis in data, 2) my mom was an occupational therapist and I worked with her a lot growing up. I'm younger than you but it wasn't much better. In 2000, I was diagnosed with NVLD. The psychiatrist ruled out Autism because I looked my mom in the eyes when I spoke to her. (Because I've known her for years? My thing about eye contact is that I can do it after years of knowing you, but sometimes I do it anyway because Social Norms and adults used to bug me about it.) It doesn't help that I'm a cis woman. Strangely enough I get pegged as autistic so I guess my diagnosis was wrong? (Most likely.)
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Jan 27, 2022 19:22
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SetsunaMeioh posted:Yeah, socioeconomic and cultural differences definitely delayed any kind of diagnosis or treatment I could've gotten. I didn't learn this until much later, but I went to preschool which served I/DD or otherwise disabled kids. As I'm from NYC, it was mostly a black and brown student base and unless you were "low functioning" (support levels seems to be the appropriate phrase for that now,) you were basically ignored. I had a language delay, I was/am hyperlexic, have a lot of sensory issues related to scent/texture/light, and I was assessed but in a half-assed "We know something is abnormal about her but she's not severe enough to be worth treating" (I go by they/them now & this was happening in the early 90s.) Well, I think I can sympathize for both parties there really, and that's even with my mom doing the same with me, and with her being an occupational therapist. Our parents expect "more" from us. More what? Who fuckin knows, but turning off the autodiag for your family so that your family never has problems is the side you got. I can tell you a side you could have gotten, maybe. My mom got me into lots of testing and was the reason I got a diagnosis early. However, putting aside all the additional poo poo that comes along with repeating that childhood, part of it is that when I got tested for stuff, I scored really high. IOWA Test of Basic Skills, all that childhood stuff. So, having that along with my behavioral problems at least in part due to undiagnosed and untreated ~stuff~, I became an infuriatingly frustrating puzzle to solve that would never show its potential. At least, I think that's how they saw me. There was talk of a divorce, but they didn't actually divorce until I was about 25. Maybe if there was some way to make a hybrid of our childhoods, we could see what the difference would be? But consider what that kind of concern would have meant for you over time. Are you certain it all would have been for the best?
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Jan 27, 2022 19:31
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Violet_Sky posted:I'm younger than you but it wasn't much better. In 2000, I was diagnosed with NVLD. The psychiatrist ruled out Autism because I looked my mom in the eyes when I spoke to her. (Because I've known her for years? My thing about eye contact is that I can do it after years of knowing you, but sometimes I do it anyway because Social Norms and adults used to bug me about it.) It doesn't help that I'm a cis woman. Strangely enough I get pegged as autistic so I guess my diagnosis was wrong? (Most likely.) It's amazing to me when I consider what different parts of human engagement people think of as requiring extra effort, and what parts are really difficult. At this point, few people would peg me as autistic in some random party or something. Like, I would be completely caught off guard unless it was just a terrible environment. But in terms of getting along with people, eye contact, shaking hands, even picking up new slang or whatever, I am great with that. I'm like a loving tank. I have been working a convention about something I haven't cared about in years just because it's a big project and it's like a game to draw more attendees each year. I am a master of the hollow social experience that would be the source of any stupid "tells" about autism. All the problems show up when you put actual context and relationships into the equation. This "they have a flat affect" stuff is obsolete past lvl30.
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Jan 27, 2022 19:50
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signalnoise posted:Well, I think I can sympathize for both parties there really, and that's even with my mom doing the same with me, and with her being an occupational therapist. Our parents expect "more" from us. More what? Who fuckin knows, but turning off the autodiag for your family so that your family never has problems is the side you got. I can tell you a side you could have gotten, maybe. My mom got me into lots of testing and was the reason I got a diagnosis early. However, putting aside all the additional poo poo that comes along with repeating that childhood, part of it is that when I got tested for stuff, I scored really high. IOWA Test of Basic Skills, all that childhood stuff. So, having that along with my behavioral problems at least in part due to undiagnosed and untreated ~stuff~, I became an infuriatingly frustrating puzzle to solve that would never show its potential. At least, I think that's how they saw me. There was talk of a divorce, but they didn't actually divorce until I was about 25. Maybe if there was some way to make a hybrid of our childhoods, we could see what the difference would be? But consider what that kind of concern would have meant for you over time. Are you certain it all would have been for the best? Lack of access to testing (and really, anything medical outside of the yearly physical) weighed a lot on us. My parents are immigrants and had so many more worries than wanting to deal with their youngest child. It was easier for them to label me as weird and abnormal rather than try to get a second opinion. Plus, they thought I would "grow out of it" if they treated me like any other child, which only made things worse for me because I've always been inquisitive and NEEDING to know the reason behind why people act the way they do. Which, of course, made my parents think I was being oppositional. I would much rather have gotten diagnosed earlier, even if it caused more problems for me then because I'd at least have answer and not have this overwhelming sense of shame over the unknown and uncertain.
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Jan 27, 2022 19:54
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SetsunaMeioh posted:Lack of access to testing (and really, anything medical outside of the yearly physical) weighed a lot on us. My parents are immigrants and had so many more worries than wanting to deal with their youngest child. It was easier for them to label me as weird and abnormal rather than try to get a second opinion. Plus, they thought I would "grow out of it" if they treated me like any other child, which only made things worse for me because I've always been inquisitive and NEEDING to know the reason behind why people act the way they do. Which, of course, made my parents think I was being oppositional. Then if nothing else, if you do get your diagnosis, and if you are diagnosed as autistic, then I hope you see this as a hopeful vindication, and an upstroke, rather than ruminating on the past in any way. I would recommend getting one for your own closure, personally. Whether you share that with anyone should be up to you, right?
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Jan 27, 2022 19:59
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signalnoise posted:Then if nothing else, if you do get your diagnosis, and if you are diagnosed as autistic, then I hope you see this as a hopeful vindication, and an upstroke, rather than ruminating on the past in any way. I would recommend getting one for your own closure, personally. Whether you share that with anyone should be up to you, right? Yeah, it's mostly for my own peace of mind, my immediate family, and my friends. Plus, I do want some sense of community but that will happen when it happens.
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Jan 27, 2022 20:02
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I never got diagnosed with anything, I think they suspected something but back in the 60's-70's no one had any idea or guidance about a weird child with behavioral problems who wasn't mute or a maths whiz. And figuring this stuff out for myself has only been the last couple of years, I'm almost 60 and can't afford an autism diagnosis, probably not an ADHD diagnosis but I might muddle along with a few tests. Like people were saying, a formal diagnosis isn't *required* and is a bit of a journey to get anyway. Just sorting out what is the non-masking bit of me is enough to go on with right now.
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Jan 27, 2022 20:35
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I was born in the 90s, so that plus being verbal, a ciswoman, and from a working class immigrant southeast Asian family, means no one suspected a thing (I suspect I get it from my dad, so to his side of the family I appeared "normal"). I sought my own diagnosis in my mid-20s after a very stressful project at work that broke my mask (though I didn't even acknowledge it as one). I was lucky that I had good insurance to pay for it. I'm a bit mad on behalf of my little brother, who was non-verbal until he was put in speech therapy at age 4, has a shitton of sensory and food sensitivities, and was super into trains, just to give a sampler, but he wasn't diagnosed as a child either. If he were an upper middle class white boy with the same characteristics, I'm confident someone would have assessed him. Hilariously, I do have a somewhat flat affect, my biggest "tell", which I only realized in a phonology class in undergrad when we had an assignment to calculate our vowel space and that of a few people we know, and also included measuring pitch and standard deviation. My pitch is normal for a ciswoman, but my standard deviation was only around 20Hz, whereas everyone else I measured was around 40Hz. I told my professor, I didn't realize I was monotone, and he was like, yeah, you are!
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Jan 29, 2022 01:52
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My husband mentioned off-handedly that I speak in a monotone and I was like "Wait, what?"
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Jan 29, 2022 02:00
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