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Have been refused PiP in the UK, and two weeks later I realised what made me mad about it rather than upset when I sat up in bed with the realisation that I shouldn't have to justify to them how it impacts my life, it's a recognised condition and if they don't know what it is or how it affects people then all that demonstrates is their complete loving incompetence.
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Apr 22, 2022 04:18
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Bank posted:Has anyone gotten an evaluation later in life? I am considering getting one for myself but not sure if it's helpful at all. My son is 9 and was diagnosed around 2. I started the process at 40 after a lifetime of underachieving, never quite fitting in, anxiety & depression. I was diagnosed with 'cognitive dyspraxia' after a few failed uni attempts at 20 and sort of accepted that was it, even though it didn't cover everything. Continued to have trouble holding down a job, meeting new people, just feeling like a real person instead of a fraud trying to play one. The kicker was when I started shutting down during arguments with my wife. CBT didn't work, antidepressants didn't work, and a bunch of other stuff started to click. I had sort of suspected it for a long time but had always felt functional 'enough' and attributed the problems to me just being crap. I started reading and thinking about it seriously when I found a Channel 4 quiz (which is no longer online) that ran alongside a documentary about ASD. A friend joked about his score being somewhere between neurotypical and autistic, so I took it and uhhh  After reading a lot more and doing a few more reputable tests (the aspergers subreddit recommended the RAADS-R test), I took printouts to my GP and anxiety babbled until they agreed to refer me. The NHS process in the UK takes about a year and a half, you have to push hard with your GP and go in with some more reputable tests to get a referral (or you can just go private if you can afford it). No idea how it works in the US, I guess if your provider covers it it's probably a lot faster? The two tests they did were the ADI-R and ADOS-2 tests, which are very much up for interpretation by the clinician doing them, not really something you can do yourself. The latter (the ADOS-2) was clearly designed for kids, particularly kids who have not learned to mask or question their own behaviour, which was a little embarrassing, and without the support of my parents to talk about my very young childhood, there were a few parts of the test we had to gloss over or best guess. But the upshot is that now have a report that finally answers the question I have been beating myself around the head with all these years. For me the most important thing about the process was that there were a lot more things that clicked during and after the diagnosis. Like I have never been able to tell if someone actually likes me, or if they're just being polite / playing along. I cannot imagine going up to someone I don't know at a bar or club and just talking to them. For the longest time I thought it was social anxiety (and even had CBT for it briefly) but it's rooted in not knowing how / locking up because it doesn't feel right/safe, not merely from lacking the confidence. So there very much is a point to diagnosis later in life. I understand myself and the things that went wrong in the past more. My marriage is better. I am taking steps toward looking for an occupation that works for me. I understand my stress thresholds better and now that I know better what it is that wears me out and overloads me, I can avoid pitfalls better. I mean, in my case it was very much a case of me not being a functional human being, and then finding out why.
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Apr 27, 2022 04:36
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Having the diagnosis will help with that as well. My parents (particularly my mum) didn't believe the diagnosis of dyspraxia when I got it. Their doubt fed into my doubt of "what if I'm just lazy / sensitive / awkward / not that bright." I still haven't told them about the autism diagnosis and have just accepted that if they don't believe me, that's their problem. I know who I am, and a medical assessment agrees with me now. But for years I almost felt as though I didn't deserve a diagnosis. It was only when I was struggling in life anyway that I thought I needed to know, and went for it. I was really nervous just before in case the report came back negative, but I had already resolved knowing that something was wrong. If it had said it wasn't autism, I'd have pursued something else. In an ideal world I'd recommend that everyone with ASD get a formal diagnosis but I guess we don't live in an ideal world - there are huge waiting lists, expensive healthcare systems, and worst of all, there are still a lot of older medical professionals who are holding onto outdated ideas about what autism is. Bobby Deluxe fucked around with this message at 12:20 on Apr 27, 2022 |
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Apr 27, 2022 12:18
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This might be thinking out the box, but pne thing that always put me off is transport. So maybe hire a minibus or transport service to pick up from / drop off at a safe location like a train / bus station?
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May 5, 2022 21:42
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It's 'officially' recognised in the sense that psychologists talk about it at an academic level and observe it in kids, but beyond that, not much. If a kid goes to the right school or has parents with enough resources, they might get diagnosed with it and the school might be forced to acknowledge it if it's part of their profile. Outside of education though, not really. Most non-SEN trained people and even some older GPs and social workers will simply refuse to believe neurodiversity is at play and brand them lazy / difficult, especially if they're from a less well-off background. There is unlikely to be any support in adult life. As with so much autistic behaviour, it's seen as something you should have 'gotten over by now,' even if it was never acknowledged or recognised and you never recieved support for / training to combat it. These videos are pitched at adults with ADHD, but the advice may help for what may be going on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo08uS904Rg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlObsAeFNVk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM0Xv0eVGtY I did have a gigantic post of advice for something to try, but I'm not a psychologist, just someone who recognises growing up with PDA and the walls I ran into repeatedly.
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May 12, 2022 14:00
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Adult diagnosis is a wild ride, but it's a very rewarding one to be on, congrats!
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May 20, 2022 17:21
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Dr.D-O posted:Nowadays, though, the average age when kids start using tablets/computers/smartphones keeps getting lower and lower (I know parents who have bought iPads for 12 month olds), and the expectation is gradually becoming that it's weirder to not spend time online than it is to spend time online. I get you though, how abled culture looks down on and blocks neurodiverse accommodations until they are convenient/useful for them, like with things like work from home.
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May 26, 2022 15:50
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nesamdoom posted:I tried to explain to my daughter that it doesn't get better but practice it gets easier. That's far from a 'got over it' thing. What you have is autistic trauma. Just because you had to learn those lessons and came out the other side, doesn't mean the way you learned them was right or that other people should have to go through that. You must be able to see that amphetamine abuse, criminality and wanting to go to prison are not healthy. I guess it's like if you imagine someone who went further down a bad road than you did, learned harder lessons than you did, suddenly walking up to you and saying 'right, you need to become even more hardened because there are nightmarishly bad things out there and I've dealt with them, so come on, up you get." You'd resent them. I'm in my forties and I'm only now starting to be happy because I'm unlearning all of the bullshit I picked up over the years just to fit in and be a part of society. You say she would be happy just being on her tablet all day. So let her be happy. You were forced to crawl through broken glass to get where you are and that's a hell of an achievement, but that doesn't mean that she does as well. And the other thing to bear in mind is that she might not respond or survive the same way you did. Different people have different levels of functionality and severity. What you learned to fight and push through might break her. It's hard for survivors to understand that, because accepting that it might be bad for her is part of accepting that it was bad for you, which nobody wants to do. I don't know, one of the things that did me the most damage was one of my parents really drilling into me that I have to be social, I have to be outgoing. I absolutely exhausted myself and made myself miserable in my twenties because of it. And when I did take time for myself, I felt guilty. It's only now I'm older and taking more time for myself that I'm actually feeling happy more days than not. I don't know if this is clear enough or if it's going to come across as an attack, which is not at all what I intend. I'm just saying that every parent passes their generationsl trauma on to their kids unless they are absolutely 100% conscious of it at all times, and it sounds like you had a ton of poo poo dumped on you from an early age. You might think that's what you're protecting your daughter from but ask yourself - is the 'cure' worse than the symptom?
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Jun 2, 2022 16:51
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The best advice (and by that I mean it's the best I've found and it's still not great) is that neurodivergent people need to be given time to work out their own way of doing things. The corrolary to that obviously: the reality of modern life is that we don't always have the time, or our parents / loved ones don't always have the money to make that possible. nesamdoom's daughter reminds me of my uncle and cousin on my Dad's side. For some reason my mum grew up instilling in us an absolute hatred of both of them for being 'lazy' and our aunt "having [cousin] diagnosed with something so she didn't have to go to school / could get benefits," and now I'm older and starting to break out of the miserable expectations my parents put on me, I kind of think my aunt was in the right? Or at least that side of the family was dealing with a condition I nearly killed myself trying to ignore, and that was probably identified in my cousin by the school and not the parents. I am happier and interacting much better with people now I set my own limits on how often, and it's not under the pressure of trying to maintain a job and social circle that were good on paper but making me mentally and physically unwell. In fact I'd be much more able to pursue my own income now if I hadn't spent five years ignoring the symptoms of RSI because they were inconvenient to my boss. That uncle passed away a few years ago, before I got my diagnosis, and it rips at me that I never got to make up with him. I just want to talk to him because my memory of him was of him being like I am now, find out what it was like for him instead of getting twisted, judgemental second hand accounts from my mam who portrayed him as living the life of riley while we struggled. I've sort of strayed off the point which is that I'm more motivated to do things now because my brain can process what I'm currently doing into more direct results. I'm not trying to hold down a salary or grit my teeth and put up with nightclubs so I can point to the people I go drinking with and say 'see, I have friends,' I'm being creative and monetising it and watching a passive income grow, and I have a small but incredible circle of friends who respect my boundaries. But I am also incredibly lucky to have that opportunity, so my advice is less about what you should do, and more what you shouldn't do, which is run down your limited energy on things you don't even want. Bobby Deluxe fucked around with this message at 14:31 on Jun 8, 2022 |
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Jun 8, 2022 14:19
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I multiclassed in ADHD and boy are there conflicts between the two classes.
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Jun 10, 2022 21:39
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TIP posted:Those of you who discovered you were autistic as adults, how open about it are you? Do you tell old friends? New friends? Family? People you're dating? My wife has been incredibly understanding because she's neurodiverse as well (looking more and more like adhd, but has some very autism-like sensory issues), but has always had issues herself that have led her to be patient with people who need to do stuff differently. My older brother's always been very open minded, but not sure my younger brother would understand. The sad thing is the younger brother has kids and the school told his parents one of them has ADHD, but they haven't told him. I'm biting my lip because my exams results were hosed up by my undiagnosed stuff, but it's not my place to get involved. Apart from that I don't tell other people. A lot of people out there will see you as an easy target if they find out. Others assume harmful poo poo about you. Others still will see you as needing help and try to take you on as a project. I'm lucky I can mask well enough that I can pass as just being an anxious weirdo, so well one of my friends works supporting autistic people and I haven't told him. But just from things the people around me say about other autistics, I can't trust most of them not to either try and tell me I'm not auristic, or start treating me weird because of it. TIP posted:Researching autism was very eye-opening to me about how wrong the public perceptions of it are. Telling people you're autistic should be a positive thing that helps them better understand you but now I feel like it will instead just put a bunch of wrong ideas about me into their head. Also talking to a nurse manning the 111 line who straight up assumed all autistic people are math savants (it was something like a date and time she gave me and then said "of course you can probably tell me what day of the week that is"). Half the problem is I'm really bad at describing bodily sensations and don't use the right key words to put them in the right direction, so I found out that my medical records have been describing the dull burning sensation and feeling like something is pressing against my jaw from rhe inside as a 'headache.'
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Jul 3, 2022 05:21
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Dance Officer posted:I also sometimes told potential employers that I'm autistic, but this invariably lead to me not getting hired, so I stopped doing it. I told my current employer after about half a year working there, he told me before that one of his own children is autistic, so I felt pretty secure in the move. Since the autism diagnosis I haven't been working (other RSI disability reasons) but it's my understanding that a lot of major employers have either become less robust in supporting the 2 ticks system in recent years or have dropped out entirely. Either way my personal experience has been that large organisations like hospitals, local / county council, universities or any large national company with an HR department on site tends to be signed up to 2 ticks, and you tend to have a lower risk of one rogue manager either misunderstanding your needs or targetting you.
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Jul 3, 2022 12:16
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If you take everything, literally, you're not autistic you're a kleptomaniac.
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Jul 8, 2022 19:50
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I sometimes feel like neurotypical people are just listening out for key words or phrases, and then once they hear one (even if it's not really the point of the sentence) they're not really listening because from that point on most of their thought process is going into a reply. I feel like where neurotypical people accuse us of being 'difficult to understand,' it's because we don't use the right keyword and describe things in a way where you actually have to think about what's being said. Chris Bonello (Autistic Not Weird on Facebook) posted a great image that sums the whole mess up nicely: 
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Jul 13, 2022 10:39
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I've never been able to find them, but there have apparently been studies done which show that allistic people communicate with each other with very little miscommunication, and autistic people can generally communicate with each other fine as well; but as soon as you get an allistic person trying to talk to an autistic person, the incidences of miscommunication goes through the roof. The difference is that we always get the blame because we're a smaller group. I also don't know where the word allistic comes from but people on tumblr use it a lot and it's a good alternative to neurotypical (not every non-autistic person is neurotypical).
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Jul 13, 2022 11:08
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That sounds cool, if you live in an area populous enough to have a decent dating pool, let alone a dating pool of autistic people. I remember trying internet dating back in the early 2010s in my university town and it just being the same 4 or 5 faces week after week. I was so loving lucky to meet my wife through university, luckier still that she liked me enough to pursue me despite me being in full social defence mode all of the time. Honest to god she invited me over hers one night and offered to cook for me, and I was so thrown I tried to make an excuse about it being curry night and tried to back out. We've been married coming up on ten years, so good luck with your search, if there's hope for me there's hope for anyone.
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Jul 13, 2022 22:25
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Job interviews and CVs can be hauntingly similar. Years ago I got to the final round of candidates for a really sweet IT position - 2 ticks, 10 minutes walk from where I lived, local government, training provided, decent pay compared to admin, promotion track etc. At one point in the interview, they were asking me how I'd deal with a complaint, so I started regurgitating the stuff from the conflict resolution training I did at my previous job. The guy interviewing me seemed really enthusiastic about my responses, but in a prompting way - like he was going 'yes, and then?' like he was waiting for a particular answer or key phrase. I kept going down the mental checklist and he seemed to be getting really enthusiastic, and then I ran out of things on the mental checklist, and then he suddenly disengaged and seemed a bit disappointed, like I had forgotten the thing he thought I was listening out for. I wouldn't be surprised to find out it's some sort of interview technique to see how candidates deal with being psyched out like that, but I think it was more likely there was a specific answer he thought I was leading up to and then either I didn't say it or I said something different. Weird interaction anyway, definitely in my all-time top 10 "allistic interactions I didn't understand that had a material cost" of all time.
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Jul 14, 2022 10:06
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I was saying to a friend who supports (other) people with more severe autism for a living that any variant of "I shouldn't have to tell you" should instantly alert you to a person's unsuitability to be dating (or even probably friends with) autistic people.
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Jul 14, 2022 23:49
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"Just relax, be yourself." "No, not like that."
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Jul 15, 2022 10:19
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Dance Officer posted:How do others here experience being in love with someone, and how often does it happen to you? Probably doesn't help that my peer group at school were toxic wankers who would literally do the 'friends? What are you, gay?' if you tried to be at all nice or positive. Hence I came to university alone at the other end of the country with absolutely no tools whatsoever for starting or maintaining healthy relationships. I have literally never asked other people if they want to do something because I have zero idea if they are going to turn around and react like they don't know me well enough. This was one of the many revelatory moments I had after diagnosis, realising that I'm not a fundamentally unlovable piece of poo poo, I just have a social disability and not being able to read other people properly has caused a fuckton of problems. Knowing why I was bad at it, and why so many things went wrong has been an incredible relief. A few years ago I told my wife that if she left me I'd be devastated, but not shocked or surprised. I know I love her. I have no read on if she loves me, that's not something I can feel. It certainly looks like she does - little gifts, she says she does constantly, we spend almost all of our time together, she's sad / angry in reaction to bad things happening to me. But then I've read a lot of stories on r/relationships or things like that where the person who got dumped thought everything was fine. It's like if you have no sense of smell. You read other people's experience of what smells good. You see them react to things. You know flowers smell nice. But then someone hands you a flower, and you know it should smell nice, and you've read descriptions of how it smells, and how other people react to it, but you just can't smell it. And yet, I have been married for coming up on 10 years this September. I have no doubt that any person other than my wife would have left me by now. She is extraordinarily patient. She herself has said though she's been dumped before for being 'too needy' so maybe we both just have emotional levels of need that are too much for most other people. When we finally got together it was after being acquaintances on the same course, but she'd been in a relationship with someone else at the time. In the 3rd year we were in a smaller group together, and she invited me round hers (we were broke students near the end of term), and while we were talking about how she'd broken up with her last boyfriend and she wasn't sure if she wanted anything new, I just admitted I liked her. I've spent too many years pining over people I've liked or pretending to be friends while gearing up for the 'right' moment to say I'm interested, so I took the soonest moment instead. We didn't fall into each others arms right away, she just seemed surprised, but by the end of the evening we were just curled up on the sofa together. One of the traps I used to fall into with relationships was thinking I have to be a certain way or I'll keep putting people off, or lying about hobbies on dating sites (most of my twenties I had 'going out, quiet pubs / bars' in my profile when I loving hate bars and am not particularly happy with most pubs). But if you can't be yourself around the person you love, you are going to have a miserable life, arguably worse than you would have alone. I know I have the privelage of being married saying that (and also financially stable), but you're going to be spending so much of your life masking at work, or around extended family, or out shopping or whatever. I wouldn't recommend it with the person you're planning on spending your life with. Dance Officer posted:How do you deal with people who are in love with you, but you're not in love with them? I like to think I'm being more honest with people - like when I told my now wife - but I had 38 years of not knowing, and masking is a hell of a habit to shake.
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Jul 16, 2022 19:03
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TIP posted:Fielder researched Asperger’s syndrome while fine-tuning his TV persona, but he rejects any suggestion his character is on the spectrum. “There’s a lot of social disconnects that people experience all the time that have nothing to do with autism or anything,” he says. When I ask if he’s ever wondered whether he has a developmental disorder, he’s genuinely horrified. “Please don’t tell me this is the angle of your piece,” he says. It's like when you ask someone if they're gay and they say "eww, no," there's not really any way to spin that as being progressive toward LGBT identity.
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Jul 19, 2022 07:40
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You're talking about echolalia, and it's pretty common.
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Jul 21, 2022 07:31
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My controversial opinion is that the amount of people who are neurodiverse but undiagnosed or refuse to accept it will skew any statistics like that. I'm not trying to suggest that neurodiversity and trans identities are correlated, but that a person who is unwilling to accept diversity in their neeurology is probably also going to be unwilling to accept diversity in their experience of gender, at least to some extent. In a way, it's not that rates are higher in neurodiverse people, I think rates are under-reported in allistic people. Lot of people probably closeting themselves to fit in.
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Jul 22, 2022 20:17
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TIP posted:If I was I was a teenager I would have had the energy for it. I also didn't know gender neutral was an option. I knew gay was now (mostly) allowed, I knew people could transition from one binary to the other (because of a shop my dad used to mock at the bottom of Westgate Road, by the goth shop), but neither of those felt right. I had no idea you could just opt out entirely, even though when I was at college I loved having long hair, and at uni I used to wear eyeliner and nail varnish because the town I moved to was a lot safer than where I grew up. But then I got a proper job and it was a thing that I just kind of stopped doing completely. Honestly if I hadn't lost the job because of RSI, there are a lot of things I wouldn't have questioned and I'd probably be a stressed out wreck, if not dead from a heart attack. Makes me wonder how many other autistic people are high-functioning enough to slip under the radar and never realise their true self. Now though, I'm old and tired, and just dragging myself out of bed to face another day is a huge effort, I don't have the strength left to fight over something like that. I can barely be arsed to shave let alone get a makeup routine down.
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Jul 22, 2022 23:38
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We are all autistic people who've spent years trying to navigate the minefield of allistic dominated communication platforms, it's understandable that we're all a bit "not sure I should post this, will people kick off?" I feel like a lot of my posts are huge infodumps, so I always worry after posting "Am I being an rear end in a top hat here?"
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Jul 23, 2022 23:43
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SetsunaMeioh posted:I do this a lot too because it's my way of showing that I'm paying attention to what's being said. I often give a caviat of "I'm saying this because I'm trying to relate to you" and if they still get mad, then I often stop giving them my time/attention.
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Jul 24, 2022 00:00
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HopperUK posted:I feel like 'non-binary woman' is closest to how I feel. I definitely am not a man but 'woman' doesn't feel like it's quite me either. If there was a way to just opt out of gender entirely and just be a they/them androgyne, I could definitely go for that.
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Jul 24, 2022 03:57
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Cloacamazing! posted:What I don't get is where this autism = emontionless thing even comes from. I guess it's the whole "genius too busy for emotions" thing from pop culture? But that's shown to be a lie in every single case. Anyway, he observed that the autistic children in his care didn't show emotion and / or had to be reminded to smile when something pleased them, as Hopper & RPATDO were describing. HopperUK posted:It's because some people with autism don't show their emotions in expression and body language in a way that's easily read by neurotypical people. RPATDO_LAMD posted:Also many autistic people (including me, especially when I was young) can struggle with self-reflection and the ability to recognize their own emotions and know what they're feeling. Unfortunately this confusion between atypical display of emotions / "no emotions" was still very popular in the 80s, the end of which saw the Cruise / Hoffman oscar bait Rain Man come out, and so much of the public's perception of autistics comes from this film. It portrays Raymond as fundamentally emotionless except for outbursts of extreme frustration and self harm. I think at one point in the film someone even says he has a lack of emotions, or says he doesn't have emotions 'like the rest of us do,' (meaning his emotions aren't the same, but I feel like most people heard it as not having them). In reality the disconnect can be varied though. Autistic people may smile uncontrollaby first before realising that something made them happy. They may describe wandering round the house unable to concentrate and having too much energy, when an allistic person might just say 'irritable' or 'angry.' Famously you have meldowns / shutdowns which look to neurotypicals like 'just disproportionately angry.' And you might hear a joke, think it's the best joke ever, and then go on to excitedly explain why you think the joke was amazing, only to have the other person go "but you didn't laugh much." No, I was busy unfolding the many layers on which the joke works, I forgot. E: I just realised that whole post was an incredibly autistic moment - you said something like you don't know where that comes from and so I defaulted to a massive explanattion, whereas you probably meant more like "I can't relate to the people that do this." I end up doing this a lot. TIP posted:I think the Orville does a surprisingly good job of making their robot character genuinely alien and not just a human minus some characteristics. I certainly don't relate to him. Bobby Deluxe fucked around with this message at 07:18 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 07:11
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I could sum up 90% of the problems I have as "It just feels wrong," with the extended caveat that if something feels wrong, it's almost impossible for me to push past that feeling and actually do it. It's not exactly fear or anxiety, because I feel emotionally neutral when I get blocked in this way, but also my motivation to do it is almost negative - it takes an incredible reserve of will to do it. Ask me about going to obscene lengths to make sure I don't have an odd number in my D&D builds!
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Aug 1, 2022 04:24
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Retrospectively going over your childhood post-diagnosis is absolutely wild. I think easily half of my depression and anxiety cleared just from going over situations I had failed at, or things I was 'supposed' to want but didn't, and realising there's nothing I could have done differently. Also going over it with the benefit of maturity, and realising things like when I was picked on at school, I didn't do anything wrong, that was on the other kids; and also that one of my teachers was in retrospect clearly drinking on the job or having a breakdown of some kind when they called me (and the head of the sports team, which is what made it extra weird) 'giant loving babies.' The most common thing is going over something that happened and getting to a point of thinking "Well what the gently caress is the difference between what this guy was saying and what I was saying, it's like there's some weird unspoken rule I don't... Ah, right. No, I see it now." Anything where there's an ambiguous line you shouldn't overstep is a huge problem for me. The biggest thing was growing up not understanding girls, which is partly down to my mother's disneyfied deification of true love and taking the piss out of me for having a close female friend when I was really young, combined with the burgeoning proto-incel MRA culture in GBS in my twenties. I never put any of it into practice thank god, but it led me to basically completely overanalyse every interaction that could be interpreted as romantic. Combined with an inability to read other people properly it was an absolute disaster, I would freak out if someone touched my arm trying to work out what it 'meant.' It properly drove me mad for a while. I wasted years thinking I was unlovable, or creepy, or ugly. Post diagnosis I know now that I just don't understand most other people and their desires and have a much smaller dating pool, i.e. people who are truthful and up front about things. My wife is incredible in that respect, and I am insanely lucky to have met her. Essentially, whenever I previously found myself haunted by the ghost of awkwardness past and was left asking 'god why am I like this;' well, at least now I have an answer. Now I know what I'm dealing with, I can look up coping strategies more likely to work. Whereas before I would sink into a morass of thinking I'm a failure, a piece of poo poo, I should just not try, this is all so unfair etc. I couldn't 'let go of the past' in the trauma sense when I was still wandering around believing that the exact same thing could happen again, because I didn't understand why it happened in the first place. Weirdly it still technically being 'unfair' that I have autism doesn't bother me even a quarter as much as just not knowing and thinking that I was a lazy / uncaring / insensitive person. It's the idea that you could have done better that gets you. Bobby Deluxe fucked around with this message at 12:45 on Aug 4, 2022 |
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Aug 4, 2022 12:30
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The great thing about allistic people telling you that you can't do something, is that it suddenly makes it absolutely fine and there are absolutely no negative consequences to being denied it suffered by the autistic person whatsoever.
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Aug 6, 2022 18:59
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There are few things more satisfying than seeing someone with bog standard interests suddenly realise that they are the odd one out.
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Aug 10, 2022 23:12
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66 particularly, like as in it makes sense to me but only because I realise that allistic people say poo poo that doesn't make sense all the time, it's just a turn of phrase. And then I get mad at how 'makes sense' is a phrase with an associated meaning rather than a literal one and then I've sort of answered my own question.
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Aug 12, 2022 09:19
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I hear people nowadays saying there are problems with it (I haven't read it recently), but The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime was lauded when it came out because the main character is an autistic boy. I don't remember if it's from his perspective but it was for its time pretty well done. E: It certainly helped give a lot of people more of a 'non rain man' view of what autism is.
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Aug 13, 2022 10:04
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It's certainly a spectrum comorbidity. Usually more asociated with dyspraxia and dyslexia, but my auditory loop is delayed - my brain sometimes takes an extra second or so to process the noise someone is making into a string of words, if that makes sense. I also have trouble multitasking and filtering out background noise, which makes the processing even worse, but even in a 1:1 situation with no background noise I still gently caress up. SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:My uncle has been teaching since 1985 (retired in 18) and we talked about autism earlier this year after I came to terms with my diagnosis. I don't think that's what you/your uncle were getting at, but I think there are very large and influential social movements who would jump on that for the wrong reasons entirely. What we need is not to be looking at how to prevent or 'cure' autism, but to be accepting that it exists, and that a lot of us with it need a little help sometimes. Personally I think the increase in diagnoses is almost entirely attributable to people being more self-reflective nowadays, and the people in positions to spot these sorts of things being better educated than they were in the past. My mum recently retired from running a playgroup and over the years she's been on a lot of training courses and recieved a lot more support as the years have gone on to help spot the signs early on. When I compare the ed psych I saw in my early twenties (who diagnosed me with 'cognitive dyspraxia' because there was no support policy in my LEA for ASD), the difference in understanding now compared to then is incredible. It's hard to express properly without having been there and grown up at that time, but it's a culture shift in the same way that mental health patients were institutionalised and never spoken of again in the 1900s vs how they were treated from the 90s and 2000s. Similarly, the difference in how autism was percieved (if at all) in the 80s compared to how it is understood now. I grew up thinking I didn't have it because I wasn't as serious as the only cases that were ever talked about. I thought that just because I was able to mostly keep my head above water I was OK. If social attitudes now were like they were then, I wouldn't have sought out diagnosis, my GP wouldn't have referred me if I had, the charity who diagnosed me wouldn't have existed, the clinician wouldn't have had the training to deal with an adult, and I probably wouldn't have been diagnosed because it's not as disabling as they would expect it to be. Autistic people have always been here, we're just better recognised and able to take off the mask now. Bobby Deluxe fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Aug 15, 2022 |
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Aug 15, 2022 18:32
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I absolutely cannot concentrate if I'm sat too close to another table at a restaurant with someone talking too loud.
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Aug 15, 2022 23:24
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Anne Whateley posted:I don't think it's controversial to say that the prevalence, and not just the diagnosis, of allergies has increased, for reasons we don't fully understand. Ymmv but I don't see any reason both couldn't be true for autism. Two things worth noting: Firstly that there are very strong hereditary links with autism and neurodiversity in families, and that it's incredibly common for a younger person to get diagnosed, and then for all of their older relatives 'quirks' to suddenly get contextualised in light of a medical professional saying "this trait / problem is absolutely an autism thing." There are a ton of people with autism walking around who have adapted well enough that they think it's not a problem until they see something on TV that clicks, or have a breakdown from trying to hold it together. For me this was the Chris Packham documentary on the BBC, but the point is that there are now more people diagnosed with autism, people talk about it more, people understand it more, and there's way more visibility. In the same way that trans visibility and trans acceptance have given people more common access to language to understand what's going on and realise that it's ok to feel/be this way (and they don't have to exhaust themselves pretending to to be), autism being more visible has led more people to look at their own behaviour and that's a good thing. Like there's very, very clear hereditary links, and almost no evidence that it's environmental except that it feels like it might be to older people. Statistically, it's leaning incredibly strongly toward hereditary causes (logically as well), to the point that it's really hard to make the environmental argument without relying entirely on uncle vibes. But even taking those vibes at face value, there's less coal in the air and lead in the water supply now - maybe autism is how humans are 'supposed' to think and boomers all have coal / lead poisoning? That might sound harsh, but it's no worse than OP's uncle accusing us of being brain poisoned. Also they can't accuse environmental factors of causing behavioural changes, and then ignore the environmental factors behind their upbringing. Especially since their IS evidence of coal / lead being harmful, but uncle says something 'might' be affecting behaviour. Anyway, secondly; there currently is no 'blood test' or genetic screening for autism. Currently it's diagnosed via behavioural tests,* and as we understand the condition more, those behaviours get spotted more in schools, colleges, workplaces and the legal / medical system. This is not a condition that has suddenly emerged, it's a condition that's always been here and we were just ignoring it because past generations were a lot more mean spirited and lovely toward strughling kids. And the second we reach the point where there is a genetic screen or blood test, or a 'cause' for it, we reach a point that is incredibly worrying for autistic people - the point at which we stop existing because allistic people can choose for us to not be born. That's straight up eugenics. That's why it is controversial to say, because putting it down to an environmental factor means GSK releasing an autism pill, or kids being aborted before they have a chance to exist. It denies us an existence and authenticity a lot of us are only just coming to terms with accepting, and pathologises us as a condition to be cured or prevented. Which is absolutely how groups like Autism Speaks already discuss us. * Which is why I have a huge problem with Sheldon from Big Bang, especially as an adult. He has autistic behaviour. He is mocked for the behaviours associated with autism. But the showrunners get around their ableism by saying 'he was tested.' It's a behavioural diagnosis. In the same way autistic visibility is good, Sheldon sets back autism representation by giving a very visible figurehead for autism denial. organburner posted:Some of the "treatments" for autism have historically been pretty grimdark. Again, this is why viewing autism as something to be 'cured' is such a huge problem.
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Aug 16, 2022 12:12
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SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:And no one said anything about cure.
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Aug 17, 2022 10:41
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The only times I don't like being me is in contrast to the expectations of others, or the accommodations that society is willing to make. I used to feel sad that I "couldn't do things." Now mostly I get sad that allistic people not only refuse to make space to accommodate my way of being, but they seem to get really angry and defensive about people wanting to do things differently, let alone needing to. If there was universal basic income and I could just eke out my own little existence, I would be perfectly happy.
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Aug 17, 2022 18:34
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 12:00 |
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Cloacamazing! posted:It'd be pretty cool if there was medication to support your ways of coping with things. If I could take a pill before a get-together that would help me filter all those noises, actually follow the conversation and not get tired after a short while from the effort, that would be a huge help and significantly improve my social life and overall stress levels. Just look at how the world views antidepressants. A lot of people taking quick-acting anti-anxiety meds to get through an episode or a bad day. But once it's there as an option, it means you are seen as having a 'cure' and so the rest of the world will expect you to take it all the time, even if the side effects are terrible or prolonged use is bad for you. I'm thinking particularly of older ADHD medication, which would let the person focus and motivate themselves for a few hours, but caused heart problems if used long-term. And it was never used just when the person needed it, it was expected to be taken regularly, even after the science started to show that doing so caused real damage. I know a lot of modern options don't have side effects that bad, but it's horrifying to me that so many peoples lives were cut short so that they would be better behaved in school or be able to hold down a job. Hell, look at how many allistic people get through their day using over-the-counter painkillers and end up with liver damage. A lot of jobs are not healthy for anyone, moreso for autistic and neurodivergent people. But the point is not that only autistic people shouldn't have to put up with it - the point is nobody should have to put up with it, and it hits autistic people hardest. I don't want to bring my own politics into it, but to me it comes down to is so many people out there being abusive and exploitative, and wilfully ignoring the science when someone has legitimate problems dealing with things, because the exploiter thinks that everyone should have to deal with hardship, even if it makes no goddamn sense.
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Aug 18, 2022 12:31
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