Published on 12, July, 2020
I think I am autistic, I have struggled my entire life with many aspects of life, and as I am sure many others on here have done, developed my coping techniques. A diagnosis will not change who I am or how I live my life. Or would it?
For most of my life I have suffered from alcoholism (late teens to early 40's) and it is only now that I am sober for a length of time that I have been able to question my behaviours and come to the conclusion that I may be autistic.
I have taken a few online test and I think the results speak for themselves. AQ50 score of 41, EQ score of 16, Aspie Neurodiverse score 120/200, Neurotypical 84/200 you are very likely Neurodiverse, RAADS-R 142.0.
I am just wondering if a formal diagnosis is worth pursuing? I think it would help me come to terms with how I often feel and provide me with a reason to give to others to explain how I am but the thought of going to my GP, asking for a referral, discussing personal feelings/behaviours and then having to go through it all again at an assessment horrifies me! And I do mean horrifies!!!!
I am currently on strong anti-depressants (citalopram 20mg & Mirtazapine 45mg) but question how much benefit I am getting from them. Whenever I tell my GP that I still feel depressed she just ups the dosage. So not sure how responsive she will be to me asking for a referral for autism.
I don't think self-diagnosis is good enough, I want to know for sure but the process seems off putting.
Have others that have been diagnosed as adults felt a formal diagnosis beneficial?
Thanks in advance for any replies
I'm also pursuing a formal diagnosis. I know it'll take ages, but I want to do it so that I can maybe find resources that will help me manage my difficulties better.
I would say at this stage I am 90% sure that an ASD diagnosis explains my life. My wife and ageing mother are also of the opinion that ASD "is me", so whilst I could well believe that self-delusion is one possibility, what are the chances really, when close family are saying, "hey, this is you"?
I do feel acute sadness that my late father never lived long enough to hear the news. He did say he could not really understand me, and he always seemed to keep his distance. His death has left me feeling a little cheated of the possibility of a better relationship with him, and that's a bitter pill, but I am slowly accepting it.
Perhaps I may yet be able to improve my relationship with my estranged son. That would be reason enough I think, to go through the rigmarole of the formal route.
I have mentioned this in other posts on this site, but feel it appropriate to mention it again:
The diagnostic criteria is not to ascertain if you are autistic or not (to be put forward for diagnosis means that you almost certainly are autistic) but to ascertain the impact your autism is having on your life. Paradoxically the more support you have and the more you are helping yourself, the less likely you are to be diagnosed. I was explicitly told this at the end of my diagnosis, where my diagnosis was quantified as 'borderline' due the immense support I get from my partner.
Also I seriously understated how affected I am in my daily life by my autism, my partner (with me throughout my diagnosis assessment) often added information that demonstrated the true impact of autism on my daily life. Without her input I feel I would have talked my way out of a diagnosis through ignorance of my difficulties (that I struggle to recognise) and understatement.
Having been diagnosed has been an absolute turning point in my life; Martian Tom's above post regarding the Enigma machine is spot on!
Really interesting comments. There is something in what you say that contributes to the reasons that I have not gone for a formal diagnosis.
Firstly, the reason for the diagnosis is more about working out what impact the autism has on your life and whether that diagnosis will then help to make your life easier. That has been a sticking point for me as I wasn't sure how a diagnosis would then contribute to making my life easier. Though I have found being self-diagnosed means that I don't tell people about being aspie because I worry they'll tell me I'm being stupid. So then that automatically makes life harder because I still feel that I have to pretend.
Secondly, I think I have become so good at masking that I think I would talk my way out of a diagnosis. There are so many aspects of life that I have just accepted to date as being difficult assuming that everyone finds them difficult or because I hadn't realised how difficult I find them. In recent months I have started to challenge these things myself and now my husband will regularly hear me use the phrases "doesn't everyone have that problem then?" and "it's an aspie thing". Previously I would not have said anything at all about finding something difficult or I would have glossed over something that I didn't really understand. Though I find that I only do this with my husband and again pretend to everyone else.
The issues around medication hadn't occurred to me before as a possible benefit of diagnosis, but yes I can definitely see that would be beneficial.
I think I'm putting together a case for formal diagnosis here as I still seem to be doing a lot of pretending to other people.
I self-diagnosed some 18 months before my actual diagnosis, a period during which I started identifying myself to others as being on the autism spectrum.
The biggest factor of being formally diagnosed is that it has given me a very real platform from which to start dismantling my masking/camouflage/pretending behaviours; as such I am bit by bit freely expressing my autistic behaviours in situations where before I would be subconsciously been 'normalising' my behaviours.
Also my formal diagnosis has been essential in settling a dispute at work where in the first instance my self-diagnosed autism was not accepted, and in the second instance, following formal diagnosis, my employer did not accept that my autism qualified as a disability under the Equality Act 2010 and contended that autism was not permanent.