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Loz

G'day Folks, 

This is kind of new for me, so apologies if I seem a bit lost. When I was in my early thirties, I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety disorder. Did some counselling but avoided the medication. Learnt how to manage it and spent years learning how to self reflect which in turn helped me to understand myself a little better, be aware of who I was and try and push myself to a better place of understanding. A year and a half ago, a situation at work pushed me to medication for the first time, I was sent to an occupational nurse who asked me if I'd ever been diagnosed with dyspraxia, didn't even know what it was. I started getting better and then in January I had a motorcycle accident, mild tap, uninjured. But two months after that, had another motorcycle accident, went over the bonnet of the car, broke my wrist and ended up with PTSD which I'm being treated for at the moment. 

Early on in my treatment, I came across an article on adhd and noted a number of personality traits that I had in common. I had always thought there was something weird about me and thought that the depression and anxiety were the cause. But this seemed far closer to me. I took this to my counsellor who said she had wondered if I was on the Autism spectrum. As she was still getting to know me at the time, she wanted to get to know me better before bringing up the subject. Now we are coming close to the end of treatment, she has asked me if I wanted to pursue a diagnosis. I asked her opinion and she believes that I do have autism with attention deficit disorder traits. I'm almost 40 years old now so for it not to be picked up for so long, I must be quite low on the spectrum. But I'm struggling to understand what is a trait and what is 'normal' I know that I will be asked questions. I certainly don't want to be untruthful or inflate my symptoms in order to get diagnosed. But how do I know what things to talk about when I get assessed? Has anyone else gone through diagnosis in later life? How were you assessed? I feel like this explains so many struggles I've had, why I've always felt separated from everyone else and I guess I'm afraid of saying the wrong thing or not giving the best examples and being told I'm normal. Then I'd effectively be back in the dark, trying to figure myself out. A diagnosis could give me confidence at home and work to say this is where I struggle and here is the reason why. Sorry this is long and a bit pointless. I haven't told my family about it yet. Hoping I don't have to until I have a diagnosis either way. Just wondering if others have had this same anxiety about going through diagnosis?

Parents

  • Welcome,

    Your journey so far towards a diagnosis is not so different to how mine was, nor quite a few other diagnosed later in life (late forties for me). For those of us who are autistic but don't have intellectual disabilities, it's not at all unusual that we have a long history of everything being put down to depression and/or anxiety without anyone ever scratching deeply enough to see what underlies them. I was identified in much the same way as you - a mental health nurse was going through all my previous records from years of counselling at a triage interview when, completely out of the blue, she asked me what I knew about autism (nothing like enough, obviously, as I'd never associated my traits with the little I knew about it at all).

    It's understandable that you're a bit anxious about the assessment, but I think you'll be surprised how easy you'll find it once you get there. Given the other professional opinions you've already been given informally, I think it's very unlikely that it's a wild goose chase. The psychologists who do the assessments are extremely good at digging out what they need to know - even stuff that you wouldn't think in a million years was autism related, or that you'd always tried to hide from people (or even to hide from yourself), or that you always just thought were perfectly "normal" and had never concerned you at all. All you need to do is to be honest, and it's best not try second guessing what answers are expected. Once I figured out where the assessors were coming from, I actually really enjoyed my assessment - it was the first time I got to reveal the "real me" to anyone without feeling that value judgements were being made about how "normal" or "wierd" I was.

    You might also be surprised at where you place on the spectrum. I was convinced that I must have been a "borderline case" at first, but it turned out that I wasn't at all - I had just become so good at acting the part of a "normal person" that I had even fooled myself. It's not just a simple line from "low functioning" to "high functioning" - capabiliities vary hugely across all sorts of different traits and abilities, and even the formal diagnostic measures barely scratch the surface of what autism really is. The apects of autism that most people know are just behaviours - things that can be observed from the outside - but the true core of autism goes a lot deeper than that, and it's not unusual that we never suspected that those deeper things were any different to other people. It's also very common for autism to occur with other conditions. ADHD, dyspraxia, dyslexia, epilepsy, and a whole host of others are very common for autistic people; it's debatable whether some of them are even separate conditions or just part and parcel of some people's autism - particularly the so-called "executive functioning" differences associated with ADHD, which are extremely common.

    Best wishes.

Reply

  • Welcome,

    Your journey so far towards a diagnosis is not so different to how mine was, nor quite a few other diagnosed later in life (late forties for me). For those of us who are autistic but don't have intellectual disabilities, it's not at all unusual that we have a long history of everything being put down to depression and/or anxiety without anyone ever scratching deeply enough to see what underlies them. I was identified in much the same way as you - a mental health nurse was going through all my previous records from years of counselling at a triage interview when, completely out of the blue, she asked me what I knew about autism (nothing like enough, obviously, as I'd never associated my traits with the little I knew about it at all).

    It's understandable that you're a bit anxious about the assessment, but I think you'll be surprised how easy you'll find it once you get there. Given the other professional opinions you've already been given informally, I think it's very unlikely that it's a wild goose chase. The psychologists who do the assessments are extremely good at digging out what they need to know - even stuff that you wouldn't think in a million years was autism related, or that you'd always tried to hide from people (or even to hide from yourself), or that you always just thought were perfectly "normal" and had never concerned you at all. All you need to do is to be honest, and it's best not try second guessing what answers are expected. Once I figured out where the assessors were coming from, I actually really enjoyed my assessment - it was the first time I got to reveal the "real me" to anyone without feeling that value judgements were being made about how "normal" or "wierd" I was.

    You might also be surprised at where you place on the spectrum. I was convinced that I must have been a "borderline case" at first, but it turned out that I wasn't at all - I had just become so good at acting the part of a "normal person" that I had even fooled myself. It's not just a simple line from "low functioning" to "high functioning" - capabiliities vary hugely across all sorts of different traits and abilities, and even the formal diagnostic measures barely scratch the surface of what autism really is. The apects of autism that most people know are just behaviours - things that can be observed from the outside - but the true core of autism goes a lot deeper than that, and it's not unusual that we never suspected that those deeper things were any different to other people. It's also very common for autism to occur with other conditions. ADHD, dyspraxia, dyslexia, epilepsy, and a whole host of others are very common for autistic people; it's debatable whether some of them are even separate conditions or just part and parcel of some people's autism - particularly the so-called "executive functioning" differences associated with ADHD, which are extremely common.

    Best wishes.

Children
  • in reply to Trogluddite

    G'day Trogluddite,

    Thankyou for replying, I have to admit, when I first spoke to my counsellor about it and she revealed that she suspected I had autism, it was a relief. Not only that she wasn't dismissing my suspicions, which I quite likely would have had with a GP conversation  (which has happened to me before) but also that it could actually explain my depression and anxiety disorder. I know the autism doesn't cause the anxiety disorder, but missing that puzzle piece has meant that I was pushing myself to be normal, act normal, think normal and then getting frustrated when I couldn't achieve the goals that I wanted. I ended up scaling back my life in order to cope with it but now I feel like this might give me some hope.