Published on 12, July, 2020
Good Evening All,
I would love to formulate a post diagnostic course for Autistics or even a book. One that contains all of the information that I wish had been available to me when I had been diagnosed. That information that you spend hours and hours foraging for in the information jungle that is the world wide web. Information that is slowly learned from time spent with other Autistics but that would be so much more convenient and time saving to have in a nice neat easy to read and digest format.
So, what information would you want to see in a post diagnostic course or book?
There is such a need here and a we need to have diagnosis as a gateway to treatment not the end of care.
Personally I think knowing and understanding your traits is stage 1, then knowing and understanding your stims and masks, then finally alternative coping strategies.
The thought is you have to start with knowing where you are, then knowing what you are doing and how well it works and finally looking at alternatives to see if there is something better.
Absolutely! We, the adult diagnosed Autistics, often arrive at our diagnosis exhausted; traumatised and completely burnt out by spending a lifetime trying to fit into a world that simply isn't made for us. Many have suffered a lifetime of sometimes severe mental health difficulties as a result of their (undiagnosed) Autism and all of us have experienced the social isolation; fixed thinking and sensory irritations that go with being Autistic. Then we finally get diagnosed and.......Nothing! Literally nothing, you're just sent back out into the big wide world with this new, enormous, life changing piece of information about yourself and there is nothing to support you with dealing with it; understanding how what it means for you; knowing how to help yourself.
I personally think that knowing and understanding your traits is the biggest part of it. How does my Autism affect me? I know my stims, I realised those before I was even diagnosed, in the pre-diagnosis information search. Kind of "Ah! that's what that's about then!" and masks, do we mask? I mask more in public now that I am diagnosed, simply because I now know that there is something to mask. Did I mask before, not really to be honest, perhaps that's where I was going wrong? Coping strategies is definitely a big one. It starts to become clear how certain things do affect us and why and we need to know how to manage that to make life more bearable.
Indeed, there seems to be no support for newly diagnosed autistics. I had a course of antidepressants from my GP, which merely triggered awful daily migraines. Other than that, ineffective as it was, nothing.
It all comes from their purposeful, deliberate and intentional refusal to understand where we are coming from, based on their discriminatory and prejudiced attitudes, they regard our issues and our needs within our condition as being nonsense - and in their zero-tolerance and zero-patience mindset, they believe that the only way to manage our condition is by means of ultra strict and relentless uncompromising discipline in an effort (or so they think) to “cure” us - just like what happened with the LGBT community we have to get organised in demanding a proper standard of care and we have the right to demand our rights - just look what they did to gay men during HIV/AIDS in the 1980’s and during the Stonewall Inn, groups like Act Up - we have to get more radical in asserting our rights