Published on 12, July, 2020
I will keep this brief but I was diagnosed as not autistic. Here’s why....
good eye contact despite struggling (can only keep eye contact in one eye)
good childhood apparently, loved school....had friends. perfectly normal apparently according to my mum (I wasn’t)
I don’t flap my hands or dance in circles. I do other stuff
i didn’t notice pictures that were not straight in room
didnt talk excessively about special interests (I don’t want to bore people)
can communicate well, when people are asking my questions
I had friends but can’t maintain them now don’t want any.
can play football
despite struggling with a raft of problems since I can remember. I was just told......your not autistic. Goodbye
i very well may not be autistic but......I feel they were looking for an extreme case. I hide my stuff well and had to too survive.
I just feel like I’ve been given no help and just basically told, yeah....you’re just not very good at stuff and maybe it’s trauma? I felt different since a kid and this was brushed off. Rant over.
anyone else had something similar?
I was diagnosed as not autistic at my first assessment. I would have presented similar to the way you describe, although my assessor was more polite and gave me more ideas about other diagnoses. This sent me down a blind alley of focusing on my poor mental health for years instead of the underlying cause i.e. autism.
I did eventually realise I was autistic, at which point I began reading everything I could get my hands on about autism and compiled a large Word document detailing why I thought I was autistic, showing every symptom I thought I had. Then I asked for a second assessment and this time was diagnosed as autistic.
How many years between the two, Luftmentsch? Research has moved on a great deal albeit sadly in some case not all assessors have kept uptodate by the sounds of it.
A lot. I think about ten between being told I wasn't autistic and seriously beginning to think that I was misdiagnosed, several more until I got the actual diagnosis. That said, I think the main difference between the two assessments was that I had done a lot of research in-between and had shared that with my mother, so that we were able to tell the psychiatrist things that we had not been asked at the first assessment and had not known to mention without being asked.
If I think back over 18 years ago now to the first time they tried CBT, the psychologist was noticing a lot of signs of my autism, but didn't recognise them as such and was just genuinely puzzled. I remember him saying that he refused to believe I couldn't be helped and didn't believe I was just being resistant or difficult, but there was something going on he just could not put his finger on.
I like to think that chap would spot an autistic patient today. Research has moved on.