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How to make sense of a new diagnosis at a later age

sylv

Hi I would love to communicate with older people (I am 58 on Sunday) who manage independence and a job but struggle with it all - do you get more tired, more sedate, more fed up, more confused? I could go on lol - I want to understand myself and others and NT's too - I would love to help others - Sylvia 

  • Too true Longman.

    I was diagnosed as an adult and wonder - had I been diagnosed as a child would I have achieved everything I've managed to or would I have been told it was beyond my grasp and not to try?

  • I think for older generation AS diagnoses you just have to count your blessings you weren't diagnosed as children.

    At 63 now I think back to having such difficulties in primary school that there were interventions my parents seem somehow to have fought off. What I now know is that in the late 50s I would probably have been taken out of education and institutionalized.

    If I had been diagnosed in the 60s I would have been treated with medications intended for schizophrenia, and there are people around who suvived these inappropriate treatments, but didn't have much of a life because of the stupefying effects.

    It was different in my 20s and 30s and 40s. Medical science seem to have identified a group of pathological neurotics who were treated as immaturity cases, or social inadequates, and given addictive medications, or told to go away and stop timewasting. I'm sure there are people on here who remember that phase. Here's a relaxation tape, or assertiveness training, or parent-adult-child therapy or etc etc.

    To be honest, life was hard but its a blessing I wasn't diagnosed until mid-50s. 

    But one thing I'm left with is a very low opinion of the health professionals I occasionally bumped into on the way up (I avoided even going to my GP for years).

    Arrogant, cocky self justified no-need--to-take- difficult patients seriously - call that professionalism. A lot of health professionals have let down people on the spectrum badly.

  • I can cope with a job and a cut-down version of family life but after that I am exhausted. I have become aware that I never stop thinking and analysing everything so by the end of the day my brain is aching with exhaustion. The other factor is that all the time I'm at work or around people My mind is racing to keep up and also to the "mask" from slipping. So when I get home I quite often go to bed for an hour or hide somewhere and listen to music.

    I only have a self-diagnosis at the moment but when I made the connection with ASD I felt both releif and totally crushed. Six months later, I'm starting to rebuild my confidence in myself which allows me to talk to other folks more naturally. I've also done quite a bit of reading which has helped to understand the differences and traits of both me and others.

    DunK