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

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 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.