Published on 12, July, 2020
During my autism assessment, the psychiatrist said that although my autism affects many aspects of my life, I was still able to communicate to her well and therefore only had it “mild”. I understand that I have low support needs and that other autistic people have different or more extreme struggles and need more support, but I was masking a lot in the assessment in order to answer the questions as clearly as possible, which completely exhausted me and impacted how I felt over the next couple of days. As Keedie said in the TV show “A kind of spark”, her autism only seems mild because ‘we make it so, at a great personal cost’. Autism has a huge impact on my life, even if no one else can see it, and especially if I’m purposefully changing my behaviour to fit in or adapt to other people. Just because it seems mild to you doesn’t mean it actually is to me. I feel like this is why the terms “high functioning” and “low functioning” are being used less in favour of “support needs” which I feel is more accurate and less diminishing of autistic people’s struggles. I’d be interested to know other people’s opinions too as I know some people don’t mind the word “mild”!
For others around it’s “mild” because it affects them mildly, because Ive mastered my coping strategies, which took years and a lot of my energy. Long time ago before my realisation I had some thoughts. I thought that I’m somehow kinda a bit disabled (especially when comparing myself and others being a group and me being always the loner) and to continue the thought- I came to conclusion that if you are visibly disabled, it’s obvious and severe, then you gonna get recognized and supported on time, or at least there is higher likelihood for that. But if you are only a bit disabled, you gonna go through life without any support and only thinking that you are a total failure. At that time I thought that I don’t deserve to live, because I can’t be like others. What I want to say is not that it’s easier for people with higher support needs, doesn’t matter if they are on the spectrum or have other types of issues, conditions etc. I wanna say, that it’s hard for both - people with high support needs and people with low support needs. It’s a struggle in both cases but different. I’m very much afraid of mental health professionals as they already traumatised me enough but I’m gonna try again.
so sorry I luckily apart from a few bad apples have found the medical profession pretty good
My experience of mental heath professionals, especially, has been very different. It's only thanks to my daughter's intervention, in demolishing long held, gross, inaccuracies about me,that I now have a healthy relationship with a mental health team. There's been no exchange of heated words in the nearly 7 years I've lived in the SW of England. That contrasts with 40+ previous years of being treated like crap. A far from uncommon happening for those of us who get the mental health diagnosis first, and an ASD dx more than a few years later.