Published on 12, July, 2020
Hello, I'm a 21-year-old man. You can call me my username, Armada. I wanted to ask for some advice from people who may have gone through the struggles I'm currently facing or are going through the same thing as me. I apologize as this may get long-winded and hard to read, as I like to ramble on in these types of posts.
For a long time now, I've been struggling with some fairly 'basic' signs of autism. Overstimulation, being anti-social/socially anxious, struggling with 'meltdowns' and masking are some things that I deal with the majority of the time. Though, most of these things are swept under the rug by doctors and family because I'm not presenting as a "stereotypical autistic person".
But, the main thing I really want to know is that is it really worth it for me to go through the time, effort and money to get formally tested by a professional? Now that I'm 21, I'm almost done with schooling (at least for right now, I'm not sure if I'll be getting my bachelor's degree). I won't need the services that my college may offer to their students who are on the spectrum. I don't think a workplace, especially where I'm located, would offer any accommodations to an employee. In my mind, the diagnosis would just be proof to shove in my family's faces to say "Hey. I was right. I was right all along. Suck it". But I'm not sure that spending over $1,000 is worth it in the long run.
I would love some insight and wisdom. Thank you!
If anyone is curious about what other things I may be dealing with, feel free to ask. I'm very willing to be open.
I absolutely agree! I will find a US-based community as soon as possible. Thank you again!
You're welcome! And it's not a problem at all - we have lots of international members here :)
That being said, it might also be a good idea to seek additional, experience-based advice from a US-based community, where there'll be more people with detailed knowledge of, and opinions on, the matter from a US perspective.
You are awesome for this! I wanted to take some tests online but I was unsure if they were accurate. Thanks for the link!
Thank you for the information you've provided! I wasn't aware of the ADA act, but that's really useful to know about. Thank you so much for bringing this to my attention.
And yes, I should've probably clarified that I'm based in the USA, my apologies if I should've posted this question to another website
Hi Armada and welcome to the community!
armada said:But I'm not sure that spending over $1,000 is worth it in the long run.
I'm assuming from this comment that you're not in the UK, so I won't post any advice from the NAS, which is UK based and UK focused.
armada said:I don't think a workplace, especially where I'm located, would offer any accommodations to an employee
However, if you're in the US, then it seems that similar entitlement to workplace accommodations might be enshrined in law:
https://autismsociety.org/resources/legal/#:~:text=Americans%20with%20Disabilities%20Act&text=It%20guarantees%20equal%20opportunity%20for,Bush.
My advice would be to take some online autism tests. AQ10 and AQ50 (sometimes called just 'AQ') are the most commonly used by clinicians in this country, but the RAADS-R is the most definitive. They can be found here: https://embrace-autism.com/autism-tests/
If you score in the autism range it will give you more certainty about following up on a diagnosis.
Hi, welcome to the community! It’s very individual, it’s hard to say if it’s worth getting the diagnosis. You can consider few things - how important it is for you personally, your identity, what would it give you? If you say that there are no accommodations that this diagnosis could give you to improve the quality of your life, then looks like the identity matter would be the most important.
i can say for myself - I strongly identify with the autistic struggles and generally experience, from feedback from others I know that my quirks are autistic traits, since I found out what ASD Asperger actually is, I recognized myself there and I tested myself multiple times, all tests showed high scores and I use this knowledge to help myself improve the quality of my life without having any diagnosis. Being part of this community also helps me. For this I don’t need dx, to cover my ears on certain noisy situations I don’t need either. I’m not going to request diagnosis at least in the nearest future because it wouldn’t technically help me with anything and there is also risk of being told that you are not autistic. So here are two components of the dx - autistic traits, that are present and the impact they have on your life. The last point is a bit tricky, because it’s quite subjective. One specialist may say that being a loner and having no friends is not a problem, other one may decide that this is a problem and indeed your autistic traits cause this problem. It’s just an example. There are examples where people hear, that they can’t be autistic because they are married, highly intelligent, good educated and high achieving while intelligence is not listed in the criteria. So here you can consider pros and cons. I can’t paste a link, but you can also research on this site an article is it worth to get a diagnosis. I hope it helps a bit. Whatever experience others share, it’s your decision what you will do.