Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi all,
I'm 24 years old I've thought for years I may have aspergers, but I'm really not sure if it's worth wasting my time or the doctors time, finding out. So, I thought, I'll write down a bit of what I experience here, and if you could give your opinion as to whether it sounds worthwhile?
I've always been a bit socially 'at odds' with everyone else. When I was a kid I didn't have any friends for a while, and when I did, I was terrible at maintaining friendships.. this is the same now.
I have anxiety and depression which were significantly worse when I was in primary school/high school, but I still have it now.
I bite my nails, I have facial tics, I have complex partial seizures (doc said its triggered by anxiety??) I like to rock back and forward and sideto side when i'm excited/nervous/stressed, I have dyslexia and dyscalculia.
I have one of those "no expression faces" and a somewhat "monotonous voice"
I have various interests, but only really seem to have one at a time, and when I have an interest, I like to research it a lot and gather lots of info about it and seemed to get "sucked in". Some examples are: Paganism, mental health, the universe, animals...
I've really had to learn about social situations; I'm quite good at being social but there's just some things that I can't learn, which are: not getting jokes or taking longer than the rest of the group to get the joke, being a bit "slow" in conversations, being tired out by social situations, etc.
also as for routine, I don't have strict rigid routines, but I do get irritable and angry if someone tries to change my plans for the day, or there is a big change and disrupts my day.
I also have some sensory things, like loud noises sometimes physically hurting me so I cover my ears, sometimes get panic attacks from loud noises, not liking physical touch very much, my eyes are very sensitive to light and I have my brightness on my phone and computer down to the lowest, which is still sometimes too bright, and I'm a picky eater.
But at the same time, I don't seem to get other things that i hear a lot of people with aspergers have.
Be honest, what do you think? (obviously I can't write it all down, otherwise this would be a long post!)
Personally, I found my assessment a really satisfying experience. I'll describe a little below - though I should point out that there does seem to be quite a bit of variation in how different teams do it.
My assessment was four two-hour long interviews spread over a couple of months. The first one was mostly spent completing some of the standard self-reporting questionnaires, in order to give the psychologist some leads to begin the rest of the process.
The interviews actually felt very relaxed. The people in a dedicated ASD unit will understand that your communication style may be unusual, and will have encountered any anxieties that you have many times before - and they're also trained to see beneath any "imitation of normal" behaviour that I worried might interfere with diagnosis . I was put at my ease very quickly, and did not find the questioning to be too intrusive or embarrassing at all - more comfortable than many sessions with counsellors and therapists in the past, to be honest.
During the final session, an occupational therapist joined the psychologist for part of the interview. I think this was for her particular expertise in sensory and executive functioning problems, which seem to be particularly pronounced in my case.
In my case, parental involvement was by post, as my folks are in their 70's now, and live too far away to travel conveniently. When I spoke to my Mum later about it, it seems that the questions she was asked were fairly innocuous - mostly practical questions about how I played with my toys, when I learned my first words, behaviour at children's parties, how often I had tantrums, that kind of thing. Not so different from the kind of anecdotes that parents share with each other every day at the school gates, really - and not at all expecting her to "psychoanalyse" how I had been.
I hope that helps to put your mind a little more at rest. If you have a local patient support group where you might find someone who has been assessed in your district, they might be worth contacting too. There's no such thing as being "over-prepared" so much that it would change the outcome - in fact, the psychologist I saw thanked me afterwards for preparing myself so well and making her job so much easier!