Published on 12, July, 2020
My family had no previous awareness of ASD until our Daughter was referred to CAMHS, due to severe anxiety and school refusal. She has been assessed and is now diagnosed with Asperger's amongst other things.
The thing is I am diagnosed with BPD, GAD and Depression, yet the more my daughter and I learn about Asperger's in females, the more convinced we are that I actually have Asperger's and not BPD. Is this possible?
I doubt MH team would take me seriously in any case. But I can't help thinking about what my daughter said to me after her Psych and psychologist explained the traits of Asperger's to us in a meeting one day. We were walking out from the meeting and she said......"Mum I think you qualify as having ASD more than I do". I didn't tell her that I was already thinking the same thing.
My daughter reminds me so much of me from an early age, the crippling anxiety, learning to mimick and mask, amongst all other ASD traits.
I have finally recognisd most of my overload triggers just through learning more about ASD. I actually don't feel like such a stranger in a world of people who i could never fit in with. For once in my whole 38 years of life I feel as though can relate to other people, those who have ASD
It is certainly possible that you have been mis-diagnosed. Knowledge of autism can be very patchy among mental health staff, right up to clinical psychologist level, and it's not unusual that late-diagnosed autistic people have had their autistic traits previously mistaken for other psychological conditions. My own autistic traits, over three decades, were attributed mainly to depression, and it was suggested that I might also be bipolar or have GAD. There can also be a problem that, once you've received a diagnosis, other professionals find it very hard to see past it, and will attribute almost anything to whatever condition is written in your notes. Another problem is that autism can present differently in women than in men, and professionals have been slow to recognise this, so autism could have been incorrectly ruled out at your previous diagnosis.
As to BPD in particular, I have an autistic friend that a psychologist had previously suspected had BPD, and know another who had BPD suggested by the same psychologist; having got to know him very well, we're pretty sure he is also autistic, and he's waiting for his assessment (the other friend, that is, not the psychologist!) What little I know about BPD suggests that there are behaviours which could look superficially similar when observed only in clinical interviews (we had a similar discussion here recently about narcissistic disorders.)
Of course, I must stress that all of this is hypothetical; I'm neither a psychologist nor do I know you well enough to say anything more definite. However, the fact that your daughter recognises it in you, and that you empathise so much with her traits, leads me to think that you should definitely look into it further!