Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi. I'm a 39 year old female, married with 3 children and a professional job. With the increased awareness generally of autism, a couple of people pointed out to me that I may be on the spectrum. When reading about it, everything made sense and I'm feeling pretty annoyed no one noticed it during my childhood as it was tough!
I'm getting on OK now but have some mental health problems and obviously don't deal well with social situations.
I'm wondering if there's any point in going for a diagnosis now and if that would really make any difference to my life.
Hi there
Very similar to my story, apart from the kids. I have managed to hold down a professional job for most of my life but with a lot of challenges. I made it to my 40s before things got so bad that I reached the "either I need to find an explanation for this, or accept that I am going crazy" stage. A great deal of research followed, and when I started reading about autism, and especially autism in women. it was a bit of a shock - everything I read, I thought oh, that's me.
I went for a private assessment as my problems had got so bad that I was hurtling towards some kind of breakdown. The cost of the private assessment was less than the cost of potentially falling apart and not being able to work during the 2 year wait for an NHS diagnosis, so I didn't feel like I had much choice.
I was right in my self-diagnosis: Aspergers. Now, I will warn you, if you are the same, there is no support at all post-diagnosis. However, knowing what I was dealing with made a huge difference to me, as did being able to request some reasonable adjustments at work. Once you know why you have problems, it does give you a chance to mitigate them to some degree. For that alone, I feel like the diagnosis was worthwhile.
Anxiety seems to go hand in hand with autism. I was diagnosed with both by the person who diasnosed my autism (prior to that I had never been to the GP about the anxiety).
I'd recommend looking at Tania Marshall's list of signs of Aspergers in women: https://taniaannmarshall.wordpress.com/2013/06/22/first-signs-of-asperger-syndrome-in-young-girls-pre-school/ and https://taniaannmarshall.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/moving-towards-a-female-profile-the-unique-characteristics-abilities-and-talents-of-asperwomen-adult-women-with-asperger-syndrome/
If you feel amazed looking back that no-one noticed it during your childhood, you may find the young girls list interesting as well as the adult one, just to see how many of the signs you actually exhibited.
When I was school age, Aspergers was not a diagnosis anyway, so I guess it's not surprising that it was not picked up.
Good luck with whatever you choose to do and I hope that you manage to get some answers.
Thanks so much for your reply and the links. Really hits home. I had huge problems in childhood and school but, as you say, it wasn't a thing then. They knew I was odd but they didn't know why. What is really interesting for me about the links is that my daughter is 2 and a half and she's so much like me. She is also like the description of pre school aspergers girls. My hope for her is that she goes through her childhood proud of who she is, without having to deal with people criticising her for being her. I think my son has it too but his lack of social skills doesn't seem to bother him at all. Boys and girls are very different.
My brother has told me he thinks he has it and he has a son who is severely autistic (non verbal).
Can I ask where you got the private diagnosis?
Thanks again