Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi,
I am a 29 year old women and have been looking at the possibility that im autistic for a couple of years now. My niece was recently diagnosed with ADHD and autism and during that time my family and myself noticed a lot of similarities between my niece and how i was at the same age. As we researched autism in girls more the symptoms seems to familiar to me that i was surprised i has never been diagnosed when i was young; i have been diagnosed with OCD and general anxiety disorder and have been in and out of therapy since about 8 years old.
I have also taken a number of online autism test (unsure how accurate they are) and they have came up with a high likely hood that i am autistic. I guess i am just looking for advise on if i should pursue a diagnosis. Although i think i have a lot of the symptoms i am somewhat reluctant to seek this out because i would have thought if i was autistic it would have come up during my years in therapy? In autistic peoples experiences how often are you misdiagnosed or not diagnosed for whatever reasons?
I know that if i went through the process it would be quite stressful for me, however, after seeing how well my niece is now doing with the proper support and understanding i think it could be a good thing for me.
Please let me know if anyone has any experience of late diagnosis even after being in therapy and diagnosed with other things before.
Jay123,
If you are in need of support it will be a good idea to pursue a diagnosis, it can also make it easier to understand yourself.
I am not surprised that so many people are being born autistic, I am becoming more convinced like many scientists that autism is possibly the next step in human evolution. According to my studying genes can build upon top of themselves which does explain where the additional information from nature comes from. During the last 10 years autism diagnosis rate have increased from an estimation of 1% of the world’s population to 2% not including those who are not diagnosed. There’s nonautistic parents giving birth to autistic children. This increase of diagnosis can’t be because of an increase of awareness alone. The cause of autism is still unknown, so it is possible that the cause of autism is evolution supported by evolutionary psychology and other scientific research.
So I am expecting more people to be born autistic generation after generation.
I was diagnosed privately and my son has a private diagnosis from the same company. His has been accepted by the local neurodevelopmental service who do NHS autism assessments in Norfolk. Mine is in the process. It's been accepted by GP, dentist and hospital with no problem. The private assessment was straight forward and easy to arrange. Everyone I met was very frendly and I was able to refuse some of the tasks as I didn't feel comfortable.