Published on 12, July, 2020
... just reading through a SARS release of my MH records..
Anyone else done this?
The degree to which they have failed to understand or recognise an Aspie, when she is right in front of them is staggering in 2019,. I have to forgive the ignorance regardless But in the absence of understanding the readiness to blame and misdiagnosed me and then hide that from me, is really quite unforgivable.
So much hidden under guise of "therapeutic privelege" . Dear God! No wonder that never went well!
I can never trust them again. But, I will fight for something better for others.
My mental health isn't at its best right now. I can't turn to my parents for support, they don't understand and last told me that I need to pull myself together. Very unhelpful.
Professionals are ok. I do it all in secret don't want my parents knowing. I'd never hear the end of it. The professionals are ok but whenever I mention the possibility of autism they completely ignore it. I know I'm not diagnosed yet but I think I will be soon and it will come out that I'm autistic, but the professionals aren't even weighing it as an option.
Very confusing for me. I wish I had more people to talk to about it in my life.
You might want to see the live stream 'Spectrum live' which this website broadcast today. It was all about reasonable adjustments in therapy for autism. The professionals should know that your autism will affect your therapy. I start really pushing the point that you feel they need to respond to you 'as if' while you wait. You can wait an age, getting no support, or inappropriate support and sometimes if they don't account for your autism. The support you get can even be counter productive.
Oh thank you, I will have a look for Spectrum live. I think it could be beneficial for me to watch. I feel the support I am getting at the moment is counter productive for me. I think it will be easier once I've been diagnosed and they can look at things from a different angle.
Currently I don't believe they are giving the correct help.
Yes, indeed. I have medical phobias which they were trying to treat with CBT and like approaches for years. when I was getting nowhere they blamed me to the point of misdiagnosis a personality disorder and chucked me in the bin.
As soon as I realised I was autistic, I understood why CBT would never work. The cause of my problems with medical treatment NEVER had anything whatever to do with anything I thought. CBT had been just gaslighting me. The problem was that every medical procedure had been a literal, not an imagined, trauma because my sensory system was behaving differently to other people's. The experience was real, not imagined and could not be changed by thinking about it any differently, only by the general medical people handling it differently in light of my different neurology. I'm not even sure now this fully meets the criteria for a "phobia". A phobia is an irrational response to something, but given what I felt was actually real all my life, my response wasn't all that irrational. It was a normal response to an atypical experience.
You really must insist that if you are autistic, your autism needs to be at the core of any treatment not a bolt on, or worse and irrelevance; because you will be sensorily experiencing the world differently, thinking differently, processing and analysing information differently, communicating differently, processing, expressing and interpreting emotion differently. They can't ask you to do any therapy like an NT, if you aren't an NT. You need to do it like an autistic person, because you are an autistic person.
If the NHS lets you down and you have the means, find an autism informed private therapist. They are out there and they know how to accommodate. Better yet, a therapist who is on the Spectrum him/herself.
Meanwhile, there are some good books and videos out there written or done by people who know what they are talking about. Any talk by Dr Hendrickx on autism and anxiety and Luke Beardon's little book on anxiety and autistic adults.