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“Trendy” diagnoses

Alien0n3arth

I’ve got some negative experience and also some thoughts. It’s about the self diagnosis in mental health conditions being not accepted mostly by professionals. 
There are various online tests - screening tools. AQ50, AQ10, RAADS, and many others. There are also tests for ADHD. These are screening tools, not designed to diagnose. When you fill out the test, you get the result. If your result is significantly high, you get a message- you might have xyz condition, it’s better to contact a mental health professional. What is the reality? If you fill out the test or even few of them and their results together point to this condition and you go to the professional, there is a high chance, that they will not take you seriously, there high risk of hearing the stupid  “trendy” comments about diagnoses that everyone wants to have, that you just want attention, you’re just lazy not willing to work on yourself, or laugh and question if you know it from TikTok. 
There is a huge ocean of information and also misinformation out there, we as non professionals often lack the ability to differentiate what is true, what is not, but it also depends on where do we look for the information. Social media is more likely to deliver us more misinformation than books, but it’s not all black and white. 
the truth is that we ourselves know best what we experience and a professional who questions that, who tells us “you are exaggerating, creating your problems yourself, or that “this is not a problem” erode our trust and make us more cautious about contacting them. I heard from a psychotherapist (psychiatrist and psychologist, with long experience, doctor, lecturer at a university) that lack of friends is not a problem when I told her it is. When I was a teenager, I was suicidal because of this. And then I heard such a thing. 
So I feel it like - if you think that xyz condition describes your problems and explains the why’s, better stay as you are and don’t dare self diagnosing or reaching out to professionals with your insignificant problems. I hope I will finally find someone treating me seriously. I hope others here have better experience. In my case I was told by few professionals that Im probably autistic, the first one - the lecturer gave me her “trendy” comment after I described her my problems. I haven’t even mentioned anything about autism. I will see if it leads me anywhere or I stay as I am trying to cope. At least the self dx helped me manage my life in a way that is a bit easier for me and recognize how to name actually my struggles and strength and weaknesses. I’m not sure why I’m sharing this, just want to share some thoughts and experience. Can anyone relate? Sorry for a long post

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  • I'm afraid I don't agree and I have very black and white thinking about this. It will be unpopular because it looks like everyone in this thread is self-diagnosed, but I don't believe there is such a thing as self-diagnosis. It's a a logical impossibility, the nature and definition of diagnosis means you can't do it to yourself, particularly since you are not a trained qualified professional who is able to make diagnoses.

    Alien0n3arth said:
    they will not take you seriously, there high risk of hearing the stupid  “trendy” comments about diagnoses that everyone wants to have

    This is in fact one of the negative consequences of the self-diagnosis crowd - it means autism doesn't get taken seriously any more.

    Self-diagnosis and over-diagnosis from paid diagnosis mills has real world harms to people with autism, in terms of diluting the limited help available and making it less likely for autistic people to get the help they need - this already happened recently in Australia. It means people with autism don't get taken seriously and it's one of the reasons I don't tell people I'm autistic, because they'll just think I'm part of the trendy crowd jumping on the bandwagon. It won't be taken seriously.

    There are enormous communities now on TikTok and Reddit and YouTube and other social media, of mostly self-diagnosed people who all have convinced themselves they have autism because of online questionnaires which have very high rates of false positives, and research shows are unreliable for diagnosing autism, and because they relate to memes and think autism is quirky or an identity. They share with each other various things that have nothing to do with autism and reinforce it in echo chambers (you get banned if you question any of it).

    This is not good and actually quite dangerous. They're turning a neurodevelopmental disorder and disability into a club for people with the same opinions and personalities, and go out of their way to warn people to avoid doctors and healthcare professionals who might tell them they aren't autistic, and claim to know more about autism than the professionals who do the diagnoses. It's crazy.

    Self-diagnosis actually harms those who diagnose themselves. Many autism traits can be characteristics of other conditions, from anxiety to depression to PTSD or personality disorders, many of which have treatments. If you diagnose yourself and avoid seeing a professional then you potentially deny yourself treatment and make yourself suffer unnecessarily.

    None of this means any of you here don't have autism or shouldn't post here. Before I was diagnosed, I was on a waiting list for 4 years. I did not feel comfortable saying that I had autism then, because I didn't know whether I did; I just strongly suspected it. And it's fine to join autistic communities and get help if you feel that fits for you or that you might have autism. If the diagnosis was negative, I would have respected that. I would still have autistic traits, but perhaps not above the threshold for a diagnosis. I could still have related to the community and found benefit from it.

    Not having a diagnosis doesn't mean you don't have autism, it just means you don't have a diagnosis. You might get one in the future, or have reasons for not thinking it's worth getting one. That's all fine. But you still aren't diagnosed with autism.

  • in reply to Paper

    I have to respectfully disagree with some of it too.

    While I am now diagnosed - I probably wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the idea of self-diagnosis. I'm not going into any more detail - but by 'here', I don't mean the board. The diagnosis in the end was just a rubber stamp, and didn't give me anything new. It was my self diagnosis and things that I read on the board here that got me through. Not a piece of paper.

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  • in reply to Paper

    I have to respectfully disagree with some of it too.

    While I am now diagnosed - I probably wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the idea of self-diagnosis. I'm not going into any more detail - but by 'here', I don't mean the board. The diagnosis in the end was just a rubber stamp, and didn't give me anything new. It was my self diagnosis and things that I read on the board here that got me through. Not a piece of paper.

Children