wahaha-sexual:

noitemsfoxonlyfinaldestination:

howtfoldlaundry:

noitemsfoxonlyfinaldestination:

if you think you’re oppressed because you’re self-diagnosed as autistic or aspberger’s or anything else, you need to sit down

unless you’re qualified to make such a diagnosis

which i doubt most self-diagnosed people are

okay it’s asperger’s, not aspberger’s, for one.

for two, unless you have something to say about how expensive it is to diagnose

and the fact that you might spend 3k (like i did!) to be told ‘well, you smile, so you’re not autistic’

you really need to sit the fuck down talking about who’s valid and who’s not.

i mean unless you can provide all self-diagnosed people with the cash to get diagnosed.

mmmm yes please tell me more  about how self-diagnosis is 100% accurate and should always be taken seriously

webmd is really useful

ok I understand that if you’re going private or not on a national healthcare like most in England are, it is really expensive (and I was diagnosed with depression by my gp before being refered to a clinical psychologist who is going to test me for asperger’s next week and is refering me to a psychiatrist for meds for my anxiety disorder)

But still, self-diagnosis is not the way to do it!

Then pray tell what is? If you cannot afford pro-diagnosis and still need to find resources to help you manage your life, how can it possibly be harmful to figure out what’s up and look for community and advice relevant to that issue?

I’m seeing so many assumptions of incompetence when it comes to self-diagnosing autism and other mental/neurological disorders that just don’t happen if it’s somatic in nature.

If you fall while skiing and your break your arm, are you gonna completely avoid saying that “Owwwww, my arm’s broken” before a doc has confirmed that yes, it is indeed broken? Like hell you are. You’re gonna take a look at that arm sitting at a weird angle that it’s not supposed to and you’re gonna go all “fucking shit, my arm’s broken! And dammit that hurts!” or something to that effect.

Are you gonna consult with your doctor before claiming that you have a cold? No. Are you gonna consult with your doc before claiming that you sprained your ankle? No. Are you gonna consult your doc before claiming you have diarrhea? No.

Because those are plain as fucking day. And to some of us, the symptoms of our disorders are plain as day, too.

Let me use me as an example: I’m a psychology student. I researched loads of different mental illnesses and checklisted my symptoms. Eventually I thought I had BPD. This was debunked upon meeting with my therapist because- guess what?- I wasn’t qualified to diagnose and therefore made incorrect assumptions.

Something’s missing here: did you mistake some symptoms and have another disorder instead? Or did you imagine you had those symptoms because you’d been reading too much about them? Not the same situation. In fact, vastly different situations.

Additionally, your incorrect assumptions are not because of you being unqualified. Correlation is not causation. Incorrect assumptions are incorrect assumptions. Being qualified to diagnose does not make you immune to making incorrect assumptions either.

There is also the chance that people may be biased: if they want to be psychotic rather than neurotic, or have something more serious than what they have, then subconsciously they will make the criterion for those illnesses fit them, or their symptoms twisted to fit the criterion. Notice how this is all subconscious, so they don’t even consciously know they’re doing it!

Now this is definitely a genuine concern. Something that always pissed me off when my psychologist insisted that I should fill out a questionnaire to figure out what psychopathology I might have. I told her plain and simple that this will not work. A quick glance at the questionnaire had already revealed to me which questions were related to which disorders and I would be able to manipulate it from here to the moon. She, a trained and pro psychologist completely dismissed my concerns and ordered me to answer it all, which btw I couldn’t because it was all yes/no questions and I couldn’t answer a single of the questions in such binary terms. That should pretty much have told her that I was autistic, with my complete inability to work in generalisations when describing my life and my attention to detail.

But no.

She pretty much concluded that I had a depression and nothing more. An entire year of therapy with her didn’t help wit the depression because she completely overlooked my autism, which I had to discover and diagnose for myself.

Also, evaluate yourself. Make a list of all the points about you. Now, ask your friends and family to write a list of all the points about you. Compare them. Chances are, your family and friends will be more accurate in what they say because they notice all the things you do unconsciously- for example, people with asperger’s sometimes make hand movements without realising it. The sufferers themselves probably wouldn’t pick that up without being told by someone else! This is another reason why self-diagnosis is hugely inaccurate.

You seem to think that none of us have ever, ever, ever received comments on such behaviours. Do you not realise that such outward behaviours are exactly what most of us have been bullied for? We already know we have them. Making a list and asking people isn’t gonna make us any more certain than we already are. People spend so much time pointing out to us how we’re weird, we already KNOW that people notice.

Why do you and so many others seem to think that self-diagnostics is just an idea we get out of the blue? Does it nor occur to you that most - if not all - of us have been told by our surroundings all our lives that we’re freaks and more or less randomly we’ve now found an explanation for the particular way in which we’re weird? Does it not occur to you most of us actually have the ability to think critically? Does it not occur to you that with the stigma attached to having psychological or neurological disorders only very, very few people would want a diagnosis that isn’t accurate? Does it not occur to you that we’re actually coming at these diagnoses because we’ve been searching for explanations for why we are different in ways that we can’t seem to just change like people tell us to?

Also, if you have no money to be diagnosed, why diagnose in the first place?

If you’re a student of psychology I would advise you to use the internet a bit more. Why indeed would people want to know what’s up with them? Why indeed? Such a strange idea to want to know what’s going on on the top floor.

If you know what kind of support you’re looking for it’s easier to find relevant support.

If you do a google search on “I feel weird and the other kids bully me” do you honestly think you’re going to find super-useful free resources that might help an autistic kid or adult cope with life? If you search for a specific disorder and find communities where people share experiences for free you might actually find some tips that’ll make your life easier. And if they don’t work, well then you might have gotten the diagnosis wrong, and you might not. And if they do work and do help you, then who the fuck cares whether you looked on a message-board for the wrong diagnosis?

For someone who claims to know stuff, you show it very poorly.

Diagnosing yourself then makes you feel more ill and you become convinced you need help or medication, whereas before you probably didn’t- and you can’t afford the help or treatment, oops!

Needing help or treatment can lead to diagnosing yourself. In fact that is the way it goes more often than not. I have no idea how you think you know these things. It is so ignorant I don’t even know how you can think like this. A lot of people seek out explanations for their troubles specifically *because* they can’t handle some aspects of life. And what kind of shitty attitude is it to claim that since we can’t afford treatment we shouldn’t even so much as wonder what’s wrong with us? I sincerely hope that you will never, ever, ever be ill. I mean, by your logic you’d have to be able to afford extensive chemotherapy out of pocket before seeking a possible explanation for a headache or stomach-ache. Did you know that sometimes the solution to a problem is real easy and simply and cheap? Did you know that this is also the case for many autism related problems? No, you probably didn’t. Did you know that many of these really simple solutions aren’t found on webmd (which is crap for most non-somatic things anyway), because that site revolves around medicine rather than around people’s practical lives?

Did you know that your arrogant and condescending attitude is exactly why you should never be allowed to diagnose a single person. Ever.

If you can’t afford it and you’re not in desperate need, such as crippling and disabling sadness or self-harm or suicidal thoughts, or even intense fear of neutral stimuli such as, say, cars, then don’t worry about it.

But if you can’t afford it and you ARE in desperate need. Then what? And does it count to you that we need to be able to go about our lives, school studies, work and stuff so that we might not end up unemployed and on the street? Is that okay with you? That we want to be able to live lives like everybody else do?

Your view of what need is, is so narrow it’s not even funny. Educate yourself before educating others.

If you are, however, then I advise seeking as many opportunities as possible to find help and treatment, rather than do a cackhanded job of diagnoses and treatment which may damage you more in the long run.

And how and where do you suggest people do this IF THEY CAN’T FUCKING AFFORD IT?!?!?!

Your advice is just so blah it’s a wonder you can’t even see it. Through figuring out what’s wrong with us, by ourselves, we are working towards finding solutions and hopefully inexpensive/over-the-counter treatments, because anything more expensive than is unavailable. D you even grasp the concept of availability? Access?

You are placing all of the responsibility for unaffordable diagnosis and treatment at the feet of people who cannot afford it.

Another interesting tidbit is that if you look around - a lot of people with ASD actually self-diagnosed before they got their official diagnosis, suggesting that a lot of people are actually entirely correct about themselves.

In my own case, I self-diagnosed after an entire year with the crappy psychologist at the public hospital, which was free and hence all I could afford. Actually, I first self-diagnosed with depression years and years before, but at some point it got so bad I had to seek help. So I did. And that psychologist was what I got. And after that year she still had no idea that I was autistic. But then I figured it out. Kind of by accident by reading some stuff and realising that “OMG that is me, this is what I’m like. Wait… isn’t everybody like this? OMG they’re not. This explains why life is too much for me to handle! I wasn’t designed for this. Wow…. uhhh now what?” I went to that psychologist with it. She admitted to knowing nothing about ASD. I requested she send me to another psychologist in the hospital who did. The hospital refused, because they didn’t have one.

Swallow that one: The hospital did not have a single psychologist on staff who knew anything about ASD. And this is the 6th biggest city in the country. Of course they did have an ASD-specialized psychiatrist in the children’s ward, whom I had to tell them about, because I’d gone to a lecture with him, but I couldn’t see him - I wasn’t a child, I was 25.

I was told that (and I translate directly what my psychologist told me): “[I] can be [her] guinea pig, while [she] reads up on the subject”. After an entire year during which she hadn’t even so much as *wondered* why the therapy didn’t help with my depression at all. Yeah no.

Since I had also been fired due to not being able to handle life the Jobcentre had the option of sending me to a psychiatrist to figure out what was wrong with me. They wrote to him that I suspected Asperger’s, and they’d like for him to evaluate me and suggest how to best help me find an occupation that would work for me.

3 months of waiting followed. And then finally I got a session with this man. Two hours - and those were two of the roughest hours of my life - I had a diagnosis. And I had been right. In fact, he just asked me to list the symptoms I’d observed in myself, he jotted them down, asked a few questions for clarification, declared me autistic and sent me a 5-page report the following week, detailing all the ways in which my symptoms do indeed prove my autism/asperger’s, and a few suggestions to the jobcentre on how to help me - mainly he advice to them consisted in telling them to listen to me - something they promptly stopped doing.

And ever since then? I’ve been struggling and fighting tooth and nail to get any help at all, because OMG I can read and write and talk, I must not have any problems at all, except could I stop being so weird and not bother people with my annoying weirdness, please.

And you? You have no fucking clue what it’s like. When people self-diagnose we can find each other in online communities. What do you think I did during those 3 months of waiting for my appointment? Nothing? Think again. I was online. I was researching. I was talking to my family about whether I’d always been like so and so (unsurprisingly, that was a yes), I was identifying more and more aspects of myself that show my autism. And at the same time I was reading about how other people in similar situations dealt with their troubles. I found inspiration to deal with some of mine.

Now, 2½ years after I was officially diagnosed I have received more help by engaging in online communities than I have from professional knowledgeable ‘carers’. I have developed more coping mechanisms based on inspiration from other autistics than any psychologist have even come close to. I have met two psychiatrists and three psychologists at the hospital and I know MORE about autism and asperger’s than they do. Do not for a single moment think that having a degree in the fields of psychiatry or psychology means you know everything about a topic. It means you have a broad knowledge-base to work from. To actually be able to give really good advice/treatment for a specific disorder, you need to specialize, and you can’t specialize in everything (which is okay, of course). And do not assume that just because people have no degree they can’t know anything. If you have access to textbooks and other scientific materials, you can very fast become more specialized in a specific topic of psychology than a randomly picked psychologist is.

And seriously, your advice is crap. When people need advice on how to deal with their issues, because they can’t afford pro therapy/treatment/diagnostics telling them to get diagnosed and get pro help is not only ignorant, it is offensive and potentially damaging.