Whether you believe it or not, I intended no offense. I was merely responding to your choice of words in this thread - that you live with anxiety and depression. I think many folk can say that - especially in current times. To my mind, that is somewhat less clear than “I have been diagnosed with, am treated for, and have been found disabled by…” But I am not a linguist.
Having a heart attack a couple years ago kinda thrust me into the medical system that I’d largely been avoiding for decades. It opened my eyes about a few things. Sure, I had more motivation to pay attention to diet and exercise, but I knew that already.
What really opened my eyes was the embarrassment I felt over the fuss people were making (in the middle of the grocery store parking lot), and the guilt over the time and resources they were using to try to save my life that could be better used on someone who matters.
Fortunately, at the time, I guess they didn’t consider me competent to make that sort of decision, so did so anyway, but that is something that came up later while parades of medical professionals visited while I was recovering.
Anyway, they seemed concerned about my mental state and had me talk to some councilors. I was resistant to this at first, though honestly I don’t know why, for the same reason that I waved off concerns when I was having chest pains, I guess.
But to be honest, I did feel these people were pretty useless, spouting off strings of alphabet soup and almost platitudes. OTOH, they did hook me up with people who actually seemed to know what they were doing, though that took a while as well.
It took a long time to unravel the c-pstd from the ASD and the ADHD, as all of those make me who I am. Understanding patterns and defense and survival mechanisms that I had developed didn’t change that, but it did allow me to function more fully, and having tools to navigate social landscapes has helped immensely.
Being diagnosed doesn’t give me a label to shove in people’s faces, it gives me a roadmap that helps me navigate without becoming overwhelmed, but also gives me the grace to forgive myself when I fail.
ASD often becomes comorbid with c-pstd if the family or social environment is not equipped to deal with it, if they try to punish divergent behavior rather than try to understand it.
If you suspect you have divergence, even if you are functional (especially if you are functional), then you should see someone, it could make a huge difference in your life. Don’t wait for a heart attack to make you start.
And if you aren’t neurodivergent, you probably should as well, as everyone could use a bit of a mental check-up.
I was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome as a teen. But I know a fair number of people with similar struggles - in some cases worse than mine - who haven’t been diagnosed, and maybe never thought about it. So I tend to think it genuinely has been underdiagnosed, and a lot of the people self-diagnosing likely have it.
There is also the concept of the ‘broader autism phenotype’ that encompasses people who have some autistic traits, but not enough, or lacking sufficient intensity to be diagnosable. So it’s not like all these people are just faking - likely they genuinely have some of the symptoms.
“There is a defined condition called autism, that you either have or don’t have” is the wrong way to think about it. There’s a pretty big difference between me and my neighbour’s non-verbal autistic kid in terms of the problems we have, what kind of support would help, and likely life outcomes. It would be foolish to treat us the same, in either direction. There may not be that big a difference between someone who gets a diagnosis, and another person who is told they don’t quite qualify: both can have similar problems in certain areas, and could benefit from following the same advice. One just has somewhat more/bigger problems than the other.
I think people see claiming the label when you haven’t been diagnosed as a way to illegitimately get sympathy and accommodations, but those should be based on a person’s real problems, not the presence or absence of a label.
This sounds useful, and it’s something that I never got. What sort of tools are you referring to?
I came by my very late autism diagnosis via my child, who is a psychotherapist, suggesting I might look into it. I did, and I’d say I check around 85% of the boxes. And there was my mother, and her father, who were more classic autism cases, once you looked at it that way. My mother had no empathy in her. I mean, zero. She wasn’t cruel or harsh – she just had no interest. My grandfather barely spoke.
Like many autistic people I am both extremely empathetic and socially averse. It’s like if I pay attention to humans I have no skin. People are draining, even nice fun sane people. Their insides are very noisy and it never stops. So I often avoid them. A lot of autistic people really connect with animals, and I think it’s partly because animals are so quiet inside. Humans have thoughts like “Oh, what’s that? A big bird with pointed wings with a sharp angle. White throat. Could it be a tern? What kind of tern? Better get my bird book. Where did I leave it? Do I have binoculars? What’s it eating? I hope it’s not trash. Plastic pollution, single use plastic, why is it on the consumer not the manufacturer to control packaging waste?” And on and on and on.
Animals be more like: “What’s that? Oh, nothing important. Mmm.”
Stuff like emotional regulation. I was taught as a kid that you regulated emotions by ignoring them… Apparently that doesn’t work at all. That you shouldn’t get angry, or scared, really anytime someone says, “You shouldn’t feel that way.” they are causing you to erase yourself. (My therapist calls it gaslighting, but I know the board has an official opinion on the definition of that word.)
Anger is natural, it’s an important emotion that tells us that something is up. It’s like the check engine light, it’s not the problem, it’s just letting us know that we need to check under the hood. Most people either ignore their anger, or they focus on it, but few actually ask their anger what it actually needs. (My therapist thought it was quite amusing when I pointed out that I literally kept a pack of cigarettes on my dashboard to block the check engine light. We agreed that was an apt metaphor).
Conflict resolution was also another important one. I watched my parents scream at each other almost every day, but I not once saw them make up. I literally did not know that conflicts could be resolved, much less how to do so, so I’d fight if it was important, and fawn if it wasn’t.
There is a lot more than that, but it’s hard to explain, there are things that can only be taught in person by a very patient person over the course of many, many hours.
Whole lot of language prescriptivists here.
Ignoring emotions is fairly obviously unhealthy, but knowing how to deal with them constructively is another question. I suppose I should try and get some actual help, now that it finally exists. Trouble is, that’s one of those things it’s easy to procrastinate on indefinitely, so I do. 
And sorry to hear about your heart attack. I hope you’re doing better now, physically as well as mentally?
I’ve been diagnosed with OCD, prescribed ADHD meds. Probably not actually Asperger’s.
Short answer is, they are telling you something, listen. If you don’t, they will just get louder.
Long answer is a lot, lot longer, I’d recommend if you have the ability to work things out with someone.
I procrastinated, and even gave up when I tried almost 20 years ago, as navigating the bureaucracy to get into therapy was beyond my patience…
Much better in both aspects. Not living in a state of constant low-level anxiety has done wonders for my physical health.
Something to remember, joy and despair are almost the same thing, rational thought overwhelmed by emotion. Only real difference is that joy is fleeting.
I was in my fifties when my doctor diagnosed me with Asperger’s Syndrome.
I’m lucky in that I have areas where I function really well (chess, bridge, computing, reading.)
As a child I literally had no friends - I simply didn’t know how to hold a conversation.
Fortunately I joined a chess club aged 13 and this made social interactions (just with fellow players) much easier.
Now retired (in my seventies) I still only have a handful of people who I speak to (almost all met through chess, bridge or work.)
I don’t feel lonely because I am mainly in my own world - I:
- play and teach bridge
- read a lot
- use my computer for gaming and correspondence
I hope this helps folk understand a bit about one point on the autism spectrum.
I have not been diagnosed. I have, I guess, “self-diagnosed” to a certain extent based on the fact that my daughter has been diagnosed as autistic, and she is basically a little mini-me in almost all respects (see my comment above that alludes to how I fought the idea she was on the autism spectrum because she was so much like me, and I was perfectly normal, right?), and the same kinds of hacks that I learned to put in place for social situations, etc. are helpful for her (but don’t seem to be things that neurotypical people do, for the most part).
Now, I will say that my daughter is further down on the spectrum than I am (both in terms of her substantial logical abilities and her not-so-substantial socioemotional abilities) so that’s why I don’t really refer to myself as “autistic” (in the quote above I said “autistic-ish”). Eh, sure, maybe I wouldn’t actually diagnose out to be formally autistic. And at this point I’ve tackled how to socialize as something like an academic/scientific subject (observe others, take mental notes on what works and doesn’t, practice, figure out what I’ve done wrong and repeat the cycle) and I now actually consider myself as pretty good at it for a nerd, so I have no incentive to actually go through the trouble of getting a diagnosis.
But my daughter and I are so similiar that I think that even if I’m not diagnosably autistic, I’m on that bell curve reasonably near the line that would be drawn that says “autism.”
As I said above, I do a lot of watching other people (both in conversations with me and conversations with other people that I’m listening to) and figuring out what they’re doing in terms of eye contact, body language, tone of voice, what kinds of things they’re saying, how they tend to diffuse conflict, what kinds of questions they ask me to keep a conversation moving, etc.
It helps a lot that I happen to attend a church that a) has at least weekly meetings (but often more), b) is very social and expects a lot of social engagement, and c) has a ton of people who are gifted at people skills, so I have a lot of great models and a lot of very good data points, and continual opportunities to practice.
All of this doesn’t work quite as well for facial expressions, of course, so I guess I was lucky that I don’t seem to need to work on those quite as much. It can often be obvious when one makes the wrong facial expression for the situation, though, which I have done at times.
It’s not about the diagnosis, it’s about obtaining tools you may not even know exist.
I was an excellent performer. People actually invited me to parties and stuff because I was really good at acting like a fun person to be around. But it was all performance, and no connection.
It was also a constant state of hypervigilance and anxiety, which was utterly exhausting.
Having more effective tools at my disposal has made such interactions far less painful, and far more fulfilling.
It’s the difference between having directions to follow vs a map to explore.
I spent countless hours in the mirror working on facial expressions. Most people don’t realize how different a smile is if you use the muscles under your eye vs the ones in your cheek.
One thing I really had to suppress was laughter. I tend to laugh at surprising things, even if they are not appropriate to laugh at. Got myself into trouble a few times that way. Always do a double check when I feel like laughing to make sure it won’t offend.
My kid is Level 2, though with time I think he will not require so many supports. It is, indeed, a very broad spectrum. Some people’s external appearance belies pretty significant disability, which is more or less where my son is.
I have diagnosed ADHD-PI. It was hard to spot because, not to put too fine a point on it, I am really damned smart. I coasted through high school. I was not disruptive. I was a quiet, daydreamy girl with my nose in a book or whatever story I was working on.
But my home life, in part because of my ADHD, was an absolute fucking nightmare. I have significant trauma that flowed from my inability to pay attention, to do things the way my mother expected, to listen, to whatever, and I could not change to literally save my own life because the end result for me, when I didn’t do as I was told, was repeated, specific death threats and egregious emotional abuse. And I hated myself for not being able to meet those standards.
Because my ADHD is not obvious to most people I really wouldn’t call it severe, and yet when I look back on my life, it has been a factor in everything that ever went wrong. Also people think of ADHD as primarily at attention issue, it is very much that, but it also very much affects emotion regulation, working memory, and the fact that I feel overwhelmed every damned day. And perimenopause has made it so much worse.
The reason I reached out to a therapist for an autism evaluation is because I had a very frightening sort of sensory overload shutdown that took me out of commission for three days. This was the culmination of months of burnout. The trigger was going to a farm field trip where there were a lot of people, which was basically sensory hell and I could not recover from it going about my daily life.
I recognize your confusion, as what you and your family dealt with is in a whole different ballpark. It doesn’t really follow that I should just continue suffering because some people are more disabled than I am.
For this reason, I think it is useful to learn about yourself, to connect with other people going through similar things, and to learn tools specifically tailored to people with my condition. I like to know things about myself.
That’s why I sought evaluation and treatment.
A term like “high functioning” is belittling in its very nature. Many of us who you would consider “high functioning” are lucky to be alive. I genuinely wonder how many neuro-divergent people resort to self-harm because of the inability for others to understand them. I know a few.
I don’t.
A lot of the feedback on whether or not I am conducting myself correctly is cumulative over time. I do regularly ask for feedback, but really only from one of the (maybe) four people I trust to act genuinely. But really, what this has amounted to starts with getting a certain feeling or emotion during a conversation and then observing the result of the conversation. The next time I get that feeling or emotion in a conversation, I observe the results and compare them.
The biggest obstacle is that I didn’t develop the ability to really process those feelings or emotions until I went through EMDR therapy when I was in my 30s.
I think that clinical depression combined with autism is extremely common and oftentimes confused for one simple reason. Autistic people tend to have a relatively difficult time feeling and processing emotions as one of the symptoms of the disorder, and my interpretation of what depression meant to me was the inability to feel anything at all.
Before that, though, my feedback was strictly based on tangible and quantifiable cause inputs and effect outputs. Since then, I can add those emotions to the equation, and it makes all the difference in the world.
I’ve been working at this for more than 40 years. I didn’t realize that I was doing this subconsciously with every conversation I had ever had or had ever observed until I started talking to a therapist when I was in my 30s.
I think a great amount of care needs to be had when engaging in these conversations because for a great many people, these journeys are deeply personal. We have to take a great amount of care to avoid comparing ourselves to each other. It seems to be common for people who have autism spectrum disorders to live destructive lives until they learn the tools to live those lives productively, and when autism leads to a destructive lifestyle, we really have to question terms like “high functioning” to describe their situations.
I have two doctors, my psychiatrist and my GP, who offer treatments without official diagnoses for a variety of reasons, and since we live in a society where people do tend to discriminate legally based on mental health conditions, I have a great amount of respect for them because of that. Plus, diagnosis for any type of ASD is extremely cost prohibitive through most insurers in America today.
Throughout the course of my life I’ve been diagnosed with PTSD, recurrent severe major depressive disorder, dysthymia, PMDD, anxiety disorder not otherwise specified, social phobia, panic disorder (misdiagnosed, I believe) and much later, at age 34, ADHD predominantly inattentive. I don’t still have all those things, I don’t think, though my ADHD is worse than ever.
I am currently undergoing evaluation for ASD. I posted this thread because the person I hired to evaluate me for ASD told me she thinks I have ASD.
I’m pretty methodical about my approach to therapy. I identify a specific problem and then I identify the professional most likely to have expertise, experience and insight regarding that specific issue. When I was looking into ADHD I sought an expert on adult ADHD who could do a proper differential diagnosis given my multiple comorbidities. The question is, “can this constellation of symptoms be caused by the other diagnoses I already have?”
I was deeply interested in whether or not my significant social anxiety had its roots in my history of interpersonal problems, whether that history was caused by autism, because I think my approach to tackling social anxiety will vary depending on its cause.
Am I this way because of ADHD? Trauma? Or those things, plus autism? Not even my husband had a clue where to start.
Therefore I sought out someone who specializes in neurodivergence and trauma.
And it is important to note that it’s not just about self-harm. Lack of self-care can be just as damaging long term, and comes from the same place. In the end, I was refusing medical care even though I knew that it would kill me if I didn’t get it. Fortunately, they didn’t listen.
One of the big things that came out of this for me recently was that I’ve been treating myself as neurotypical, holding myself to those same standards, my entire life. A very small example which seems so obvious in retrospect is wearing earplugs. I lived 42 years before it occurred to me I don’t have to listen to all that noise. I’ve started to investigate other ways I’ve tried to force myself through whatever the neurotypical thing is I’m supposed to be able to do. This includes meeting neurotypical levels of productivity.
My husband’s uncles are having a birthday party at a race track that will involve tons of people, copious amounts of alcohol and cigar smoke. This time around, I just said, “No. I’m not doing that.”
Managing his large family gatherings are another thing on my agenda. Even when I’m with the ones I like, it’s pretty overwhelming.
I was started on Ritalin before I was Ten, I refused to take any any longer before I was 19.
Note–long term Ritalin use causes (anecdotally) a nasty temper. That has been my experience.
My main issue as a child, besides the fact that I generally preferred to be alone, was social inappropriateness more than lack of ability to make friends. I always had a friend or two, I would often become obsessive about them, but it was clear that the overwhelming majority of my peers did not like me. I was abrasive, condescending, very aggressive, and had weird obsessions. In middle school I became obsessed with Jesus and fully brought my Bible to class with me and prostyletized constantly and it did not really help my social problems. Yet I persisted in just being weird AF. Despite the bullying, derision and social cost, I just persisted.
As I got into high school I learned not to do that shit, yet I still screwed up some important friendships. I was on the edge of several groups who could probably take me or leave me. I didn’t know how to be important. I’ve always struggled a lot with group dynamics.
In college I continued to alienate people due to inappropriate trauma dumping, and I think that’s when my social anxiety started. I couldn’t figure out how I was supposed to be in order to be considered acceptable. I can’t fucking hide how I feel and I was feeling pretty shit.
I have friends I’m pretty comfortable with now, but it’s telling that 90% of them are either diagnosed ADHD or ASD. The other three have borderline mothers like I did.