This is what my sister was diagnosed with…at age 71. She thinks I have some of the same traits, just not as strongly as she does. Can be. But I’ve negotiated around it for so long, a formal diagnosis doesn’t mean a lot to me.
But we’ve had fun armchair diagnosing other family members.
None taken. I understand. You’re Dinsdale. It’s your job. If I’d known you’d be reading this, I’d have phrased my post more carefully instead of typing whatever came into my head. My bad!
LOL. But yeah I do tend to give more grace here to the posters who are clearly autistic.
My grandpa was 86 when he discovered he was autistic, and he basically discovered it by nature of being very much like my autistic son. I think he got a real kick out of it. No way that man’s going to see a therapist. But he is much more the stereotype than I will ever be.
But yeah there are traits everywhere in my family, it’s difficult to suss out what is subclinical traits vs what would rise to the level of diagnosis. I’d place bets my grandfather would rise to the level of diagnosis, my Mom probably would and my Aunt might (it’s going to be a bombshell for my Aunt. I’m not ready for that conversation yet.)
It’s important to point out that autism is extremely heritable. Just having an autistic child significantly increases the probability that either parent is autistic. It’s pretty common that parents only start looking at themselves after a child is diagnosed.
Today, my therapist had me fill out screeners, RAADS-R and CAT-Q. Both results were pretty indicative of autism, though I leave that to her to sort through. I know where she’s going though. She had me send her an essay I wrote about one of my parents and in her response she pointed out the autistic traits in my essay. Makes me think the reason I’ve always had trouble getting readers to connect to my female characters is that they are too much like me!
After my health issues over the last coupla years and losing a bunch of weight, I started an exercise program a few months ago. Some light weights and walking a minimum of a mile and a half a day. Best way to start my day! Because…of all the doggos I get to meet! The people (other than the few I already know) are fungible, but the dogs are great. I got to scritch four dogs this morning, Yay, me! I can certainly read the dogs’ body language and will pause to pet the ones who look like they want it. Best socializing there is.
This describes a rising 5th grader at the school I worked at for years before my retirement at the end of the school year. Except for the Jesus obsession. When he hit 4th grade I started thinking “that kid really needs to be evaluated”. Hopefully he’ll get the support he needs, because he really alienated a lot of classmates. They (his classmates) also need help learning to get along with classmates who are different from them.
Around 50 I was dating and eventually married someone who worked with special needs children in school and worked with a lot of autistic kids. She told me I was probably autistic. I thought of autism based on the non-verbal/arm flapping type of people and I’m not one of those. Then I looked up things on autism and a lot of my “quirks” fit.
Someone mentioned contantly stimming. When I read that I realized I was playing with my hair, which is frequent.
I have sensitivity things. I prefer no light. When I lived by myself I wouldn’t turn on the lights, even at night unless it was needed. I would walk into the apartment, and feel my way to the room I wanted.
I have always sat funny. I had a coworker say that I sat like a pretzel. A couple of months ago I noticed a strange feeling in my foot. Looking up stuff, it looks like the way I sit has now damaged a nerve in my left foot.
And so forth.
For older folks wondering about getting an autism diagnosis, that is a thing. AARP reports on it:
Granted this is just an off-the-cuff comment played part for humor, but in response to @Dinsdale and @China_Guy and anyone else who is surprised at the number of folks here who are claiming neurodivergency… if you asked me to pick a group of people that was likely to hold a higher percentage of neurodivergent folks than the general population, “members of an online message board that peaked in the 1990s/2000s” would be a pretty safe bet.
There absolutely is a problem when mental health diagnosis is used as a fad or fashion statement. There’s also a problem when mental health conditions are brushed off as something people should just “deal with” or “get over”.
I have had to give this a lot of thought. I’m frustrated with the rampant misinformation and conflation of symptoms you’ll find on Tok or reddit, but I don’t see that sort of thing here. If a bunch of people on a message board want to get together and talk about some traits they have in common and what’s helped them cope, I see zero harm in that. As long as nobody’s trying to bill their message board posts to insurance, I don’t see the point in getting bothered about it.
The only potential harm to self-diagnosis is that they aren’t getting a differential diagnosis and could be dealing with something else they don’t even know exists.
Personally I am a little obsessed with accuracy and don’t trust my own judgement on this kind of thing.
Thanks all for the additional discussion. I agree that discussions such as this should be conducted respectfully. But I also feel that questions asking for clarification/explanation ought not initially be interpreted and responded to as attacks.
When discussing neurodivergence, autism, or other emotional conditions, I think it is very important to be able to discuss “severity.” Are you “a little bit” autistic, or “a LOT”? Simply saying “ASD” does a poor job of distinguishing between my son (very much on the mild end of the spectrum. Clear issues, but aero engineer, published fiction author, married, homeowner, etc.), and China Guy’s much more profoundly impaired child. If we do not use “high functioning,” what terms ought we use?
I also have issues with people “self diagnosing” what may, in fact, simply be a personality trait or something. Add in the possibility of differences between the rigor with which different mental health professionals approach a diagnosis. Finally, I wonder if there is in fact some overlap between the shallower end of neurodivergence and the edges of the broad range of neurotypical.
But thank you for the additional discussion.
Same. And to clarify, I wasn’t taking anything as an attack or inappropriate.
Anyway, I think there’s a blurry line between “diagnosis” and “personality trait”, as you say. I believe the short answer is “does it interfere with your ability to function normally in your day to day? If so, congratulations, you have a condition!”
… which of course is a moveable target depending on what one needs to do to function “normally in day to day life” (which shifts over time, and is different culture to culture, etc etc).
Without getting deep into my personal story, I will say that my own understanding of ADHD (and possibly Autism, though I still have an inherent resistance to applying Autism to myself because of these same questions of “is that really it, or is it just trendy to think so?”) has really shattered my understanding of myself (in a good way) and allowed me to have compassion and better awareness for myself around my failures and challenges past and present. And tied most of those experiences together as clearly stemming from a similar set of things that are hard or different for me than they seem to be for most people.
I’m baffled when it comes to understanding where I may or may not fit in relation to neurodivergence. The whole concept is so nebulous that I’m tempted to assume it consists of probability functions like an electron cloud. At any time I may or may not be in a neurodivergent position and it can’t be known until the wave function collapses.
OK, that was semi-facetious, but I use humor to cope with the frustration of trying to get a fix on anything so nebulous. It would be nice to get a diagnosis that I’m either autistic or not autistic, so I can quit wondering. I don’t care which it is.
I wonder if anxiety & depression really make one neurodivergent or not. I wonder if anyone even knows the answer to that. Neurodivergence is even more nebulous than autism.
I like loud rock-‘n’-roll, but leaf-blowers drive me absolutely out of my skull and I flip out, grabbing my head, collapsing on the floor, and screaming, because it feels like the noise is lacerating my innards, an ugly dark-red gory gash of sonic horror. The only way I can cope is to put on the song “Helter Skelter” and crank it to 12.
Of course some people have more severe issues than others. I really have no problem with a “high functioning” label. I guess some people feel it minimizes their experience. I personally couldn’t care less. I can also say I have fewer problems with ADHD than other people with ADHD that I know, and I don’t think that invalidates my particular struggle. As for what terms we ought to use, a lot of people are generally using the diagnostic support levels: support level 1, support level 2 and support level 3. There is a world of difference between level 1 and level 2 and level 3. I think some level 1s are in denial about that. I’m not getting into the politics of autistic self-advocacy here, but it’s a whole thing.
As for whether or not someone is self-diagnosing a personality trait, what business is it of mine? I find I’m much happier when I just let people do what they feel they need to do.
“Differences between the rigor with which different mental health professionals approach a diagnosis” -
Absolutely. Although one thing you may or may not be aware of, there is a growing body of research indicating that clinically significant autism in girls and women usually manifests very differently than it does in boys and men. Girls are more often socialized, more likely to seek out social relationships, and more likely to develop adaptive behaviors to mask their autism. What this means is that traditional evaluations like the ADOS which many consider to have “greater diagnostic rigor” blow right past these girls. For this reason additional diagnostic tools have been developed, like the CAT-Q. If you are genuinely interested in how autism presents differently in girls and women, from the perspective of an experienced clinician, check out this podcast episode.
The same phenomenon also exists with ADHD, where girls are more likely to be inattentive type (not hyperactive) ergo, less disruptive, less of a problem for other people, less likely to be diagnosed.
ADHD and autism seem to be “trending” now because the research is finally catching up with the reality, and all these adult women wondering what the hell has been wrong with them all their lives are just now getting those answers.
“Neurodivergence” isn’t a diagnostic label, so it’s whatever the user wants it to mean. It originally started as referencing specifically neurodevelopmental conditions including autism, ADHD, and certain learning disabilities. Things that were endemic to how the brain grows and operates and present from childhood. As more and more people jump on the bandwagon, the idea of “neurodivergence” has broadened to include things that are really not like neurodevelopmental disorders, like PTSD and OCD and whatever else.
Neurodevelopmental disorders are kind of in their own category, so I think it’s useful to have something that describes them and only them. ADHD and autism both have very different diagnostic criteria but they can be strikingly similar in some respects when it comes to how they actually manifest. Both ADHD and autism involve hyperfixations, sensory issues, emotion regulation difficulties. This is further complicated by the fact that they are extremely comorbid conditions. Most people with autism also have ADHD.
This is why I think it’s a really good idea, if you feel any or either of these things is disrupting your life, to go see a specialist and get to the bottom of it.
Which is basically what I’m doing! I got tired of wondering and decided to go bite the bullet and find out. Especially when it got to what felt like a crisis point for me.
I entirely agree with this. I actually am really annoyed that Asperger’s has been folded in with autism, and for a while after she was diagnosed I would tell people that my daughter was Asperger’s, because I felt it was a better descriptor. I honestly think that the case of my child and her relatively mild socioemotional delays are causally different than the case of @China_Guy 's child – not just severity, is what I mean; I suspect we will find that there are different root causes of what the DSM currently mushes together as a single “autism” diagnosis. I don’t like them being mixed together because you get people thinking that you’re talking about one type when you’re really talking about the other, and vice versa. High-functioning and low-functioning are one way to get at this, I guess.
Oh cool, that sounds like you’ve really benefited. And yeah, I’ve seen that with the resources for my daughter. I think I have slowly been building up the tools by trial and error myself, as a lot of the guidance my child’s (excellent) therapist gives I’m like, “oh yeah, I figured out how to do that.” But it’s amazing that she gets the advice as a teenager and doesn’t have to figure it out herself; in your analogy, it’s like I painstakingly made my own map by hand over almost fifty years, while she gets the map already and can use it to explore instead of having to put it together first. (I also think there are things in my makeup that made me better at building these tools than my kid, so that I don’t know whether she would have managed it at all if not for the support.)
I didn’t figure this out until the pandemic, when I was trying to figure out how to convey smiling expressions with a mask!
Oh wow, yeah, this is me too. Always have to check to make sure I’m not laughing at times that would be offensive to the other person.
Schizophrenia when I was younger. Issues with depression and anxiety ever since. Attachment problems due to both childhood abuse/neglect combined with my psychosis. Lifelong social trauma.
I’m mostly better now. I still have some wounds that will never heal, but I wish there was more discussion about mental health. Mental health is so complex, and goes so far beyond just socially acceptable mental illnesses like mild depression.
You could try the RAADS-R test as a self screen test to see if further testing is a good idea. However I have no idea what kind of Dr you go to to get screened for autism, or what they can do about it.
I don’t think the goal is to pathologize everyone though. If everyone is neurodivergent, then nobody is neurodivergent.
I think its more to seek validation for peoples behaviors as well as learn ways to manage them when they are harmful to yourself or others. The goal is more self awareness, awareness of others and understanding what peoples strengths and limitations are.
Understanding your own behavior can make it easier to find outlets and social support where your behaviors are accepted or your strengths are utilized, while you avoid traumatic situations. Learning about other people’s mental health issues makes it easier to make accommodations for their limitations. The lines between severe illness, clinical, subclinical and personality quirk is blurry, hence why so many mental illnesses are measured on scales like 0-80, etc.
I’ve never experienced anything but benefits from learning more about myself.
I don’t think many people realize how efficient and effective it is to know exactly what you’re dealing with before you try to address it. Behind every mental health or ND diagnosis is a vast body of research specifically about that constellations of symptoms or characteristics. You can find out what the leading evidence-based interventions are. You can find communities of people going through similar things. There’s a reason I started my life with a laundry list of diagnoses and don’t have a lot of them anymore. I tackled them one at a time when I could. Not even just single diagnoses but parts of diagnoses or problematic behaviors I identified.
I’m more comfortable with things when I can label and quantify them. I don’t like not knowing. I don’t like thinking something is so when it isn’t. Yes, to a certain degree, all diagnosis is subjective, but it’s the best system we have for matching people with resources. I really believe that.
I do this sometimes. In general I seem to have a knack for saying things that sound really cringe when in my head it really seemed like a reasonable thing to say. I’ve managed this by keeping my mouth shut in circumstances where there is any possibility of this happening. I realized recently how much this has limited my ability to engage in a variety of circumstances. And why in certain social situations I’m perceived as very withdrawn.
I also can’t manage group dynamics very well. Confusing as hell. When do you know it’s okay to speak? How do you know what people want to hear? When I do think of something to say, I can’t figure out how to interject without interrupting, and inevitably either the conversation moves on and my thing is no longer relevant, or I do interrupt.
So I feel like one of the lessons I’ve learned in life is to just shut up.
(Not on the internet, sorry.)
I do much better one on one with people.