I’m wondering what other people’s experiences were like.
I called a number of psychiatrists who specialized in ASD when I started to have questions, but none of them were focused on adult diagnosis or therapy. The first psychologist I saw didn’t think she was qualified to make a diagnosis in adults, and referred me to another who I had to pay out of pocket because he didn’t accept my insurance. It left a bad taste for me because it felt like there is a scarcity of resources available for adults.
Where I live, adult diagnosis’ start in the thousands, never mind the constant therapy sessions afterwards that aren’t covered.
It’s too expensive to be officially diagnosed …
Self diagnosed… Old enough that there is no known benefit to a professional diagnosis.
Yeah I didn’t find out until a close friend found out she was, and we had a lot of the same stuff in common. I started watching YouTube videos on it like “20 signs that you might be autistic” and I’d have 18 of them. When I started asking friends and family they were like “how did you figure it out?”.
The fact they already knew, and that in didn’t even know it ran in my family until I started asking was a mix of both relief and anger nobody said anything. I had been struggling my entire life needlesssly for a very long time.
I cannot think of any reason at this point to get a professional diagnosis, but I understand if someone else would want it.
I’m not surprised to see downvotes on the comments saying you don’t need a diagnosis, but I completely agree with them. I googled “neurodivergent therapist” and found a local practice that had an autistic Psychologist who focused on assessments. I reached out to schedule and she said “I guess you could get a diagnosis of high functioning ASD, but why do you want this”. I told her I was sure of my self diagnosis but wanted the validation. She said a therapist could do that without me paying thousands for the full assessment. She strongly discouraged me from the process. It was disappointing but after watching countless YouTube videos of people who had gotten their diagnoses, told family/friends, then revisited the subject months or years later, there was a resounding consensus that the diagnosis didn’t change anything. There are also drawbacks to an official diagnosis, especially when it comes to emigration and child custody. If you feel disabled by ASD and want to try to get benefits, it would probably be easier and cheaper to go to a regular therapist and get the alphabet soup of diagnoses that we tend to get from those not sufficiently trained in neurodiversity (bipolar, depression, anxiety, OCD, BPD, ODD, etc). I’ve started receiving helpful accommodations without saying I’m autistic by telling people, I have auditory processing issues, so I need to be somewhere quiet, or telling my boss I burnout really easily and needed to reduce my hours.
