ArtemisSo shit like this is why autism goes undiagnosed & unrecognized so often.
These will be true of *some* autistic people, but it really has nothing to do with anything.
And that's not even mentioning the fact that a lot of questions ignore the possibility that an autistic person may also have ADHD.
Like "It’s important to me to carefully plan any activities I am going to do". Ummm. I have ADHD, motherfuckers. Of course I don't carefully plan all my activities! How tf would I manage that when I'm fucking impulsive as all hell?
NaomiElizabeth@artemis They were mutually exclusive according to the DSM for a long while, and Dr's aren't the kind of people to put any effort into learning anything new, after the amount they had to do for med school.
Really inspires confidence when you go to see them, and they only have a DSM-III on their shelf, when IV has been current for ages, and V is nearly ready for release.
Then you hear someone like Dr. Russell Barkley saying '60-70% of people with ADHD also have autism'.
If that's the case then surely the reverse is also true, and if it's that common then why isn't one automatically being tested for, after diagnosis with the other?
mpark@NaomiElizabeth @artemis It's weird to me that you can't necessarily even get both things evaluated by the same doctor. When I got my ADHD diagnosis, she suggested I seek an autism diagnosis (which tells me she thinks I'm autistic) but that I'd have to go somewhere else to get it because she doesn't do that.
@mpark @artemis And all too often the diagnosis will differ depending on who's doing it. Saw so many people on the Wrong Planet forums, listing the number of different diagnoses they got from different doctors, before they finally ended up with 'autism'.
And then even when they've found one that accurately explains them, a lot were stuck with the stigma of a prior schizophrenia dx, and providers who refused to accept their new diagnosis, because 'autism is made up' or 'overdiagnosed'.
Far, /far/ too much of the upper hierarchy of the medical profession is made up of willfully ignorant conservatives (who probably never even wanted the job, but either that or lawyer was all their well-off parents would let them study), with no empathy whatsoever, and a god-complex.
And that's before you even get to the thoroughly unscientific shit-show of bigotry, whose foundation is pathologizing, institutionalizing, and abusing everyone who wouldn't conform, on the basis of whatever its practitioners could make up for their 'case studies', that is psychiatry.
Healthcare should be regulated by bodies representing patients. /Never/ providers.