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?
I do carefully plan A LOT of my activities, but "all/any" is so silly. It doesn't just ignore ADHD. It ignores the fact that people don't always act the same way in every situation.
It's so weird to put things in such absolute ways.
But the people writing diagnostic questions for autism don't consider that the person answering them might be obsessed with nuance & accuracy, which seems like a failing.
The true test of whether you're autistic is how much time you spend explaining that the diagnostic questions are unanswerable, overgeneralized, & hard to give a clear response to. 😅
Hannu
Jess👾@FknHannu @artemis At some point, neurodiversity diagnosis based on symptoms hits its limits because there's extensive overlap between most of the neurodiversities. My hypothesis (uninformed) is that a lot of the overlap in symptoms simply boils down to trauma from being raised as a person born "different" in a world that punishes differences.
@JessTheUnstill @FknHannu
I think this is a major reason it took me so long to get from realizing I have ADHD to also realizing I'm autistic.
So much stuff could just be explained as trauma from living in a world that doesn't accept or accommodate ADHD.
This site has a series of "Misdiagnosis" charts that look at symptom overlaps.
It's overly simplistic but useful I feel.
Compendium of helpful images that I will cry if they are ever erased from the net:
https://neurodivergentinsights.com/category/misdiagnosis-monday/
Bernie Luckily Does It@artemis I'm glad you did realize you're autistic and I'm glad you're one of us!
Morgan ⚧️@JessTheUnstill @FknHannu @artemis the genetics have a lot of overlap too. I'd bet the diagnoses we have right now are both too specific to accurately assign just one category to a lot of us, and too vague to accurately assign all of us to any category (or accurately predict our needs). Brains all just have different levels of the same many characteristics, but people who base their personalities on fitting in the normal box will lose their minds without other boxes to seal the rest of us into