Adult Misdiagnosis: The Default Path to an Autistic Identity
This post is about the hundreds and thousands of autistic people who are misdiagnosed everyday by psychiatrists, psychologists, and other professionals.
This post is about the hundreds and thousands of autistic people who are misdiagnosed everyday by psychiatrists, psychologists, and other professionals.
When we deny the validity of self diagnosis, we fail to recognize how broken health care systems can be. We effectively restrict our support to those privileged to afford a formal diagnosis.
A full list of the contributors to Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism, with short biographies.
Elizabeth Bartmess elizabethbartmess.com This is a three-part series. Part I explores autistic interiority and neurology. Part III explores Setting, Plot, and Character Growth. In Part I, I talked about how neurological differences affect autistic people’s internal experiences and strategies, and how we change over time as a result. Today, I’ll talk about variation in autistic
Shannon Rosa from Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism and Corina Becker from Autism Women’s Network interviewed Laura Crane from CRAE, the UK-based Centre for Research in Autism and Education about her work in supporting best practices in health care and education for autistic people, and also demonstrating that Autistics, children specifically, can be reliable witnesses during
We talked with researcher Dr. Meng-Chuan Lai about the overlap of mental health and autism, the evidence-backed tendency of autistic people to be LGBT+, and much more.
Since I didn’t know I was autistic, I just assumed there was something wrong with me and that I deserved what I got. I learned that intrinsically, I was less than a person, since I didn’t have a framework to tell me otherwise.
I am very grateful to have this new piece of information about myself. I don’t consider my diagnosis to be an answer to all my life’s problems, nor do I consider it to be a deficit. What I see it as is a new lens to see my behavior through.
Joseph Krauter is an autistic writer and tech worker who was diagnosed as an adult, while serving time at San Quentin Prison in California. We talked with Joseph about how his life could have been different with earlier diagnosis and supports, the difficulty of receiving an autism diagnosis while incarcerated, and how his life has changed since both his autism diagnosis and his re-integration into society.
“For too long autistic children have been just taught what they should do to fit in a neurotypical mold, instead of being taught who they are as autistic people, and who neurotypical people are as a neurotypical people, and how to appreciate both, and build translations between the two.”