How did you first discover your Aspergers?

[Keigan]

How did you first discover your Aspergers?

For myself, my discovery started with a personality report generated from having my DNA sequenced.

 

[Sabrina]

By chance. I went to an Asperger’s talk at my kids’ school and I realized that a lot of the traits the speaker talked about, described me.

 

[Chance]

3 visits to ER with extreme panic attacks - later called "panic disorder," and a referral to Psychologist to see how to get things back in control... and so the ASD/PTSD/mild OCD/SPD/mild Tourettes, nightmare began to explain itself. Oh what a joy it has been... Not so much, but overtime it helped to know. : )

 

[ksheehan88]

I was researching AS because a friend had been diagnosed and I wanted to help him. Turns out this place opened my eyes and made me realise I was researching myself lol.

 

[Judge]

Saw a program on the National Geographic Channel about "Taboo Behaviors". A man who had "a relationship" with a life-sized doll who had this condition called "Asperger's Syndrome". Never heard of it before.

But what really caught my attention wasn't his interest in a life-sized doll, but his solitary hobby. And how they claimed it was consistent with his social isolation. He built plastic models. Something I've done off and on since I was seven years old. After that I began to investigate this thing called "Asperger's Syndrome". I was in my mid-fifties at the time.

It became both a shock- and an obsession to delve ever deep into this. Being highly skeptical at first, and eventually coming to the conclusion that I too was on the spectrum of autism. And then it was only a matter of time before it landed me here. As for the rest, well anyone can read it right here.

 

[Marcus]

I ended up getting diagnosed by a medical professional after I was told that I couldn't read anyone's feelings or facial expressions properly, and the fact that I rarely ever look anyone in the eye.

My love for being alone was also seen as suspicious as well.. Do I regret the diagnosis? Absolutely not.

At least I figured out why I do things the way I do.

 

[ksheehan88]

I ended up getting diagnosed by a medical professional after I was told that I couldn't read anyone's feelings or facial expressions properly, and the fact that I rarely ever look anyone in the eye.

My love for being alone was also seen as suspicious as well.. Do I regret the diagnosis? Absolutely not.

At least I figured out why I do things the way I do.

This right here.

 

[kay]

I saw Temple Grandin on television and could relate to a lot of what she said. That was interesting to me, but didn't explain me because I talked early and didn't have the extreme problems she had as a child. Anyhoo, about a year later a psychologist explained Aspergers to me after I went asking if there was something similar to Autism, like Autism light or something.

 

[xudo]

My husband was diagnosed with Atypical Autism and thought a lot of the things on the questionnaires he had to fill out really sounded like me. So I got a referral to CMHT (they refer to the Autism assessments here) and here I am.

 

[Butterfly88]

I was seven and was having some trouble in school. My mom thought maybe I wasn't focusing and perhaps had ADHD since my cousin has it. She took me to a neurologist who said I didn't have ADHD but suggested she take me to a psychiatrist. She took me to a psychiatrist who diagnosed me as PDD-NOS.

 

[Gracey]

Maybe four years ago I had the mother of all melt downs. (Didn't know it was a melt down, thought I'd lost my mind)

For 30 years I had been stumbling head first into depression.
Took the meds, had time off yet another job, felt better, went back to work.

Until I started asking why?
Why does it keep on happening?
To me depression is a way of signaling I need to change something.

I changed my recovery method.
During my research I practically lived in the DSM, even joined a site for people with mental illness thinking I was mentally ill.

It was only when I started pissing the mentally ill off and just not seeing things from their point of view and not understanding why they'd taken offense I started to look further. (Not that it suprised me, I just thought people going through a rough time themselves would be more accepting ... apparently not)

I came across something online written by a female Aspie -as a means to rule out yet another possibility.
I'm not sure I could speak for two days straight after reading it.
I was gob-smacked.
Read more about it, thought 'surely not'
Read more
And more
And even more and though holey moley !!!!

 

[OkRad]

My therapist. Then they said no. Then maybe. Then Chrom 6 disorder. I guess that is like a curve. If we all were genetically Karyotyped, we might see a lot of us like me

 

[Flinty]

I had a diagnosis of schizophrenia. However, this did not mesh with my speech delay. After research, I determined that it had to be autism (and not Asperger's, as that did not involve a speech delay).

 

[Ambi]

I was in Speech Language Pathology school - burning out, and reading about traits that were supposed to be about our clients, but matched me.

 

[dragoncat16]

I had heard of autism as a teenager and I remember seeing Temple Grandin back then describing what she did with animals (it is only now that I know her name, but I know it was her). I remember I was fascinated by the condition even back then, but it never occured to me that it could apply to me because all I had heard about autistic kids is they bang their heads against walls and I never did that. Instead, I was talking in complete sentences before I was 2 and reading by the time I was 3.

When I was bullied out of my job for the second time around four years ago, I was mostly trying to diagnose the person who had recently treated me that way, to figure out why he would do what he did to me but not to anyone else (it actually turned out he had treated someone else in a similar way but I didn't know it at the time - he had actually taken tasks from her and gave them to me so she resented me for it and I had no idea why she disliked me so much). I found he had traits of being a sociopath and some of the sources said that sociopaths seek out a particular personality type to be their victims.

Because I had a history of being bullied at school and elsewhere as well as at work, I started to see myself as having something that made bullies gravitate toward me. I looked further into it and the sources were really vague about it, but I found one that suggested that people with Asperger syndrome were often bullied. I then looked that up and found that I had already posted on the web describing Aspergers from the perspective of someone with the condition. I thought that was weird, because I certainly didn't remember posting something like that. Moreover, I had signed someone else's name. In case the previous sentences are confusing, the description I found was so close to the story of my life that it really could have been written by me. I was absolutely sure from then on that I had Aspergers. My mom begged me not to get diagnosed or mention it to anyone because of the stigma of having a "mental illness" and the resulting trouble I would have finding employment.

Now, just recently, I have been bullied out of yet another job, and in fact my entire career (the one I went to university for 16 years to get), and finally I have my diagnosis. I think I would have been better off to have got my diagnosis four years ago, but I didn't even know it was considered a disability. I don't think it is considered a disability in the country I previously lived in. As far as I'm concerned, for me it's only a disability because of the way people treat me. At least with all the shows about and celebrities with Aspergers these days, it is sufficiently "trendy" for my mom to accept that I have it, but she thinks that somehow if she b****es at me enough, I'll stop having some of the Asperger traits she finds so annoying.

 

[Sherlock77]

I'd say four years ago... I was hanging out at our local flea market and ran into one of my friends and just started chatting... Somewhere in that conversation (not entirely sure how it came up) he thought I might be Asperger's... I pretty much left it at that for a long time, occasionally telling some limited people about that conversation...

This past spring, after meeting someone who is somewhat familiar with Asperger's I just decided to finally do some online tests for it, so I did... Everything came up positive for Asperger's, so far I've just self tested but do see most of the typical traits in myself...

 

[Ambi]

I had heard of autism as a teenager and I remember seeing Temple Grandin back then describing what she did with animals (it is only now that I know her name, but I know it was her). I remember I was fascinated by the condition even back then, but it never occured to me that it could apply to me because all I had heard about autistic kids is they bang their heads against walls and I never did that. Instead, I was talking in complete sentences before I was 2 and reading by the time I was 3.

When I was bullied out of my job for the second time around four years ago, I was mostly trying to diagnose the person who had recently treated me that way, to figure out why he would do what he did to me but not to anyone else (it actually turned out he had treated someone else in a similar way but I didn't know it at the time - he had actually taken tasks from her and gave them to me so she resented me for it and I had no idea why she disliked me so much). I found he had traits of being a sociopath and some of the sources said that sociopaths seek out a particular personality type to be their victims.

Because I had a history of being bullied at school and elsewhere as well as at work, I started to see myself as having something that made bullies gravitate toward me. I looked further into it and the sources were really vague about it, but I found one that suggested that people with Asperger syndrome were often bullied. I then looked that up and found that I had already posted on the web describing Aspergers from the perspective of someone with the condition. I thought that was weird, because I certainly didn't remember posting something like that. Moreover, I had signed someone else's name. In case the previous sentences are confusing, the description I found was so close to the story of my life that it really could have been written by me. I was absolutely sure from then on that I had Aspergers. My mom begged me not to get diagnosed or mention it to anyone because of the stigma of having a "mental illness" and the resulting trouble I would have finding employment.

Now, just recently, I have been bullied out of yet another job, and in fact my entire career (the one I went to university for 16 years to get), and finally I have my diagnosis. I think I would have been better off to have got my diagnosis four years ago, but I didn't even know it was considered a disability. I don't think it is considered a disability in the country I previously lived in. As far as I'm concerned, for me it's only a disability because of the way people treat me. At least with all the shows about and celebrities with Aspergers these days, it is sufficiently "trendy" for my mom to accept that I have it, but she thinks that somehow if she b****es at me enough, I'll stop having some of the Asperger traits she finds so annoying.

I relate to your story!

 

[pjcnet]

About 20 years ago my parents were watching a documentary about Asperger Syndrome when it was pretty new to most people and I fully related to all the traits mentioned, I then asked my parents whether I had this and they answered, "most definitely". They'd known for ages that I was autistic, but had tried to keep it from me, even though I'd so far lived a very difficult life they for some reason didn't want me to know why and pushed for me to live normally (it all went pears and I was even sent to a "normal" school when I was younger against all expert advice where the sh*t really hit the fan). Even though I was official diagnosed later as an adult with Asperger Syndrome (AS) along with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), this isn't strictly true since like both my brothers I was extremely slow to develop things such as speech as a young child and was originally officially diagnosed as autistic along with both my brothers in the 1970s by the highest expert in field in the UK at the time (Professor Rutter), back then doctors were fascinated by all 3 of us being autistic against astronomical odds when at the time it wasn't believed to be genetically linked. I however started recovering as I got older, but kept many of my traits as an adult which means I truly have high functioning autism (HFA) and not Asperger Syndrome as later diagnosed, although in many ways they are similar (the 1970s wrongfully weren't taken into account as they were on my paper medical records that didn't for some reason get transferred over to computer as they should have been when the new system was first implemented). My 2 brothers sadly didn't recover however and remained very low functioning and need 24/7 care for the rest of their lives (they can't count to 5 or read/write for instance so will never be-able to be part of this community).

 

[isthisreallife]

Maybe four years ago I had the mother of all melt downs. (Didn't know it was a melt down, thought I'd lost my mind)

For 30 years I had been stumbling head first into depression.
Took the meds, had time off yet another job, felt better, went back to work.

Until I started asking why?
Why does it keep on happening?
To me depression is a way of signaling I need to change something.

I changed my recovery method.
During my research I practically lived in the DSM, even joined a site for people with mental illness thinking I was mentally ill.

It was only when I started pissing the mentally ill off and just not seeing things from their point of view and not understanding why they'd taken offense I started to look further. (Not that it suprised me, I just thought people going through a rough time themselves would be more accepting ... apparently not)

I came across something online written by a female Aspie -as a means to rule out yet another possibility.
I'm not sure I could speak for two days straight after reading it.
I was gob-smacked.
Read more about it, thought 'surely not'
Read more
And more
And even more and though holey moley !!!!

You could be talking about me with everything you just wrote

 

[Adora]

I went to see a clinical psychologist due to my anxiety getting out of hand and also dealing with past traumatic experiences,in the past I was passed on to a counselling place where I found out that they mostly dealt with young people they considered at high risk of developing schizophrenia, though i wasn’t diagnosed I ended up misdiagnosed by another psychiatrist with schizoaffective disorder,it wasn’t until many years later I decided to go for some therapy and I went to see a clinical psychologist and after a few sessions with her she asked me why I can’t look her in the eyes and I said to her it just makes me feel weird looking in peoples eyes, not long after she told me that I am on the spectrum and I was previously also diagnosed with ptsd but she told me due to having ongoing abuse from my home and at school it was more complex ptsd than ptsd,she really helped solve a big puzzle in my life that even before my dad’s mental abuse affected me why I felt so different,now I know not to be so hard on myself though there are days I really struggle with it.