My mental health has been slowly degrading over the last 20 years. But when something changes very slowly I always wonder “did it really change?”. Also when I am depressed it feels like I have allways been depressed. So for a long time I didn’t do anything about it and just tried to function.
Our neighbours, who are also friends are social workers and they work with autistic people who can not live without help but are mostly independent. They once let slip that they think I could be autistic.
When everything got so bad that I finally couldn’t procrastinate looking for therapy any more I had an initial talk with a psychologist.
They asked some questions we were talking about many aspects of my life when I told them about the theory.
Next thing they told me was: “This must be diagnosed before you start any kind of therapy because the therapy would need to be completely different depending on the diagnosis.”
So I started searching for places who diagnose autism in adults. Every one in my area had waiting lists for years so I started looking further out.
In the end I was lucky and found a place in a city I could reach by train (I can’t drive) where I had to wait only a month or so.
The friendly psychologist there told me after a few minutes that she was reasonably sure I was autistic and had ADHD but that we still needed to do all the tests just to be sure.
We did all the tests and it was confirmed.
My mental health has been slowly degrading over the last 20 years. But when something changes very slowly I always wonder “did it really change?”. Also when I am depressed it feels like I have allways been depressed. So for a long time I didn’t do anything about it and just tried to function. Our neighbours, who are also friends are social workers and they work with autistic people who can not live without help but are mostly independent. They once let slip that they think I could be autistic. When everything got so bad that I finally couldn’t procrastinate looking for therapy any more I had an initial talk with a psychologist. They asked some questions we were talking about many aspects of my life when I told them about the theory. Next thing they told me was: “This must be diagnosed before you start any kind of therapy because the therapy would need to be completely different depending on the diagnosis.” So I started searching for places who diagnose autism in adults. Every one in my area had waiting lists for years so I started looking further out. In the end I was lucky and found a place in a city I could reach by train (I can’t drive) where I had to wait only a month or so. The friendly psychologist there told me after a few minutes that she was reasonably sure I was autistic and had ADHD but that we still needed to do all the tests just to be sure. We did all the tests and it was confirmed.