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What autism diagnosis does everyone have?
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this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2024
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Autism
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I got diagnosed at age 46 without needing any of that. The psychologists trusted that I was being honest in my self-assessments and self-reflections of my personal history and asked questions about them. The session lasted seven and a half hours and included a whole lot of testing and questions, and I got my diagnosis a month later.
If you are in the US and don't mind traveling to the Dallas area, see about scheduling an appointment with Spectrus Psychological Services.
Thanks for sharing that resource. I've gotten some validation from neurodivergent therapists and am okay with my self diagnosis for now.
Right on. Just so you know, part of the process is intelligence testing, the results of which they go over with you. It was there that I learned about how IQ tests are biased against neurodivergent people and that I shouldn't hold too much stock in the overall score (It was like 126, which surprised me because I scored in the 99th percentile on the Wonderlic and Mensa Admissions Tests).
The neat thing for me was my score on the Speeded Processing Index...essentially, it measures one's cognitive processing speed. I'd always known I was a quick thinker, but that test put me in the top seven hundredths of the top one percent. Thinking fast has always been both a boon and a burden (fucked up too many relationships by not slowing my ass down and thinking before I speak/act), so it was good to have some validation there because it is something I now know I really need tk work on with a therapist who works with autists.
Interesting! I actually did a psychological assessment recently (naively thinking that autism would be included), so I completed the intelligence testing too. I think it was the WAIS2. I didn't realize it would be included and I was in an extreme state of burnout but I still got a result of "superior" processing speed. It's one metric that sometimes makes me question whether I could be autistic because so often the narrative is that autistics are slow processors, but your perspective and result indicates that I shouldn't allow that to cloud my judgment.
The telltale sign of autism is unbalanced growth. A neurotypical child grows at relatively the same rate with regards to their intelligence, their social skills, their hygiene, and everything else. Autistic children will usually show much larger growth in certain areas and weak growth in others. The reason it's more difficult to diagnose adults is that we've had enough time to balance things out by developing coping mechanisms for ourselves.
So while I've always been a very fast thinker, it took me muuuuch longer to develop emotional intelligence. Each of us has our own brand of autism, so forget any preconceived ideas about what you think most autistic people have in common. As is often said, if you think you're probably autistic, then you really are probably autistic.