Self dx isnt a thing
Unpopular opinion: You can’t self diagnose. The purpose of diagnosing is having someone with knowledge on you suspected disease/disability tell you if you for for sure have it. I’m not denying that people go undiagnosed for various reasons and that is very sad, but hey they aren’t diagnosed. They suspect they have something (which they may have or might not idk im not a professional). You can’t say you are autistic just bc you want to be quirky or you feel like you don’t fit in. All while they say “autism is a spectrum, im high functioning” like ok then can you advocate for those who cannot even live on their own. What are you really doing to help your apparent people? If you want to make serious disabilities into a trend where you can just join a community, then stop making your humiliating tumblr posts and go make a fuckin difference in the world. All of you are minimizing the struggles of thoose less fortunate and to be quite frank its a little bit ableist. Sorry for the rant but yall better reflect.
Edit: Some of y’all misunderstood what I meant. If you thought you had a certain disability and then you went to a professional who confirmed your assumptions, then good for you! I’m glad you got the help you needed. It is important to professionally diagnosed in order to get professional help. Also, if you are high functioning you should use your privilege over lower functioning people witth your disorder in order to make a difference. You don’t need to do this, but is a good thing to do. LASTLY, if you claim to have more education then people who have dedicated their lives and studied countless people with your alledged disability, then you are naive. You might as a lot of experience but at the end of the day you can’t not diagnose yourself just because you have done your research. Go out and comfirm your assumptions if you can please its for your own safety. Thank you.
Pro diagnosed here and annoyed with the OP. Lemme spill this out for you so you realize your gatekeeping is doing more harm here. First off, the shitty functioning labels THAT ARE USELESS…are harmful. They create a false dichotomy of “useful” and “useless” autistic people. Those who need lots of daily help and can’t make their communications understood are assumed incompetent when it’s their caregivers who don’t bother to explore behavior patterns. Ascribing the “low functioning” label to them based on what you observe is harmful. So is “high functioning” because the things we struggle with are seen as laziness rather than something we need help with, so we get discouraged from asking for help when we need it and it becomse a vicious cycle.
Telling people capable of understandable communication who are still figuring themselves out that they “should” be advocating for those who have more support needs is totally unfair. I saw you say they don’t *have* to, but it reads to me as implying they’re somehow bad if they don’t– that’s the message I got, anyway. You don’t put a roof on a building until the foundation and walls are built and able to support it, do you? Same principle here. I kind of view the autistic community as a giant army who is constantly assisting new recruits (newly diagnosed people whether pro or self) while supporting soldiers who aren’t able to fight or who can only fight in short bursts at a time (people with extensive support needs whose communicaitons may or may not be understandable). We’re doing this while passing information to people in other fleets (allistic people who are neurodivergent in ways that don’t include autism) and to the more general population (neurotypical people). Secondly, not everybody has access to a professional– in a perfect world people who selfdx now will one day be able to get a prodx in the future. But there are people who aren’t white, aren’t cis, living in abusive / unsupportive homes and / or unable to afford the cost of seeing a professional to get tested. My hope is all selfdx people use selfdx as a stopgap until they can get a prodx. Thirdly, professionals can get it wrong, too. I see posts where people said they were refused a prodx because they “can socialize” (masking behavior by chatting) and “can make eye contact” (by forcing themselves to). It took till I was 15 to get diagnosed in 1995 because “girls can’t be autistic” so if the pros can get it wrong on a cisgender girl then how much can they screw it up for an adult who isn’t cisgender?
Fourthly, education? Educated people can get it wrong. See above. Also, I think an autistic person knows more about being autistic than a neurotypical. There are nearly (or totally) ‘unexplainable’ internal traits and thought processes that pros will never know about because they aren’t autistic and can’t experience them.
Fifthly, people who selfdx take NOTHING away from people who are prodx'ed. They don’t have access to the accommodations that prodx people have, they don’t have access to the medications if they need them and all they have is community support. The most they can do is buy stim toys, talk to other members of the community and learn ways to cope.
You don’t live anybody else’s life but your own, so thinking you know another person’s brain better than them based on what they write on one website on the internet is logic that is about as sound as a steaming pile of triceratops shit. Now that’s a pile of shit! Telling selfdx people they aren’t valid is removing their community support and that’s removing the ONLY support some of them may have.
If you’re gonna gatekeep, go buy a fucking gate and keep it instead of telling people they don’t count in this community without a prodx, okay? Okay.
Here’s your gate. Go keep it somewhere safe.
Look I really don’t want to argue with you because most of what you say is compeltly valid and correct. The problem here is that you kinda lost sight of my point (like most people who saw this post). It’s something called confirmation bias when you look for the specific phrases/words that help your arguement and interpret them in a way that would benefit you. Not your fault just psychology. Anyways my point was not that people cannot be disabled w/o a proper diagnosis. It was simply: you can’t call it a diagnosis. This isn’t gate keeping (which also leads to me to believe that you think everything is a community that you can just hop in and out of. Bad word choice I think) At that point you should try your best to get help. Which I understand that some people can’t get help and again that is ok that doesn’t mean you don’t have the disability. Just legally, officially and stuff.
Please stop antagonizing me to promote your personal veiws.
I’d also like to share a little background info about myself now that a bunch of people are pissed off. My sister for the longest time was depressed never went to a doctor until she attempted suicide 4 years ago. She was sure as hell depressed but she wasnt diagnosed nor did she self diagnose herself. The reasons why she didn’t get help is complicated. But back to my story, my sister never denied having depression she knew. Turns out now her doctors are diagnosing her with bipolar. What a plot twist. Which are similar yes but being treated and accommodating for depression is vastly different than bipolar. She is now doing better due to the fact she has gotten the proper help she needed years ago. Just a little food for thought.
Thanks for reading 💖
Your post is pretty clear about “don’t call yourself autistic unless you are pro diagnosed” which is the same thing. Please read again what I said about why some people CAN NOT GET DIAGNOSED for reasons beyond their control. Yes, there are cases where someone’s selfdx is wrong, but I’m pretty sure a majority are right. Kicking everybody out because they might be wrong is just as damaging. I would rather help 20 people who discover they have it wrong rather than risk overlooking the 1 who is right. But people can be misidagnosed…both with autism or with other things. I won’t deny that. I bounced around with doctors saying I had ADHD, ODD, “just a bad child”, and got tested for Turner’s syndrome (which came back negative.) It was a clinical psychologist who put it all together instead of looking at one thing or another and said “autism”. My childhood was doctor’s offices, blood tests, scans and people scratching their heads like I was an experiment gone wrong. I was a very difficult child behaviorally, too, and going to all these doctors made it worse. I hated it so much. But if I knew what I know about autism now when I was 10, you bet your ass I would have selfdx'ed, gone to my mom and gotten a prodx– but we had insurance to cover it. I would’ve been diagnosed 5 years sooner than I was. People selfdxing are looking at the whole picture of themselves. We know ourselves better than anyone else. And guess what? Your sister is probably more sympathetic towards the depression community because of what she’s gone through. EVEN IF somebody is wrong in their selfdx and it’s something else that’s discovered when they can finally see a pro, they can still be an ally for the autistic community because we welcomed them instead of doing what your post seems to be doing, which strongly suggests that what they’re going through isn’t valid enough for you to call it autism unless we have a dx paper saying so. Take what you will from this.
I know someone who was refused a diagnosis, despite meeting all the criteria, because said person had a job, and apparently autistic people don't got jobs I know people trying to get diagnosed, but can't because of professional bias and prejudice, or because they don't have the insurance, or because it would mess up their chances of getting insurance (pre-existing condition; and yeah, this happens outside of the States too) so anti-self-dx'ers can piss off
