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Hi all. I wanted to attempt to create a thread for autistic members to come in and chat, give updates on their day to day lives, etc. This section of the board isn’t very lively, which I find to be a shame. Perhaps we can change that. I’ll start. Today has been uneventful. Made some phone calls, fed some pets, did some chores. One incident of sensory overload. Have work tomorrow and an appointment after work.

So I joined this forum to talk about my various mental health issues and try to find a solution or two with people who can relate. I been diagnosed with autism, clinical depression, and oppositional defiant disorder at various points in my life and I'm currently 16 years old at the time of this writing. I hope to have a great time with you guys.

[This post assumes that both genders can be victims of sexual aggression, and examples herein, while grammatically gendered, are not so to demonstrate a gender-specific point. Don't throw brickbats.] I read in the news today that Neil deGrasse Tyson has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior by three women. I have no idea whether he is on-spectrum; given his fluency as a communicator, I doubt it. But reading the details got me thinking. One complained that he peeked under the covered part of the shoulder on her sleeveless dress to see a tattoo of the solar system that she had mentioned at a party of the International Astronomical Congress; while she apparently acknowledges it wasn't an assault, she says it shows he is capable of "creepy behavior". Another felt he had given her an "awkward and incredibly intimate handshake". The third, more serious, alleges waking up naked in his graduate student bed in 1984 after blacking out from a drink he had given her, with no memory of what had happened, but assuming he had drugged and raped her. She did file a police report years later, and began blogging about the incident in 2014, the year Tyson began hosting Cosmos on television, 30 years after the alleged event. I detail these things because I can easily, easily imagine an Aspie committing either of the first two gaffes in utter and complete innocence, and a neurotypical losing his or her wig over it because of a whole suitcase full of assumptions. And then... OMG, #MeToo! The pile-on begins. The suspicion. The pre-judgment. The inquiry. The Trial-by-Twitter. Is the Aspie, is the HFA, prepared, even equipped to contend with this? Hardly, because it is a social onslaught of NT making. It is warfare on the most hostile possible battlefield. Now, this is not to say that autistics cannot be guilty of interpersonal offense. Delayed development of social skills may result in inappropriate expression - indeed, "creepy behavior". Auties may not have a neurotypical's appreciation of personal boundaries. Yet there must be some consideration for the difference between willful sexual aggression and aggression without intent. For example: If a neurotypical 13-year-old boy walked up to a woman and openly touched her breast, there would rightly be consternation and outcry. That boy is old enough to understand that that constitutes a transgression. If an Aspie 13-year-old boy walked up to a woman and openly touched her breast, the degree of his offense would depend on the degree of his autism. He could very well simply be fixated on the shape, or the color of the blouse, or the fact that she as an individual differed from the individual next to her, in a tactile way, and did not process that an investigation was not in order. A neurotypical bystander, however, would not draw this distinction. Both cases would represent sexual harassment, because the woman would have had the sanctity of her body violated, and her sensibility outraged. And this is where my question arises with respect to the entire movement: Is there not some point at which a person's sensibilities - in essence, their feelings - must be weighed against other factors to determine whether an action rises to the level of an offense? The Universe is full of upsets; we are not guaranteed to be made constantly happy, not by events, and certainly not by one another. Indeed, that would be an impossibility, because it is seldom possible to make two persons equally happy in a single matter in which both are equally invested. At some point, the offended person must accede to accepting some level of annoyance, discomfort, embarrassment, shame or affront in situations, or we would all be constantly knifing one another for pounds of flesh (and then knifing one another over the knifings). Was the woman harmed when Mr. Tyson curiously looked at her shoulder? She was not. Was she embarrassed? Possibly. Was she demeaned in front of colleagues? One would have had to be present to know. Did Mr. Tyson act out of salacious intent, or simply because he couldn't resist looking at an image of the solar system? One would have to know him well to say, but his body of public life and work suggests the latter. Was the woman harmed by being creeped out by his handshake? She was not. Was she made to feel uncomfortable about further workplace interaction with him as a result? Ah! Here, one may come to differing views. In my view, she was not made to do so; she chose to do so. She did not address the issue in a positive-affirmative manner saying, "I'm sorry, that made me feel uncomfortable" and I would prefer to keep our relationship purely professional", thus giving him an opportunity to back gracefully away. She instead took the offense and ran with it, informing him that the next day would be her last day at work. She elevated the value of her own sensibility to a level higher than both the value of her job or the value of the fairness she owed to another human being. To my mind, she fails the test for sympathy. Because autistics so frequently are unable to relate to neurotypicals on an emotional level - i.e., the level of sensibilities - the possibility of negotiating understanding in this sphere is limited. That suggests the likelihood that autistics may tend to stumble more frequently in this arena of social conduct, and to fare poorly under a neurotypical lens when confronted. Perhaps, #MeNToo would be more accurate? Thoughts? Edited to add: Never mind the #MeNToo idea - I can already hear the fits being thrown because it looks like “men too”.

My 25 year old son, diagnosed with autism, severe anxiety, intellectual/developmental disability, has had a severe sleep disorder his entire life. He averages about 3.5 hours of sleep per night. Often, that's not all at the same time but aggregate between 10pm - 6am. Over the years, we've tried dozens (and dozens...) of both alternative and conventional treatments. Specific to prescription medications to help induce sleep, we've tried over 15. Almost all medications have had a paradoxical effect on him (activating vs. sedating). None have helped with sleep. He's been on risperidone for about 3 years. No other meds. We have not tried Trazadone (and probably many others). ANY ideas are welcome!

I've just gone down on risperidone, from 2 mg back down to 1 mg. This is part of the plan to shift things around a bit and depend a little more on lamotrigine than risperidone because I'm a little worried about my increased prolactin levels, it sort of looks like I'm growing breasts a lot of the time and of course I don't like that. No one has actually told me my prolactin levels outside of "it's higher than normal". What "normal" means is anyone's guess because they're either not telling me or can't tell me. Whatever. At any rate I don't like it so the plan is to keep risperidone down to a minimum, I originally felt bit from my so-called "psychotic" symptoms at 1 mg anyway. Maybe I should have gone up in lamotrigine before lowering risperidone again. I've had a harder time with my self-esteem again in the last couple of days and I don't feel as happy generally as I did before. I had a bad appointment with my psychiatrist on Wednesday, I came out feeling pretty much like shite. I tried to explain my difficulty with sudden plans people make, the one example I used was the friends from my peer group decided they wanted to go for a coffee after the session further up in town. I couldn't do it, there wasn't enough notice for me and I already got it into my head that I was going to go home and I couldn't change the route now, my anxiety went up as a result. Instead of "trying to pathologise it" my psychiatrist tried to push the idea that if I condition myself more to try things I'm not expecting that it would come more easily to me in the future. I understand where he's coming from and maybe that's true but I also don't necessarily believe it will work. My social worker and my old psychiatrist told me I'm autistic and my understanding of it is that changes in routine don't really suit people with autism. My old psychiatrist was great, I'm still annoyed he decided to leave for Exeter, he explained to me that if I try to "normalise" (for lack of a better term) my autistic traits my tics and anxiety would get worse as a result. So with that knowledge trying to condition myself to joining in with out of the blue activities seems counter intuitive. I'm now confused of what to do with myself. This new psychiatrist won't even give me a diagnosis for anything and I have a lot of doubt in my head about the Asperger's thing because whilst there is a fair bit I do relate to there is also a lot I don't. I spend nearly every waking hour reading about autism trying to piece bits together of how it affects me BECAUSE NO FUCKING PROFESSIONAL WILL TELL ME. I feel like making a Freedom of Information request because they just won't tell me anything. Either that or just not talking to any of them again and just shutting down completely. I have a hard time trying to express myself at the best of times. Trying to get words out of my head onto paper or verbally is very hard because I just don't know how to start myself and these things escape me before I even have a chance to grab hold them. It's a miracle that I got this far into writing about myself. Every time I meet with my psychiatrist or social worker they ask me, "How have you been?" I don't know how to answer that. Generally? Over the last from days? How do I sum it up without over or under appreciating what I've felt? I try to distract myself from my thoughts at the best of times with my interests so that masks a lot of what I feel so it's not like I have full excess to my thoughts and feelings at the best of the time because if I did I would be drowning. I don't really feel like I have anyone to talk to about these things, no one who can truly relate to what I feel or do anything about it. I have one cousin who also has Asperger's that I might be able to open up to but I don't know if I can or not. I feel like if I try to make attempts to talk to people that I might come across as needy so I generally don't bother, I also don't know the appropriate amount of time before chatting to someone again so I just avoid doing it all together. He's is especially the case of this because he doesn't seem to want to chat to his family a lot of the time and he deleted his mum and one of his sisters off Facebook and his other sister thinks she's only hanging on by a thread so I don't want that to happen to me because I genuinely like the guy. I just don't know what to do. I feel alone and confused.

Hi everyone, I/we just joined up because.. Eh. Needing support/people who relate and such. Social media's alright, but the privacy is always wonky and the ability to compartmentalise isn't so great. Forums/IRC are better for this kinda thing, I think. Anyway, yeah. Barrel of raccoons, etc. We have a long list of things, most diagnosed, some not (some by choice.. I don't want DID going anywhere near my medical record. :x). I keep thinking I've processed my abuse stuff and then discovering yet another delicious core of it under the next layer. Heh. My resolution this year at least is to not end up like 2015.. Too many near misses on suicide (we suck at it, it turns out), too much.. Retreating back indoors, not doing anything, not going anywhere.. Barely creating like we used to. So, yeah. I want to change. However, treatment-resistance is a pain on that front (in the 'my brain chemistry gives no fucks for your puny pills' sense, rather than 'my doctor thinks I talk back too much and all I got was this crappy diagnosis' sense). I took about 15-20 variations on antidepressants before throwing the towel in at hardcore-MAOIs (having to give up ADD meds, painkillers and basically-eating? Nah.). Anyway, pluralwise there's four of us. We'll probably all stick our noses in here once in a while. I'm Whisper. There's also Wynn, Tri and Felix. We're fairly recently plural.. Had a breakdown last year and that did it, I think. Also; * Autistic * ADD * C-PTSD (not diagnosed yet but plain as day) * General Anxiety Stuff that includes panic attacks, OCD symptoms, social anxiety. * Chronic Pain from Ehlers Danlos Syndrome * Depression-Dysthemia (Chronic/Severe/Treatment Resistant) * Oh, we get psychogenic seizures, too. Trying not to be embarrassed about that. Er. Anyway. Hi.

This is selfish and stupid, but i will waste your time to ask opinions, as i am desperate. When i was 11 i got severely bullied (physical, violent) at a new school for a year before my mother realised and moved me. Before, she kept telling me 'ignore them, they'll go away'. I took the bullying by gangs surrounding me to mean, you deserve to be annihilated, to die, die; and my mother's instructions to mean, you have no right to defend yourself. This was a physically felt meaning, not pondering. Looking for an explanation, i found fundamentalist christianity which said: you were born evil and deserve to be tortured for all eternity and only constant begging forgiveness and a complete change of personhood can save you. Nobody around had any psychological understanding - this was long ago - and i had no-one to talk. As a christian i tried to 'kill myself alive' because I didn't have the guts to kill myself but hated myself and wanted to kill myself, which continues, I am a sadist against myself. I got along in life by ignoring my emotions that's where they lead and instead being logical and disciplined: I planned my work and worked my plan. Everything failed, over and over again, I will only give a few examples: I turned out to be infertile after trying to get pregnant for seven years, I trained for various jobs and got work experience but could never pass interviews; my back gave way at random and still does and is painful but I never got a diagnosis. Finally, every last hope I had of escaping the life I hated, of constant mental pain and suicidal ideation (it's called? i had severe bouts of wanting to or fearing that i would kill myself eg six months in bed unable to move saying 'die' over and over, or one day waking with nothing but terror which lasted a fortnight, throughout my life, but no realistic suicide attempts) but with other emotions as well, failed within a year. Something inside me snapped and everything gave way. I had substituted constant going out and huge acquaintance for lack of friends throughout my life, but I found out I knew no-one I could talk to. Everything had always interested me, but suddenly all my 'interests' left me cold. I had always had a vivid, creative imagination constantly bubbling away with new ideas and plans, I could come up with original and creative stuff in every field, it was the only way I passed academically, my ideas were always novel: suddenly it had vanished. I've never trusted my own mind, or that things were real. I kept finding myself crying or shrieking 'I can't take it any more, I can't bear it' but I don't know what this meant, I often couldn't breathe from the pain, I couldn't bear to live another moment, I couldn't sleep. I live deep in a village and can't drive, I would go off into the fields so I could shriek or scream or roll around crying on the ground. This intense level of pain lasted about 3 months and then a lesser level another 3 or 6. I learned to control it by not thinking about the past or future because these are what set the fear off but pretending every day is an identical repeat. I don't have the physical effects like exhaustion any more but I have lost the ability to do mental arithmetic, at which I excelled, and spelling. Even if the art therapist says 'draw something' I think 'draw a line' but have to find one to copy, so my imagination's gone. It's been three years but I can't get any clue what's wrong with me and what happened. At the time I was volunteering at a school in the hopes of getting enough experience to adopt. I really believed that if I told the parents at the open evening that I was a paedophile*, they would lynch me: I wanted to die, the pain was unbearable, but I was too cowardly to do it myself. I really believed I would definitely die and no-one would blame them and everybody would be happy and it would cause no trouble. I'm not proud I did it but really can't remember it properly, it's like it happened to another person. So I'm on the sex offenders' list, I have to avoid one town and large parts of two others (only 3 within easy reach), and some part of me thought, maybe my perception of reality is wrong. (Duh.) I forced the doctor to send me to a psychiatrist and they also assessed me for autism (their idea) and my diagnosis is autism. But I think I am mentally ill. Not knowing what the pain and fear are that coming upon me at random or if I dare to think about life is unbearable. I want to know what's wrong with me and what happened: where did my feelings go? Why did my cognitive function (eg short term memory, all thinking) suddenly and sharply degrade; my imagination vanish overnight; my feelings disappear; all my interests? At the time I felt terrified that I was falling in an endless void deaf and blind, like a trapdoor opened in life and everything turned into 2D scenery and I fell; now it feels like there is one world inside my skull and another outside. I spend most of my day distracting myself with the internet and reading, usually I feel a pleasant dull numbness and just bouts of this fear-pain. I get art therapy and have twice seen a psychiatric nurse. If I say to any of them 'I am in fear, what is this pain' they just say 'I don't know' 'how strange' 'you tell me'. They won't say anything's wrong with me or anything happened. I didn't expect them to cure me but I did expect a diagnosis. At first they said it was autism, now they make out it's only happened to me and it's a complete mystery. They want me to repeat my former life eg join evening classes because then I will make friends, for the first time in half a century, miraculously, and have meaning in my life. But I hated my life, I studied and worked to escape it, my meaning was escaping that hell, for decades. I lost all hope and meaning vanished with it. What I experienced was emotional exhaustion: I had had so many painful knockbacks, and each time I ignored my feelings, relied on discipline, picked myself up and started again. But this time something snapped inside like old elastic, went limp, didn't respond. It's like you have to manufacture emotions each time you feel them and I am too exhausted inside to make these emotions, I just feel flat and can't respond to things (people, ideas, events). I don't want anyone to think I live in constant suffering: weirdly, after five years' unemployment I got a job, I spend as long commuting by rural bus as at work, and so kill a lot of time. Everything is perfectly pleasant: but it is like spending your life imprisoned in a luxury doctor's waiting room, with all the entertainment you might want, food, warmth, drink, toilets, beds, but no meaning in life, no point, terrifying if you think about it and perfectly pleasant if you refuse to. I have to ask you to believe me that, by poverty, not driving, and rural location, there is almost no service or person or self-help group I can access, nearly all I have found by constant internet and IRL search have said 'no, your case is too difficult', I have finally found one psychotherapist who says she will teach me the correct way to talk and listen next year. I totally accept the autism diagnosis, and it explains a lot – inability to pass my first thousand job interviews (my calculation is I have been to that many, since I often had several a week and have spent most of several decades jobhunting unemployed), inability to ever make close friends, not knowing how I feel until it's too late. But I can't get over my fear of not knowing what happened or how to predict if it will happen again, if things will change (after 3 years I assume not) etc. What I want isn't sympathy (my selfpity is limitless!) but information about what this strange numbness is, this failure to work of your emotions, what happened in the sudden crisis of pain? I just want to know what that is, or have some clue. I am a sceptic and doubt everything, nobody should be afraid that by suggesting an idea I will obey it or suffer: in fact, I argue with every suggestion, I can't help it, rudely so. I am sorry to waste your time so much, but if you have experienced anything similar or have any suggestions, I would be fascinated to hear them. I am not set on believing I am mentally ill or in search of any diagnosis, I am open to any ideas and have searched autism info for explanations: I just want to understand, to have a clue where I am and what happened to me. Thanks in advance, maia (UK) *i don't like sex, with children or otherwise, i'm frigid, though as a woman, I have done it, by lying there, rigid with embarrassment NB i have dyspraxia-autism, not rainman/Grandin type, i have no short or long term memory, balance, spatial perception, hate maths, can't bear to be alone, no sensory issues etc i just can't recognise my emotions or express them or read others' emotions or therefore share feelings

** Please do not read this if you are easily triggered. I go into graphic detail about my past, as there is a lot I need to get off my chest anonymously. However, caveat lector. ** Hello! I go by the name Hellbent. I'm 18, and live in the British Isles. I have a long and storiaed history of mental quirks and quiddities. I taught myself to read at tewo from reading the captions underneath pictures in my grandfather's newspapers, and from reading food packaging. I was diagnosed with high-functioning autism at 5 or 6, and declared a "gifted and talented child". I'm uncertain whether the "gifted and talented" diagnosis still exists, or whether it ever meant anything at all. I was offered a scholarship to a prestigious educational institute for the gifted and talented in the Western Isles, but my mother held me back because "my emotional development would never catch up with my intellectual development". The institute in question mostly catered for teenagers, and my mother feared that I may have been bullied. I resent that greatly. If I had been sent there, I would have escaped the living hell that my mother put me through. Although I was originally diagnosed with "high-functioning" autism, my IQ testing well over 100, my behaviour as I slowly, slowly grew up would certainly have landed me in the "classical autism" group had my child psychiatrists been around to see it. (I spent a lot of time as a child playing cruel games with my child psychiatrists!) There were holires in the plasterboard walls of the house where I grew up because I'd throw myself against them repeatedly at the slightest inkling of frustration or sadness. Indeed, I don't believe I ever felt any emotion but frustration until my preteens - when my grandfather died, confined to a nursing home after a life of undiagnosed PTSD from fighting in the Pacific Theatre and depression resulting from a series of disabling strokes and TIAs, in and out of the local mental hospital in which I would later spend time, I felt more empathetic frustration for him, having been trapped in a dark, stinking, crude environment for almost a year, most likely the home's only inmate with an intact mind, than I did sadness. I feel strong empathy, but I am almost unable to feel sympathy. In a poem whose name I cannot remember, the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig talks of "the distance of pain which nothing can overcome". In that line, MacCaig expresses his frustration that he cannot share in his dying wife's pain. I am that nothing - I feel very acutely the pain of others. I felt everything that my grandfather went through, from his horror of a pot lid rattling - my synaesthesia brought on tehe exact same imagery of gunfire that I am certain must have occurred to him - to his unspeakable despair at his confinement to a nursing home. Thus, I felt no true sadness when he died, but, rather, an intense echo of his lifelong frustration at his inability to function. He had been an actuary before he had been conscripted - he taught me to multiply and dievide on an abacus when I was 6 or 7, and many, many arithmetic shortcuts - but, as far as I know, he never could hold down work after the war. Until the ages of 11 or 12, I never felt any emotion of my own, only empathetic feelings from others, except for frustration. I first experienced psychosis at around 9 or 10. I heard my aunt's voice calling my name repeatedly, as if from the sky. She wasn't so much as in the house at all. I ascribed it to angels, and became obsessed with angels. I was intended to be raised a Catholic, but after my parents' divorce my mother tried to get me into the Free Church of Scotland Continuing - which I had no time for. I found their cadence to be dour, inhuman, and deathly sexless. I collected holy cards obsessively. I was especially fascinated by St. Christina Mirabilis and by St. Sebastian, and I had quite a few of them. I ordered them from the Internet. At 11, menarche hit, and, in a fit (that word will occur again in quite a different context) of confusion eerily echoing what was later to be one of my favourite films (guess?), I believed that, for it to have come about quite so early, it must be a sign of something. I came to believe that I was St. Margaret of Cortona. I cut the word "Cortona" into my chest with my grandfather's whittling knife, and came quite close to slashing up my genitalia on several occasions. I tried, thankfully fruitlessly (funny choice of word!), to find one of those extremist Islamist doctors who carry out infibulations. Later that year, I came across a website dedicated to a - clearly somehow mentally ill - Internet artist and unintentional celebrity. Years earlier, she'd posted an innocent picture of herself on a forum, not realising how obsessive the denizens of that forum had been. They tracked down her Livejournal, where she had posted page after page of conceptual photography, some explicit. The website I'm now discussing sprung up as a place of veneration for this unfortunate girl. The website kicked off my first phase of serious self-injury, as the girl being so intensely deified had been a heavy self-injurer, and many of the posters on this website encouraged self-injury. I was a believer in mortification of the flesh, and I did some quite unmentionable things in pursuit of paying tribute to the girl I too came to worship. The website closed down a couple rof yearrs later, but a similar, although far less extreme, site survives, and I was a regular poster there until recently. I would dress up in the vogue of the "goddess"'s most famous pictures on group video chat. The worst phase of my cult membership, for it was indeed a cult, was the time I covered my school uniform in menstrual blood, smeared it across my face, and wrote the address of the website all over my school in it. That incident led to my first non-PDD diagnosis: psychotic depression. I was put on fluoxetine, which quite possibly explains what happened next. The next notable incident in the development of my health occurred, again, at the tail end of my eleventh year. Quite possibly my worst year to date. I had what I now recognise as a manic episode, and adopted an alternate identity. I developed a fixation on an anime cartoon, and spent all of my time on a website dedicated to it, mainly populated by older men. Being hypersexual (indeed, I am constantly hypersexual, even when depressed; I am beginning to believe that I am a clinical nymphomaniac) and a raging teleiophile, I attempted to proposition many of them, addressing them using my adopted identity. Said identity developed into a full-blown manic personality. I became somewhat bisexual, but in a very bizarre way: I was attracted to very, very young girls, and to far older men. These days, I've settled down into simply heterosexual attraction to moderately older men, but those days were wild. I never looked at porn, oddly enough - I gave it a try, but found it all too synthetic and silly - but I constantly fantasised about things I don't feel that I can mention. In the real world, I insisted on being addressed by my alternate name, and acted incredibly callously and antisocially. I became obsessed with computers, built one, and then began to collect them. My room was small, so I could barely move for all the computer rubbish. My mother indulged my eccentricity at first, but later began to lose her temper with my Victorian style of dress, borderline-hoarding, and use of gamers' language in Blakean syntax, and took me to a chiropractor, who "prescribed" multivitamins. By 12, the cycling induced by the fluoxetine had thrown me into a depression. I had had suicidal thoughts since 8 or 9, but first acted on them at 12. I put the Manics' song "Die in the Summertime" on repeat and attempted to slit my wrists with the same knife I'd pulled the "Cortona" nonsense with. Thankfully, I think I only hit a bunch of capillaries, and I managed to stem the bleeding in about seven hours once I realised it wasn't going to work. My mother let it slide, but I was bullied at school. I'd already been bullied at school for my meltdowns, but it worsened so, so much when my classmates noticed the cuts on my wrists. From 13 to 14, my mental health improved greatly. I was taken off the fluoxetine, shook off the manic alternate personality, and excelled at school. I passed my Intermediate 2s with seven As, and two Highers with an A and, er, a C. I was invited to an Advanced Higher English course, and accepted, but had to drop out before I began my dissertation - it was to be on Irish vs. Scottish black humour in literature, comparing MacCaig's poetry and The House with the Green Shutters with The Third Policeman and After the Wake - because my aunt, who mostly brought me up and whom I loved dearly, developed throat cancer, and I couldn't focus on writing when I could feel the agony that my aunt was going through. In late 2010, I began to believe that I was beginning to look old, and that I needed to look younger to find a re al boyfriend, so I stopped eating for days on end. In 2011 this worsened. In January 2011 I was almost 9st; in July 2011 I was close to 4st. I was hospitalised with multiple organ failure, and diagnosed with anorexia nervosa. In September I was sent to residential inpatient, where I spent one day short of a year. Being a CAMHS unit, it was dire; I would far rather have been sent to an adult mental hospital. My fellow inpatients competed with one another constantly to be the sickest. At one point, I lost my temper with one girl to the extent that I punched her in the face and slapped her against a wall. The incident was recorded on CCTV, and, had I not been so underweight, I would have been expelled from the unit. I was NG fed for some time. My more recent mental illness experiences are a little too raw yet to be spoken of in public, and, besides, I've rambled on long enough. My final major diagnoses were occipital lobe epilepsy - I had what I now recognise as partial seizures, many, many migraines, and a couple of possible tonic-clonics as a child, but was only given an EEG at 16, and had a tonic-clonic during the strobe test, and subsequently had several MRIs which confirmed brain damage and epilepsy - and schizoaffective bipolar disorder at 17, which I doubted at first, believing myself to be borderline, but, after some research into the topic, found that it fit (hah) perfectly. I hope that I'll fit (there I go with that same pun again) in here alright.

900 mg of lithium a day 40mg of Prozac amd 5 mg of risperdal i have aspergers which includes OCD ADD anxiety severe depression slight manic and possibly multi personalitie disorder

I have two and a half year old twins who are verbally delayed (as in, they do not speak at all) and probably both have autism. I say probably because we are still waiting on official paperwork. My son was also born with pyloric stenosis, meaning he had to have corrective surgery at four weeks old and will have a nasty scar for life. This is a condition he inherited from me, and my guilt over it is insane. I know it hasn't been proven that autism is inherited but we have a history of it in my family. I feel like I condemned both of my children by having faulty genetics and with each therapy appointment and every day I go without hearing them speak the guilt grows more intense. I do not resent my children, but their disabilities are fueling some issues I thought I had worked through years ago. Caring for them has killed my already miniscule social life, no one wants to hang around while I chase the kids. The few other parents I know judge me harshly because my kids can't communicate and are poorly behaved because of it. The assumption is that I neglect my children, when in reality I have given up everything to try and help them. I've had to quit my job, move back in with my parents (another indignity) and my life exists entirely around taking them to six different therapy sessions a week. In the past six months I've resumed binge/restrictive eating, my insomnia is back, and I'm so anxious I sweat and shake just thinking about interacting with another adult. I'm guilty about not having better genes to pass on, guilty about maybe messing up something during my pregnancy, and guilty over feeling depressed about the state of my life. Gut instinct says to delete this because no one could possibly care, but I need to get it out. If only for a little bit.

Hey everyone, how do you feel post meltdown? And how long does it generally last? I had one last night for the first time in a long time and I'm feeling so drained today. I've been paying a lot more attention to my energy since getting back on meds and I was curious what you all find.

... please see the 3rd post of the thread

How on earth does one on the spectrum manage the feelings of sadness/stress/fear for an ill loved one while another healthy grief stricken family member demands help and attention? My grama is very ill, and my mom is reasonably quite upset, but unreasonably sending me very very frightening and alarmist messages to drop my entire day and plans and life because she's practically dead- oh, wait, we're going for lunch. Or- oh, wait, she just really needs fluids but she'll probably be okay. I've talked with her about it, but I doubt she really gets it at all or why it isn't okay to do that. Any stories/theories/impressions about asd and dealing with grief? A time full of stress compounded by an increased social pressure?

I am not a parent, more so in the sense I do not have my own offspring, and no legal custody. However, I am the main support system of my soon-to-be 2 year old nephew Chunka, both financially and supportively. Chunka has sensory and major hyperactivity problems that are still being recorded and sifted out to either be diagnosed or just "let be" depending on what is going on. Chunka is a lot like his Nani (me) at his age. I was on spdbloggernetwork.com looking through blogs, and I found this titled "AN ALTERNATIVE SPD LEXICON". I read on, and oh how it related to me. And giggle a bit. And I have been reading here that a lot of people have children on the spectrum, like my Chunka, and I wanted to share this with you.

Well. My name is Louise. I'm 17 on the 19th of April. Don't know how to do this. I'm autistic. I hear shit, but they call it schizoaffective disorder. I have a bad anxiety disorder and crappy depression. I'm almost blind, almost deaf, my scoliosis is near crippling, and I used to be a victim of severe bullying... How are you today? I don't know what else to say. I have ADHD? Adopted young, but still fucked in the head....

I've been obsessed with Parenthood lately, and I was just wondering what people thought about Max - his character's behaviours/presentation and his family's reaction to him.

My name is Stephanie, I'm 26 years old and I am Bipolar! I've been dx for a year now. I've been married for 9 years, we have 3 great children. My youngest is 5 and diagnosed with bipolar, autism, and ADHD. It's very hard and draining so I'm looking for some different avenues of support :-) Medications are listed below. I have been unmedicated since March-April so to finally get a private psychiatrist to listen to my concerns is wonderful. I am hoping this is a good path of medicine even though my insurance denied the claim for Saphris. Hopefully my doc fights it!

Hi, I'm having an unclear diagnosis of either Schizoaffective disorder or Asperger's disorder (maybe plus bipolar) which is being investigated right now. Asperger's is being investigated by a team of two docs at the university clinic nearby and my own (new) doc who is uncertain about me being (schizophrenically) psychotic is reducing Zyprexa to find out. (i'm also on Prozac, Lyrica and topamax which are being continued) So de deal is, he reduced Zyprexa from 20 to 15. and guess what! i'm all TIRED and unmotivated (which doesnt make sense at all). I used to go to bed at 3 am when i was on 20mg but now i get sleepy on 11 pm and go to bed without forcing myself (sense?). I also tend to over sleep pretty much if there is nothing due. like lying in bed thinking. and even afterwards i stay in bed playing with my smartphone or listening to radio or something. it's actually kind of pleasant because i used to get racing thoughts after waking up which could only be helped by removing oneself from bed (racing thoughts with 20mg zyprexa. no racing thoughts with 15mg .... WTF! SENSE?) I'm also generally dull and droopy. or lets say i FEEL this way. my actions tell a very different story. i'm helpful at home when needed and i manage my daily activities as usual, maybe better, but i feel in a way that i should actually be unable to. which i'm not. My thoughts are also more clear, but the thing is there is not so much going on up there. it's like i'm in stand-by mode and whenever the brain is needed it turns itself on, thinks and shuts down again. it's actually also pleasant and in theory better than the racing thoughts i used to have before (on 20mg zyprexa SENSE??!!??!?!?!) but because it's new and very unusual and unfamiliar it's scaring me. On the other hand i would even fo so far and say i'm even LESS psychotic because i used to be more superstitious on 20mg zyprexa (believed more in Tarot cards and such which i now find absolutely moronic) Could this all be the begining of psychosis? maybe negative symptoms or something. I mean if i felt this way all the time, i wouldn't consider it pathological or at least more pathological than the other moods i have had before. But i'm kind of scared that this subtle changes could be the beginning of some huge shit, particularly because i have just reduced Zyprexa by 5mg and there are still 15 mg to go. BTW, I would like to invite you to read a post i posted in the Autism forum a short while ago. Maybe you can judge my mood better by reading that too. Please post your replies on that post here and not there. http://www.crazyboar...ur-sorrounding/ Thanks for reading bear.

Hi, The first time i commited myself to the clinic due to massive hyperactivity, i got diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome by an autism expert. But she moved from my town and when i started feeling shitty next time they diagnosed me with Schizophrenia NOS. (i have never heard voices, was delusional twice for some hours and i have no thinking disorder except another 2 hours of talking shit. which all happend after the SCH diagnosis) i'm also diagnosed with bipolar which is totally true and i agree with that. ok anyways. lets get to the deal. the thing is, i score really high on the Aspie-Quiz (http://rdos.net/eng/Aspie-quiz.php) and AQ test (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html) and i can totally relate to them. when i read stuff on Asperger's i really think that's totally me. in contrast, i absolutely cant relate to the descriptions of schizophrenia. but there are more than 3 different docs say i have Schizophrenia. So what's the deal with this? I really want to know what my problem (read DIAGNOSIS) is so i can seek specific help. Please dont tell me diagnosis is not relevant because it is. so is it possible that i having schizophrenia causes false positive results on Aspie tests? HALP! thanks for reading cheerz Überpolarbear

My 14 yo son recently went through some testing to see if he has ADHD. During my talk with the evaluator, some of the behavior I was reporting about him caused her to do some further testing to see if he might have autism. My ex and I have always thought that our son might be somewhere on the autism spectrum, but because he was able to compensate and deal with the world all right, we never pursued a diagnosis. Today I received the results of the evaluation, and, not surprisingly, he has ADD (inattentive type, just like his older brother, his father and his mother-- and probably his other two sibs). He also has mild autism, though the evaluator does think it impacts him enough that we should take some steps to help him socially. She also recommended that we not tell him about the autism diagnosis, because she thinks it will further harm his shaky self esteem. I tend to agree with that, and I think his father does too (though we haven't had a chance to talk about it much). However, I also feel weird about keeping the information from him. He is about to turn 15, and as someone so close to adulthood, I think he should know about this sort of thing. I mean, we aren't keeping the ADD Dx from him.... I don't think that this kind of Dx should be kept secret like some kind of boogeyman. I don't know. I am really torn. What would you do?

This is an old link, so perhaps someone here knows of an update or further findings.This was about mental deficits in general, but mood was the main focus. Autism was not the only condition discussed, it just was the nicest summation of an example: "Perhaps the most disturbing demonstration of the immune system's potential to influence the brain and behavior was a set of movies played by Judy Van de Water of the University of California, Davis. Van de Water is a co-investigator on a large study looking for environmental and genetic risk factors for autism. She and her colleagues have found that some mothers of autistic children have antibodies against proteins in the fetal brain. To investigate whether these antibodies could be interfering with fetal brain development, the researchers purified antibodies from human mothers of autistic children and injected them into gestating monkeys."

About a year ago, I was evaluated by a behavioralist for Asperger's, and I took the test. I scored 40. I'm a mid-twenties female, married. The behavioralist strongly suggested that I pursue diagnosis and wrote a letter of reference for me -- which included, for some reason, 'she looks much younger than her age'; the relevance of this still escapes me. I didn't have health insurance, and all things told, it looked like it would cost about $3,000. We're students. I didn't pursue it. My husband and I moved to Spain, where he's from. Healthcare here is free. I'd been diagnosed with PTSD before, so I sought treatment for that and also sought an eval for Asperger's. I had some hesitations about the cultural and language divides, and what those might imply, but this was my best option. This is at a local, relatively rural, public hospital. The first pDoc was a disaster -- he said that there was no way that I had autism as I'm a young attractive female (what?!) and married. He read to us out of the DSMV and lectured for four hours. It was a nightmare. I almost didn't go back. We changed pDocs after two visits with this guy. I also saw a psychologist, who said that she didn't think I had Asperger's and that I had no problems at all -- that I just needed to surround myself with "happy, attractive/nice people". This is all in Spanish, by the way, but the context is not very different. She discharged me with that advice. I don't think she read my case history, which had been taken by a different psychologist on a different day, in long-hand, and was eight pages long. She was surprised when I tried to talk to her about the same PTSD issues that had been taken down before. The third and most recent is my current psychiatrist, who is better than the other two -- he asks questions, he listens, which is a marked improvement. He also said after the first visit -- without administering any tests or reading the letter from the behavioralist -- that my having Asperger's was impossible. "If you had it before, you've cured yourself now." I did the Mellon (spelling?) test -- scored in the 90s for obsessive-compulsive and the 70s for avoidant. The psychiatrist told me that I didn't score for Asperger's, but I'm pretty sure that this test doesn't even test for Asperger's. --- So, I somehow destroyed the split-post with the relevant questions. I only remember the one question now. Thanks all for your patience. - Any suggestions for health insurance providers who might cover Asperger's eval? Are there any?

It's been two (and a bit) months since I officially received the badge of recognition. I haven't really been able to talk too many people about it since receiving the ASD label - I've only managed to see my therapist once and since she's in the midst of phasing out her private practice, I don't know how much opportunity I would have in talking to her about the sensation of having the formal label. My pdoc doesn't do talk therapy; he concentrates on medication. Then again, he is a doctor so that's what I would expect from him. I guess my question is - how did you respond in the initial period after you received the formal diagnosis? What made it easier? At the moment, I can't help but put myself under the microscope regarding my behaviours and the like. I keep wondering if my ASD is showing, or if I'm being overtly different to my peers. Sometimes I feel really conscious that I might be "odd", whereas I didn't feel it as keenly in the past. Conversely, I keep wondering if I actually do have ASD - which is strange considering the period before I received the formal dx, I felt that I was probably somewhere on the spectrum. For instance, it seems like the majority of people on the spectrum are introverted in some way and are happy to be their own company. On the other hand, while I'm not totally extroverted, I really do like the company of other people and I don't like not having social interaction. If someone threw an invitation for a party in my direction, I'll jump at it. I know that some aspies are "active but odd" - perhaps that's me?