Normally I find I overshare waaaay too much when I’m hit with a question that I’m not ready for. I haven’t learned how to filter myself or lie, and then I think about how much I share am I’m exhausted, embarrassed and I’m angry and irritated that I told someone too much
Late diagnosed middle-aged AuDHD male here, just a personal note to add that while my instinct is also to resort to the mental flowchart for anticipatory discourse I realized in adolescence that, due to the heavy burden of masking and my ADHD tendencies, I often just didn't have the energy or patience to rehearse as I would have preferred; instead I found that unscripted and improvised conversation could be a stim in itself. This may have helped me in terms of adapting to neurotypical work requirements at customer service roles but ultimately it made my descent into burnout a more protracted process, generally an annual occurrence.
Late-diagnosed autistic woman here-- I love the term "anticipatory flowchart for discourse!". I've been explaining this concept to my family (in predictably, frustratingly long detail ;D), and now I have a name to label it! Thank you! My words tend to be very clear and precise in their expression, but I'm told my body language is asynchronous both with what I am saying and what NTs interpret it to mean, so I'm working on a body language flowchart now for posture and affect, something I had not taken into consideration alongside words and the broader category of "overall behavior/role in the group.". It is such a relief to reduce them into about 5 subcategory forks and just get them in muscle memory for public interfacing.
Thank you for this. My school wanted to test me as a child, but my parents refused. I have struggled with RSD forever, and finally got an ADHD diagnosis after graduating university. That got lost along the way in my various medical files underneath all the anxiety and depression interventions. I have to wonder if I'd been born 20-30 years later, I'd have had the right support. Striving to be not just normal but "better than" to keep up with my acheivement-oriented family has led to a crushing cycle of overextension and burnout. Recently, a teacher from my high school expressed her surprise that I hadn't had more success in life. I was such a good student! Unfortunately, my "awkwardness" never passed, and every basic social skill has been hard-won. I've been a target for bullying or ostracization in several workplaces. Or maybe that's just anxiety from past experiences making me paranoid. In my forties, I've learned that things are calmer inside of me if I take on less. This, of course, disappoints my family, but I just have to live with that. Thanks again for the validation. Peace and hugs!
We are 10 (ten) seconds in and the presenting psychologist casually mentions non-binary people as if we exist? LIKE Really refreshing to see mental health professionals beginning to catch up with the discourse within the autistic community. We shouldn't need it, but validation from a professional source does go a long way in this culture, and can help make much-needed shifts in how autism is perceived/engaged with among autistics and allistics alike. Thanks!
i'm sorry but nonbinary is not a thing. you are either a man or a woman. i'm sorry you feel confused about your gender identity but that is the truth. ask God to free you from this confusion, bc it's a lie.
5:19 I don’t share my special interests with anyone, except my husband. I just assume no one else cares. Blanket statements like this aren’t correct in all cases.
I'm really good at masking too. I was struggling so much with socialising in school and I felt so alone in my own skin because it felt like no one thought I was good enough. This video is very important because Autistic people are hearing so many invalidating comments about their Neurotype because they don't fit they stereotypical way of seeing Autism. We have a different Neurotype and everyone should understand this and don't try to make us conform and change.
14:35 - very much so for eye contact. Tip of nose or ears are close to the eyes but not looking into peoples eyes. As to feelings, yes - feelings are annoying and have to be suppressed and hidden.
5:35 what do you mean by this? That we aren’t good friends? That we don’t recognize when someone isn’t really our friend? That we don’t reciprocate friendship or know how to have relationships? Please explain.
i find this stuff so triggering i have ment many genuinely diagnosed autistic women who present far more similarly to the men. there seems to be some resistance to the idea that like a large number (the vast majority) of genetic disorders have skewed sex ratio. that misdiagnosis can actually lead to harm as women or men as those treatments/interventions that are useful for autism are not for other neurodevelopmental or psychiatric disorders. that this is sometimes the result of people seeking diagnosis for a less stigmatised disorder (bpd has worse press and it really should not. people with bpd score high on very basic autism scales, has to be teased apart). there are far more women with bpd and in my mental health journey i have found them to be very compassionate and wonderful people. that tik tok autism self diagnosis is destroying the hope of those with a genuine diagnosis to be taken seriously. everyone wants to join the cool kids club. it is a cause of great suffering if you actually have autism. that autism is a disorder not an identity. the neurodiversity movement is based on a term invented by a sociologist who knew nothing about autism. that the nd movement had led to people trying to shut down conferences where well meaning clinicians (ot, psychologists, neuroscients). some of us want help for our suffering, not delusion. that the nd movement had led to death threats and pile ons on twitter on the parents of low functioning kids for suggesting that perhaps being nonverbal and banging your head against the wall is not an identity. the dsm 5 is actually pretty good (though rubbish for other things) with autism. its easy to tell an autistic woman as they are far more like autistic men than is suggested. tik tok autism or another condition is quite different. i have worked with top autism researchers (not one myself) but these are things they have said. perhaps they wont say them publicly so they wont get cancelled.
All of what you said is so out of touch with recent research on autism; please don't pretend you uphold facts when you uphold nothing but your own strange gatekeeping. Previously diagnosed autistic folks receive no less support when the definition of autism is broadened enough to include people that psychiatry (which is notoriously and empirically proven to be sexist, among other biases) has left out in the past. Your opinion also disregards the lived experience of tens of thousands, if not more, of medically diagnosed AND self-diagnosed (both are valid) people with autism. If you care about accurate diagnoses, you should be overjoyed and not "triggered" that those who slipped through the cracks (and, inverse to what you claim, were often misdiagnosed with BPD or bipolar) are now receiving the support they need--not from the medical world, obviously, but from our peers. Because yes, neurodivergence is an identity and a community. Everything is. If you don't understand what a network of solidarity is, I feel for you. That must be a hard and lonely existence.
@@noteventherain not really..i have plenty of friends, bipolar with schizophrenia etc. they are not stupid enough to diagnose themselves (what the f does valid mean anyway...this is a true or false ... or have you swallowed the postmodernist crap that is destroying the left. ie there is no such thing as truth. my friends have experienced actual mental disorders - they have had plenty of hospital admissions, require medication and psychological support. in my country the harm being done is that government is no longer taking autism seriously and funding has been cut. also the protests at conferences for treatments are a real thing (think it was in additude magazine)...the invalidating thing is to claim a disorder as an identity bcos you think it makes you interesting. there are many biomarkers for autism, (for example complexity measures of the neural networks which can be measured most easily with entropy) which indicate that autism leads to suboptimal processing. have a friend with almost genius iq but without autism would have achieved far more. what were safe spaces for autistic people such as tech and academia have been destroyed by the kind of dingos gonads delusions you are pushing.
check out the basics, neurodevelopmental disorders more common in men. others more common in women. now its over diagnosed. many of women are being harmed by autism specific interventions.
The word neurodiversity first appeared in publication in 1998, in an article by American journalist Harvey Blume,[13] as a portmanteau of the words neurological diversity, which had been used as early as 1996 in online spaces such as InLv to describe the growing concept of a natural diversity in humanity's neurological expression.[1] The same year, it was published in Judy Singer's sociology honors thesis,[14][15] drawing on discussions on the independent living mailing list that included Blume.[16] Singer is has described herself as "likely somewhere on the autistic spectrum".[14] yes, lets listen to a journalist and a sociologist pretend that a disorder which causes suffering is just normal variation. people who have cerebral palsy or schizophrenia do not dribble this rubbish.
The first damn sentence in this video is "Many autistic people do not present in this stereotypical way very often these are females, non-binary people and often some young males." The guy in the video is not a young man, the comments to the video is from several (including myself) older men that present this way and have self awareness enough we can identify even the trauma part and you wonder why we are self erasing, you just erased us with the first comment in this video, how can you be getting it right and so very very traumatising wrong at the same time that your video should be reported for being harmful to any "older" man that watch it.
There is no different presentation of autism, in females. It’s an oft repeated falsehood, based on nothing. The insinuation is that girls are being missed, while males are being diagnosed, which is also a falsehood. The ratio isn’t 1:1.
Sources? Depending on culture, girls are socialised so differently to boys; with extremely different pressures, expectations, group dynamics, social roles etc. In the early 90s my younger brother was diagnosed ADHD. My mother told the psychiatrist she felt I had far more severe functional impairment, and was wanting to get me assessed for ADHD. Psychiatrist said outright "girls don't get ADHD, it's so rare I've never seen it, therefore not worth assessment." I was diagnosed in my 30s, in the 2010s. I wonder if that psychiatrist and others like him were acting in way to ensure a self-fulfilling prophecy... of course no ADHD was occurring in girls, if no psychiatrists were assessing girls. If I'd waited a couple more years I'd likely not had to wait over a decade between diagnosis of ADHD, and finally being diagnosed comorbid autistic. The fact that a bit over a decade ago, it was supposedly impossible to have both, another stereotype that leads to misdiagnosis and missed diagnosis. And yes, some of us AFAB have more masculine autistic traits. Of course there are outliers, and different forms gendered social conditioning. If clinicians can only see autism as"male shaped" they literally don't see it in girls and women.
There are certainly women who present with ASD in a more typically male way (just as there are men who present with ASD in a more typically female way). Are things skewed in numbers? Really don't know, but as masking is learning to fit in socially, and in general males and females are socialised differently how they mask is often different. So depending on how people have learnt to mask and how "good" they are at it they will be more or less obvious. Add in ADHD (whether hyperactive or inattentive) and how ADHD and ASD can often give contradictory symptoms and spotting them can be very difficult.
@@katywalker8322 see source below...almost all neurdevelopmental disorders are more common in men. basic. there is more variability in the genes and long tails in the distribution of most traits. god knows why anyone would want autism if they actually have it. the women who are diagnosed i suspect have another serious disorder, probably more stigmatised (ptsd, bipolar, borderline etc)...and that such things are so stigmatised is disgusting. i have bipolar, and this is grossly unfair. addiction also has a large genetic component. that vastly greater stigma is unfair too. those who are self diagnosed i have far less compassion for. they saw it on tik tok, did a half assed online test and thought it made them interesting. what would you think of someone who diagnosed themselves as paraplegic? (more severe but what would you think of them?) get it.
I’m not sure that it’s an excuse. Internal experience and external presentation are entirely different. Most on the diagnosis journey are simply looking to understand a part of themselves that makes their lives confusing or difficult. The diagnostic labels and conversations among professionals in the field are simply an attempt to do so.
@@kaylaknuckles343 internal experience & external can be different, yes. But if can fully function socially, can work fulltime, can manage relationships etc, then what need is there for any diagnosis? A mockery has been made of diagnosis by diagnosing now anyone who feels a little bit different. Yet is indistinguishable from "neurotypical".
@@BipolarCourage it’s an assumption that high maskers are always functional in all of those areas. People have different reasons for seeking therapy and invisible disabilities are called invisible disabilities for a reason. Some people can keep up the facade for a time and suffer from frequent burnout or infrequent, yet extreme burnout that they don’t entirely recognize. Sometimes the high level of underlying stress that the person feels and seeks help for due to the masking eventually leads to further development of symptoms or development of comorbid conditions, which could have been avoided through therapeutic and medical treatment.
@@kaylaknuckles343 how can burnout be extreme if they don't even recognise anything? "High-masking" for extended time is BS. This narrative is harmful. Anyone who wanted to be part of an online clique is now in.
@kaylaknuckles343 exactly. @bipolarcourage people viewing "high functioning" autistics from the outside have no idea the toll that this level of masking takes, from life-ruining burnout to the difficult work of unlearning masking in order to be able to go on living the rest of your life without repeating that burnout cycle. This is one reason among many that many folks in the autistic community are moving away from labels oriented around a person's "level of functioning." (Conversely, for example, someone who appears "low functioning" from the outside may be excelling in ways that we can't immediately see or that society doesn't recognize.)
