Aspergers in Girls - Misdiagnosed and Underdiagnosed

I'm going to refer you over to another page today.

AS an aspie who wasn't diagnosed until 29, and even then the tester kept saying how "well adjusted" I seemed and how I "didn't seem autistic" and she didn't think I was autistic at all.... I feel very strongly about this.

Women are not men. Men are not women. We will not act the same. We will not cope the same. Sure, it doesn't mean that women will ALWAYS act one way and men will ALWAYS act the other. We are all different. Sometimes autism in girls is clearly apparent. However, I think on the aspergers side of things especially, we tend to do things quite differently than boys.

Women are usually more socially wired. Even if we don't consider ourselves "social" or "extroverted", for some reason we have an inner game that goes on that makes us observe, or just deal with it differently.

The reason I mention the social thing first, and by itself in this post, is that the majority of our lives are just fine to us. It's usually when we are in a social setting that we and/or others notice our drastic differences. Those are the times when we feel the most different and the most foreign.

This post is excellent, and totally true. It's time that the professionals get their brains into a different kind of thinking so they can spot more of us instead of giving us random disorders like bipolar, personality disorders, anxiety, depression.... all of which can be PART of autism, like an accessory to it. But it is not the whole picture. We need a whole picture of mental health, not just one facet.

I was diagnosed with autism in my 40s. It’s not just a male condition

Nicola Clark
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/30/diagnosed-autism-male-condition-women-misdiagnosed

Taking Mental Health Seriously

I feel as if I've had a lot of anxiety problems in my life, though I don't often consider them a real problem, to be honest. I just kinda float through and manage to carry on despite the anxieties. 

I remember often when I was a kid that I would get this icky sinking feeling in my stomach. From what I can remember, it would last every day from about November to March. If I was in school, that was good because I could distract myself. If I had my head in a good book, I could distract myself long enough to get my mind off my nagging stomach. If we could just do something to distract myself, usually involving not being home, things looked better! Thank goodness our grandparents literally lived right behind us and I could get a bit of change of scenery going there. And grandma loved to go out for coffee. A lot.

That icky feeling has not been around much since I was in high school. There have been moments where it has returned, and they are dreadful moments. But somehow I've managed to be able to take deep breaths, change my surroundings, or simply distract them away via technology. 

If someone tells you they are hurting, or suffering from some kind of nagging anxious feelings, take them seriously. I think sometimes we try to tell people they are fine, by our estimations, and that their feelings don't have anything to do with reality. This is probably the most true with anxiety disorders, because to an outside source, the feelings do seem illogical and don't seem to have a lot of basis in reality. So we brush them off and tell them that they aren't as bad as they seem.

We have to take it seriously. Yes, it's time consuming and inconvenient to have to start calling around for information and making appointments, but isn't the life of your loved one worth it? 

Sure, these days, especially for kids in school, they have all that IEP stuff and extra help in school. But what about for other things? What about feelings of anger, or frustration, or fears? What about crippling anxiety that keeps you up at night unable to just relax and go to sleep? And how do you tell your parents any of this when you can't make sense of it yourself? 

Just take them seriously. Give them support if they need it, direction if they need it, and help to show them how they can work through their feelings in a safe way, through the help of a counselor or whatever.