On My Aspergers Diagnosis
From my diaries, an August 17th entry:
“I have been a lot of diagnoses, some defined, some presumed, some intended, some required, some supposed and some permitted. Dr. Mary Beth was the first person to say to me, 'Sometimes your diagnoses make you who you are.'"
From my diaries, an August 17th entry:
“I have been a lot of diagnoses, some defined, some presumed, some intended, some required, some supposed and some permitted. Dr. Mary Beth was the first person to say to me, 'Sometimes your diagnoses make you who you are.'"
That said, within my “Diary Files” you’ll find a few entries allowing you to assume that I have little respect for the Psychiatric field. That would be an incorrect assumption. What I was smart enough to figure out in studying for my BS in Psychology, way before ’94, was that there were no answers, no explanations, for someone like me . . . not anywhere, in any overview, in any text I read. Aspergers wasn't even a thought in the mind of the DSM in 1976.
Skipping through some 20+ years and a parade of prescriptions . . . in 2000, I left the corporate world and moved to a mountaintop to write myself real. In part, I wanted to be able to explain to my family why I’d settled for “Panic Disorder with Agoraphobic Tendencies”. I wanted to be able to explain to them, to me, why my “condition” wasn’t “all in my mind”, when seemingly, at least in their perception, it was. I knew I had to clarify why my brain and my mind are not synonymous.
The truth is, Psychiatric and Medical professionals can be quite dismissive when you do not fit
their paradigms. Over the years I’ve argued every DSM “possibility” they’ve attempted to bestow. Most of their time I was deemed the catch-all “in denial”. I was not in denial, I never have been. I was in “disbelief”, which over time has morphed to a sort of incredulity, so . . .
In 2001, I wrote a theory, The .26% Solution, a “new paradigm”in philosophical and psychological thought based on the Bell Curve. I had become my own therapist. Quite frankly, I was my only truly viable choice. I became my own case study. I tested my own theory. I spent the next seven years writing thinking everything I could think. I very methodically and logically put all the pieces of my life into the order of my hindsight. I literally wrote myself into its mirror . . . I have the lexis to prove it, in all the “diary files”, on all four of my “retired” hard drives, in all the boxes full of my words.
I was just shy of my Indigo wave when . . .
In December 2007, I saw myself in a different light, through a different lens. I was shocked into recognition as I realized that my accurate diagnosis, according to your DSM, is Aspergers. A practicing Psychologist has confirmed it.
People have asked me why I wanted my diagnosis confirmed, why I wanted to own that label? I didn’t want it. I needed it. I needed to have my Medical Records accurately reflect my “condition”. Trust me when I tell you with all the certainty I have, there really is no “good kind” of Schizophrenia and . . . DID, just don’t. That DID don't reference was my “Aspergers Humor” flyin' out of me, couldn't help it.
Why, three years more of thinking and writing later, would I confess, in a public domain, that Aspergers really is my accurate diagnosis? After that three years, I’d just laugh and say, in the slow and deeply Southern drawl of Auntie Jan, “Because, evidently it’s true.”
Skipping through some 20+ years and a parade of prescriptions . . . in 2000, I left the corporate world and moved to a mountaintop to write myself real. In part, I wanted to be able to explain to my family why I’d settled for “Panic Disorder with Agoraphobic Tendencies”. I wanted to be able to explain to them, to me, why my “condition” wasn’t “all in my mind”, when seemingly, at least in their perception, it was. I knew I had to clarify why my brain and my mind are not synonymous.
The truth is, Psychiatric and Medical professionals can be quite dismissive when you do not fit
their paradigms. Over the years I’ve argued every DSM “possibility” they’ve attempted to bestow. Most of their time I was deemed the catch-all “in denial”. I was not in denial, I never have been. I was in “disbelief”, which over time has morphed to a sort of incredulity, so . . .
In 2001, I wrote a theory, The .26% Solution, a “new paradigm”in philosophical and psychological thought based on the Bell Curve. I had become my own therapist. Quite frankly, I was my only truly viable choice. I became my own case study. I tested my own theory. I spent the next seven years writing thinking everything I could think. I very methodically and logically put all the pieces of my life into the order of my hindsight. I literally wrote myself into its mirror . . . I have the lexis to prove it, in all the “diary files”, on all four of my “retired” hard drives, in all the boxes full of my words.
I was just shy of my Indigo wave when . . .
In December 2007, I saw myself in a different light, through a different lens. I was shocked into recognition as I realized that my accurate diagnosis, according to your DSM, is Aspergers. A practicing Psychologist has confirmed it.
People have asked me why I wanted my diagnosis confirmed, why I wanted to own that label? I didn’t want it. I needed it. I needed to have my Medical Records accurately reflect my “condition”. Trust me when I tell you with all the certainty I have, there really is no “good kind” of Schizophrenia and . . . DID, just don’t. That DID don't reference was my “Aspergers Humor” flyin' out of me, couldn't help it.
Why, three years more of thinking and writing later, would I confess, in a public domain, that Aspergers really is my accurate diagnosis? After that three years, I’d just laugh and say, in the slow and deeply Southern drawl of Auntie Jan, “Because, evidently it’s true.”
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