Autism isn't a personality disorder; it's a neurodevelopmental one. OCD similarly isn't a personality disorder; it's a behavioral one, and the closest personality disorder is OCPD in cluster C.
this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2024
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yeah, sorry about the imprecisions in the terminology, i just tried to repeat what the psychiatrist said, but i failed. what i think he meant is basically: "might be autism; might be ocd; might be some other thing. i'm pretty sure about adhd tho"
Yeah, don't worry; my comment wasn't meant to own you with facts and logic(TM). Just to educate, since I know picking up a bunch of jargon in the setting of an appointment is extremely difficult. Hope things go well for you!
do you consider yourself an intelligent person? perhaps above average?
because in my experience this is what causes issues - if you're smart enough to do well on the tests despite neurodivergence it can give a false negative or an "inconclusive" results
the easiest way to fix that problem is visit an adhd/autism specialist who themself have adhd/autism. Then they can properly just vibe check you instead of relaying on tests
i got passed a quick intelligence test by the evaluator during the assessment and the result was high intelligence. not sure if that's worth anything
anyway, i'm not seeing how my "intelligence" would interfere with the tests exactly. it's not like there are right or wrong answers (unless i was specifically trying to fake a diagnosis, which i'm not)
i'll look for an autism/adhd specialist in my area for me an my wife, who also got recently diagnosed. thanks for the tip
high intelligence can and will make it harder to detect learning difficulties & mask life struggles. Because despite the genetic learning disadvantage of adhd/autism, things get averaged out by being smart. You can also find coping strategies easier and just figure things out on your own
also adhd evaluations always look for signs during childhood, and if you are smart enough of a kid you won't struggle in school despite not being able to focus on regular learning like everyone else - the consistency of symptoms is pretty much half the diagnosis and having those symptoms be invisible to everyone but you complicates things
most tests (apart from self evalutations) don't really test for things like regular life struggles, and if you only recently started being able to see your symptoms (that were previously masked by high intelligence, and only now you realised something was off about it all) it could lead psychologists/psychiatrists to belive it's something else - like anxiety or depression (both of which can also be caused by adhd so that makes stuff even more annoying)
if the sentence "oh you have so much potential, if only you applied yourself" has been repeated in your childhood as if on a loop, and now makes you want to cry and/or smash things, you're probably like me - and the above is how my diagnosis went
"oh you have so much potential, if only you applied yourself"
...fuck
i feel ya, believe me, i do. best of luck!
Second this.
Intelligence can allow a person to mask to such a degree that it becomes invisible to a professional
Get a second opinion... I would rather be correctly diagnosed than incorrectly given a diagnosis...
that feels a bit like cheating tbh. especially bc he's been doing a pretty good job wrt the adhd treatment. also, i'm getting back to therapy soon and the therapist might help with the diagnosis according to him
but i guess you're right. i'll see if i manage to set an appointment with another psychiatrist next year