Aspies For Freedom

This distrust in usually based in personal experience.  Many of us have not had good experiences with therapists--generally, those with AS often have trouble verbalizing our problems, and the therapist has trouble understanding what we're trying to say.  The way someone with Asperger's "thinks" is generally very different from what a therapist is expecting to deal with.

One example would be someone with undiagnosed Asperger's telling a therapist about preference for routine, based around personal interests.  To the person with undiagnosed AS, this is just a natural kind of living style, preferable to them, and it helps the AS person offset anxieties incurred from a tedious job, ill-suited to their interests (AS people who have jobs based around their special interests aren't that common.)  To the therapist, this established routine may be seen as a pleasure-seeking escape from reality, a way to limit overall responsibilities, and the claim from the patient "it's just how I do things" would be seen as a negative self-fulfilling prophecy.  This kind of "these habits MUST be corrected to progress" is what leaves a bad impression on the undiagnosed AS person--as it did with me.  I have not had a good experience with therapists.

Therapists that don't know enough to look for AS, don't care enough to understand a patient through the AS lens (and won't make the effort)... this is what causes the distrust.  Lack of information on AS on the part of the therapist, and an unwillingness to see the undiagnosed AS patient any different from the "typical" NT patient...  this is what causes the problem.

As far as self-diagnosis goes, some people want to find the identity they never had (necessary for better understanding of self), and realize that there's other people in the world who think like them.  That's all that needs to be said on that.

I really couldn't have said it better, myself  

Really, you shouldn't use psychiatric terms and ask for informal advice from people with similar experiences?  Leave that only to the professionals, right?

As we've said before, some people are simply looking for better self-understanding.  Whether these same people would benefit more from official diagnosis and/or therapy, rather than questing curiousity and introspection, is not for you to decide.

I think I said it best, in my last comment.  

Thank you--as I was thinking I was more an annoyance to many people, than anything else.

Jos, is it possible you can comprehend things of this nature?  So far, you haven't given any indication of it.

I'd say a good professional is someone who tries to learn the facts about his client and then is open to admit that she/he may have to look it up before offering a 'solution'. It's difficult when you have little time for each client, but there are some things that cannot be rushed.
A good professional would be open to any solution offered by the client, so that she/he could think about its validity.

I share some of the same distrust that Ethel has, and I have enough experience with the mental health system to back it up.

Jos, I acknowledge I made a needlessly harsh comment to you in my last post.  My reason for doing so is that I am frustrated with some of your views, and some of those shared by your brothers in the mental health system.  I feel that the individual, especially in in regards to Asperger's, is not appreciated enough.

I get the sense that a lot of therapists, at least those I have seen, tend to investigate the "nurture" without considering "nature" half as much as they need do.  I'm easily among the "worst neurotypical" patients any given therapist could have, if they don't consider something more fundamental to my neurology could be going on.  Hence, my frustration and my angry words.

That said, there is no "collective group" here who thinks you aren't welcome.  I will try to maintain my composure in future discussions.

Yes indeed! Got it in one!

I must take some issue with Jos's idea that a treatment plan will always be a good follow on from official diagnosis. The reason is we can't be cured and doesn't "treatment" generally suggest aiming for a cure?

Unfortunately, previous therapists have got impatient with me because I only seem to improve while there is a fair amount of support eg. if they act as an intermediary with other health professionals etc.

They also had issues with the "slowness" in improvement and the fact that I would "get better" for a while and then go downhill very fast after seemingly minor setbacks.

Whether or not it is seen as special pleading, I consider an official diagnosis was necessary so that I could receive a few concessions in the workplace (ie. minimal phone and face to face public contact). This is because I easily get into a flap and can sometimes even self-harm when phone calls and face to face encounters go wrong.

This is very distressing to the people around me and to myself. I've tried things like assertiveness training and this has helped somewhat but what happens when the other person turns even nastier when I act assertively? I can't seem to cope with this kind of fall-out most times.

The impairments are subtle but pervasive and mean that things such as getting a prescription filled, making a doctor's appointment, getting medical tests done, arranging to have a handy person come and fix something broken; even getting a meal at a restaurant or going to the shops can become a nightmarish experience.

I fully realise that some of these things are simply unavoidable and I just have to manage the best I can. There is no cure and I accept that. Sometimes I would just like a sympathetic ear rather than somebody jumping in with solutions. Unfortunately, psychologists and counsellors are trained to jump in with "fixes".

I found they assumed they were dealing with an NT person who just needed a little prod to get her going and they didn't believe me when I said I couldn't follow their suggestions to the letter. I wasn't saying that to be difficult - I was telling the truth but they didn't want to hear it.

Jos, I think you'd need to be prepared for clients such as Batman, Ethel, and me who are definitely "gun-shy" about the helping professions, are intelligent and perhaps even oppositional and defiant if we believe we are being patronised and/or not listened to.

We could be either your most challenging type of client or your most rewarding - not because there will be some miracle cure but because we blossom if we know somebody believes in us.

I am very disappointed to see that you are trained to believe that Asperger's is a disorder only. That in itself will make it so much harder for you to see our potential and our special abilities as well as the areas where we struggle.

I find that straight-line processing is on-target, but in terms of myself and at least 1/4th of the posters I've seen on AFF, "excellent in science and math" is wrong.  Just flat out wrong.

I felt my last therapist was making "facts" about me that I couldn't dispute (because they were "true," as he said):

Fact, I'm incredibly immature for my age group, or at least as compared to most other patients.  (told it to me straight out, too)

Fact, I do not know what's good for me, but he does, and he is never wrong.

Fact, my routines are simple avenues for pleasure and avoiding normal responsibilities.

He never brought up the topic of Asperger's with me (really, he didn't see it...?) so I guess I was treated like an NT patient.  My brother later went to see the same therapist, and said he thought he had Asperger's, the therapist replied, "You do have some traits, but not enough to let it control you."  This after 2-3 sessions with my brother, at best.

Fact, he knows everything.

Most of the time I went to psychologists and counsellors it was because somebody thought they could "cure" me of the issues that I had. It wasn't because I really wanted to go of my own initiative.

So that in itself was not a good start. Then, for various reasons, organising to go to sessions was always difficult. That meant if anything went wrong, I could easily bail out because it was taking so much time and effort to get to the sessions. Money is often an issue.

They tended to tell me what I should do and not ask me for any more than minimal input so I didn't feel as if I "owned" any part of a treatment plan and it also wasn't appropriate for them to plan to get me off their hands after 6-8 sessions, which seems to be the norm here.

Whilst there might be a slight overall improvement over time, there are going to be other issues which will continually crop up ie. they are chronic. I don't think the mental health profession is really geared to those of us with chronic and long-standing issues which have often been aggravated by the wrong kind of treatment in the past.

It's a real conundrum for the helping professions to deal with people who will always need a bit more support than the average person in certain areas of their lives.

If he believes in a cure for Asperger's, I believe in a cure for him.  Let's cure his imperious "professional" ways, and his cunning dishonesty (which has allowed him to hide his condescension from us.)  Let's make it a mandatory cure, also.

Even to this day, I get internally agitated (and if exposed for long enough - externally agitated too) by things such as some tones of voice, people throat clearing, changes being made without consulting me, bad grammar, and being expected to be a mind reader.

Some people say just to "block out" disagreeable noises and to be more tolerant. If it were so easy, I'd already do those things. They neglect to consider that my mind is wired differently to theirs and doesn't have all the "off switches" that theirs does. That has included counsellors.

I don't have a lot of faith in counsellors being able to understand me as my expressive speech lags far behind my receptive language skills but is still reasonably good for an aspie.

Would not say you're wrong in that reaction, DogBrain.  Jos111 showed quite a few signs of that "Stuffy, Professional Bastard" syndrome a lot of us have come to know and fear.