How do you know you're autistic? 9 Common Ways to discover your autism as an adult

nine ways to discover your autistic if you were diagnosed autistic later in life there's a very good chance that a self-discovery process was a big part of your journey so in this video I'm going to go through nine common ways to discover your autistic let's see if one or more relates to you hi everyone Paul mikf here from autism from the inside I make weekly videos Sharing The Human Side of autism so make sure you hit subscribe to get the latest content so I've noticed a bit of an unconscious myth that exists in mainstream culture which is essentially to think that the way you figure out your autistic is a professional notices it in you and tells you and then gives you a diagnosis and that kind of makes sense from a medical model that's how we diagnose most of our physical ill illnesses and even a lot of our mental illnesses but when it comes to figuring out that you're autistic in my experience that is just not a very common way for someone to discover that they're autistic so I'll go through the nine most common ways that I've noticed and I'm really curious to see which ones you relate to so number one and these are in no particular order is having your child diagnosed first these days there's a lot more awareness about autism most teachers have at least heard of it before and many have enough experience to pick up obvious signs if they haven't been noticed already so in general our capacity for noticing autism in children and the systems set up for early intervention and support mean that there's a fairly High chance that if you have an autistic child they'll be identified and diagnosed as a child now obviously individual results May Vary and access to diagnosis is not equitably distributed and things like that but overall if your child is autistic there's a very high chance they will receive a diagnosis before you do and for many people this triggers a lot of yeah but they're just like me kind of moments and so learning about what autism is learning about what normal is or at least is supposed to be and then comparing that to your own life and your own experience and then joining the dots on that and saying well actually this is very very similar to what I experienced growing up and so having your child diagnosed ends up being the first step in your own autism self-discovery process number two is similar if you have a friend or even multiple friends who get an Autism diagnosis as an adult and the reaction is if you're autistic I'm clearly autistic too this is a version of going out and meeting autistic people to learn what autism actually looks like in adults but it's a bit of a special case because with a close friend you've probably personally witnessed all their quirky Behavior over the years and maybe even bonded over being very similar in many aspects so a little bit like learning what autism is through your child learning about autism through a very close friend who's had a diagnosis could spark your own Journey number three YouTube has clearly seemed to identify me as Autistic or at least keeps recommending me a lot of autistic videos I've heard this story from quite a few people who tell me that my videos or some others have regularly popped up in their feed and they start off just ignoring it for a while but it keeps popping up in their feed and eventually they click it just out of curiosity and then of course YouTube feeds them even more autistic themed videos and you end up inadvertently learning what autism looks like in real adults in real life which inevitably hits a little bit close to home really resonating with that and now your journey is well on the way number four is reading a book specifically A Memoir of an autistic person this was actually the case for me the book I read was look me in the I by John Elder Robertson and my experience was typical I got halfway through the book and I resonated so much with a lot of the things that were being said that it was just beyond a coincidence anymore I share more about my own diagnosis story in other videos but essentially I put the book down halfway through did an online self assessment quiz I also made a video on that one if you're interested and when the official internet diagnosis was maybe probably I basically picked up the phone called a local support group and attended a meeting the very next day when I arrived I joked with them that I diagnosed myself online yesterday fully expecting them to tell me that was ridiculous but for some reason no one told me I was ridiculous instead they basically said hey you found us welcome home these days there are quite a few autistic Memoirs out there which means I'm sure you can find one that you can relate to number five is a long time search in this example it's the kind of person who has always had this niggling question in the back of their mind and just keeps looking for answers and maybe you get a diagnosis and it doesn't quite feel right or maybe you find another answer and it sort of answers some of the questions but it doesn't quite put all the pieces together and you've been looking for a long time until finally you learn a more accurate idea about what autism is and suddenly all the pieces seem to make sense I can relate to this one quite a bit as well because I had some kind of idea what autism was from like culture and TV and things like that I even remember as I was working as an engineer hearing a statistic that Engineers are more likely to have autistic children and I remember having a bit of a laugh at that and say yeah well it's just that Engineers are more likely to be autistic obviously but still at that time I did not put two and two together about myself at the time diagnosing myself as an engineer and having that as a label that described pretty much everything that I felt was important at the time I didn't really see the need to keep looking for a better explanation number six deserves its own category getting diagnosed with ADHD first Sometimes ADHD can be easier to recognize and it also has clear treatment options which often make a really big difference straight away and so finding something like that that's seems to answer so many unanswered questions on the one hand it's really good because you're starting to understand yourself better but on the other hand it might take a little bit of time to realize that there's actually more to the story than that single diagnosis that said just knowing that there's a high chance of cooccurrence of both might be enough to start asking the right questions which eventually leads to finding that missing piece so far with these first six ways we've been looking at some fairly benign examples but unfortunately now we need to move to some of the more significantly less nice ways number seven of these nine ways to discover your autistic major burnout I was fine I was coping I was getting everything done yes I was stressed but I was always finding a way to keep it all together and now I'm not sometimes you can see the signs of burnout building up for many years but we all have big stresses in our life right how do you know when it's going to tip from stressful but I can manage this to complete overwhelm and burnout when there's a crash of this magnitude it's very clear to everyone involved that things are not okay and that's when trying to find answers to questions like how could this happen leads to uncovering all the hidden challenges that the person has been dealing with silently their whole life number eight is similar but in this case the crash is due to a big life change what are some examples of a big life change it could be a pandemic or a divorce or a redundancy or the birth of your first child for me the big life change that led to my first major crash in my mids was transitioning to full-time work I was doing really well at University I had a great social network I was very well supported but I just did not cope with working 8 to 10 hours in an engineering office every day so essentially a big change leads to needing to find an entirely new set of coping strategies and if we don't do that quickly enough or successfully enough a major life crisis of the order of losing your partner losing your job major burnout that type of thing is often just around the corner so clearly this is not a very nice way to find out you're autistic when virtually everything in your life is falling apart having a name for that and blaming a neurological condition is not all that reassuring sometimes it can be really helpful when finding ways to get through it and come out the other side but sometimes it basically leaves the individual believing that there must be something wrong with me and that's why my whole life is falling apart right now because it's my fault I don't know what I did wrong but clearly I'm the problem hopefully with more awareness in society we can help people discover that they're autistic in one of the first six ways and hopefully prevent these kind of major life catastrophes from happening in the first place so I said I'd share nine ways to discover your autistic so what's the ninth one well I've saved the most boring until last the final one on my list of how to discover your autistic is to have it suggested to you by your psychologist why is this the most boring way well firstly it plays into the social myth that it's the most common way and secondly it's not really a self-discovery process if someone else discovers it for you it's a bit like saying yeah my doctor tells me I have low iron apparently I don't know what they're talking about until it actually means something to you personally then it's just just a medical professional giving you a label fortunately though this can be the start of a genuine self-discovery process and I know lots of people who eventually discovered their own autism because it was first suggested to them by their psychologist you will note however that of these nine ways to discover your autistic almost none of them start with a professional diagnosis which means that for a lot of people the question of do I get a diagnosis is more like asking the question do get this discovery verified by someone else because actually they already have an answer which is why a lot of autistic adults do not have an official diagnosis and is also why almost all the autistic groups that I'm aware of recognize self- diagnosis as equally valid and the only reason I said almost is because I like to be 100% correct and it was just in case there's a group that I can't think of right now that doesn't recognize self diagnosis but if a group like that exists I would be very surprised because there are such a high proportion of self-diagnosed adults for several reasons not least of which being that diagnosis is a very costly process and if you've already got an answer to all the questions that you're asking then it may not necessarily give you much extra out of the process it would definitely be fantastic if one day all health professionals had an accurate view of autism so they could play a more active role in helping the community and especially undiagnosed autistic individuals in that Community but that's one day and for now we'll have to settle for more organic ways of sharing autistic lived experience so that we can all more easily recognize and accept it in ourselves and others as usual my advice if you want to understand autism is to go out and meet autistic people and if you think you might be autistic yourself you might like to check out the autism from the inside online social group on Facebook there are regular Zoom meetings you can join we also have a Discord server and if you're in melbour we also have a number of in-person meetups as well so I might leave it there for this video today I'm curious which of the nine ways I mentioned resonated most strongly with you or is there a 10th common way that I forgot to mention let me know in the comments otherwise thanks for watching and I'll see you again next week bye

Channel: Autism From The Inside

Views: 57,805

Keywords: autism, autism spectrum disorder, asd, autism spectrum, what is autism, autistic, autism experience, what autism feels like, autism awareness, paul micallef, paul micallef autism, paul micallef youtube, paul micallef melbourne, paul micallef aspergers, paul micallef autism explained, how to discover you're autistic, how do you know you're autistic, how to discover your autism, how to tell if you have autism, are you autistic, late diagnosed autism, autistic adult

Id: yo3oyZfczsc

Length: 12min 30sec (750 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 01 2024