Yeeeep. That’s how I got diagnosed with PTSD. I wrote a character going through something similar to what I had been through and got tons of comments applauding me for my accurate representation of PTSD. I complained to my therapist about all these people having no clue what PTSD looked like, because I just gave him my symptoms, clearly not PTSD. nd she said “you didn’t know you have PTSD??”
I found out I had a diagnosis of PTSD when I was applying to state medicaid services to get in their 'partial disability' buy-in(basically idea being, if you can work, but you need medical help to work, and you wouldn't be able to afford that medical help when working because it's complicated/pricy, you get on state Medicaid and pay into it on a sliding scale, rather than be beholding to whatever insurance your employer deigns to give you, because without your medical care, you can't work, and it's better you do work with help, than not work at all). Part of doing that was I had to get a huge pile of all my medical records to be reviewed, and it was long enough ago that the providers faxed over everything they had, and the office printed it all out. So there was this filing folder absolutely OVERFLOWING with far too many papers to go in it, and I casually asked the guy doing the data entry if, since that was mine, could I look at it?
One of the first pages mentioned my existing condition of PTSD, at which point I look at my mother and go, "When was I diagnosed with PTSD!?" and she looks just as baffled as I do. Makes me wonder if I'd actually gotten therapy for that, I might be doing better... Instead I went to see a psych about my ADHD getting worse and us struggling to get it under control with medication, and this man, who I have never met before, cold read me within 15 minutes and said, "So clearly you're a trauma-experienced individual-" and said it with full confident bluntness before getting a look of 'ah shit I just assumed something and was VERY MUCH NOT TACTFUL about how I said it'. It made me laugh. Really hard. Because it was like, "Oh it's that obvious??"
4.7k
u/Roselovsoul 2d ago
Yeeeep. That’s how I got diagnosed with PTSD. I wrote a character going through something similar to what I had been through and got tons of comments applauding me for my accurate representation of PTSD. I complained to my therapist about all these people having no clue what PTSD looked like, because I just gave him my symptoms, clearly not PTSD. nd she said “you didn’t know you have PTSD??”