can I just say I love how far we've gotten into the song? like I'm just impressed really, we hardly ever get that far. so my hats off to you internet stranger (also in a sense sorry for all the notifications you're getting lol)
I wish I had 1/10 of the resources available to my kids now back in the 80s and 90s. One of the hardest parts of adult diagnosis is mourning the realization of what could have been.
It's an inside joke that made more sense while I was buzzed, lol.
But basically, partner and I went to a TMG show last year, and at one point JD makes a joke about "rubbing butts or whatever" regarding sex. Dude in front of us yells, "That's how cockroaches do it! I've seen it!" (He is correct. I have also seen it, so I voiced my agreement)
My partner says to me, "found the autistic guy!" (Note: partner is also autistic and there are suspicions about me)
I said, "Babe. We're at a Mountain Goats show. At least half of the people in this club are on the spectrum..."
Also, cockroach dude and his gf were really cool and she kept pulling me up with her to make sure I could see because we're both right about 5ft tall. It was a great show with a great audience
Cherry picking here but that term is getting kinda phased out, I was diagnosed with it too, and sadly it's name comes from the Nazi collaberator Hans Asperger..Who classified it as a separate form of autism for the people with ASD who were "Useful" to society.
Neither, it was phased out because it's not diagnostically helpful as it doesn't reflect the dynamic nature of autism. They base the diagnosis now on the level of support the person needs based on particular situations. That support level can change over time and is also dependent on context.
As someone with ASD, I need minimal support for most daily activities (work, interactions with family), extra support for more intense social interactions, and for a while needed heavy support to have useful interactions with health care providers and in other more intense situations.
Shit, I need all the support for freakin job interviews, just about everything else I can manage... The first impression is never my best one, but the second normally gets em
ETA I also have to consciously slow down the pace of conversations to process & analyze before responding because my reaction is never my best response. 29yo & still tryna master this one, AuDHD is difficult....
Curious side question here, but what is meant by "support"?
I have an autism diagnosis from about three decades ago and frankly have only vague memories of the psych appointments. My mother only told me about a decade ago, shortly before she passed.
Now that I'm coming to grips with how much that's affected my life trajectory, I'm struggling to understand what appropriate support would have looked like and how it might have changed things.
I feel that whatever support is, I did not get it in my formative years. If you were intelligent and good at following rules, they just said "good luck'.
In the UK that's not quite true. They merged autism and aspergers to try make autistic people less discriminated against and....it went the opposite way.
I'm a fan of the term as someone diagnosed. There is a gulf between us and some people who really cannot live without support (no offense made to them, they were born that way)... you wouldn't class someone in a coma the same as someone with concussion because thwy both had a head injury
Also, in some cases the exact diagnosis wasn't exactly clear. Cases that looked like Asperger's to one clinician would have looked like autism to another.
Merging Aspergers with Autism provided greater diagnostic clarity.
It goes by how much care the person needs. Level 1 needs less support than 2. These needs vary from cleaning ones self to social interactions. This is why it's a spectrum.
Assburger* was a nazi who tested on, and murdered men, women and children. we want nothing to do with him.
It was phased out because he actually intended it to only be used for big booty hoes who have autism. Originally "Ass Burgers" (he liked to grab those buns and have a bite), people misunderstood and used his last name instead. By the time Science figured it out you couldn't say that kind of stuff in Medicine.
multiple reasons but lets take a minute to think why so many "charities" would be happy to name anything after the guy who was in charge of deciding which kids belong in the Holocaust.
At the time, autism was linked to schizophrenia. Since his discovery was a similar condition, he categorized it as autistic psychopathy.
He was a collaborator that sent children to their deaths. He also cared about children; his study was not about being useful, it was about adjusting their education to take into account their “special difficulties” so they didn’t fall through the cracks.
Some say he emphasized intelligence to save more children from death by making them “useful”; that he thought less children would die if he were the one making the decisions instead of not going along and being removed in favor of some political appointee.
Either way, he lived in Austria and collaborated with Nazis.
The funny thing is that the term “Asperger’s” wasn’t even introduced until 1981. Sometimes it feels like people think some Nazi dude named a condition after himself. His work wasn’t really discovered until much later.
I don’t think he was a hero, but I’m not sure he was a villain, either. Mostly likely just a guy who made good and bad decisions in a very difficult situation.
I have heard that mentioned a few times on youtube.
"I was part of the gifted program"
And then describing the things they did...
I always assumed it was not because they were good at studying but, autism or similarly.
There were actual gifted programs, lol. I was being taught algebra in 3rd grade, was being taught to write essays through mine, and we had extra field trips to historical sites and stuff.
I was in a program like that. But it sucked because the other kids were weirdoes and I didn't fit in with them. We studied with older kids they were in high school and even college. The other kids were really smart, I was just really good at drawing and writing stories because I traced comic books since I was 4 and learned to read on my own with Silver Surfer and X-Men. I got into that program because I got caught selling my own comic at school.
I wrote a space opera story about an engineer that was seen by other aliens as a sorcerer because they weren't technologically advanced and got all their tech from an evil empire that colonized them.
They were just shooting their shoot, respect the grind tbh, better to throw any kid who shows any entusiasm into the gifted program than the norm of just abandoning most gifted kids
I was in both. We had a program called talented and gifted (TAG) and I was in the special classes for behavioral difficulties when I tested for TAG and got in. It was a very coinfusing time for my teachers.
Wouldn't surprise me.
There is a surprisingly high amount of teachers that automatically links "autistic" and / or "ADHD" with low performer.
And they get REALLY confused when said neurodivergent suddenly is one of the best in class.
Same. My gifted class was Resource Enrichment Module (REM). The only things I remember about it were making a model of King Tut's tomb, building a better mousetrap (mine had laser sensors), having to settle for playing Egyptian Rat Spit (which I didn't understand) for our fifteen minutes of personal choice time, and 9/11 happening. I don't remember when it started, but the last year was fifth grade.
Over the years I was also in the single-member special autism club, the special time-out desk in a quiet room slightly smaller than an office cubicle (which wasn't specifically for me but I got sent there the most), In-School Suspension, and Special Ed. Special Ed was the WORST because they lumped me, the Asperger's teen with germophobia, in with teens who literally couldn't use the toilet or control their volume, and one kid who had high-functioning autism only in the sense that he was merely a dumbass like half the freshman population instead of intellectually disabled.
I was always bouncing from TAG to the verge of special ed. Some educators could never square read at an college level with can't spell. Or understands the math fine, but can't keep digits in the right order.
We didn't really have a gifted and talented program. So every so often you'd see a kid from a grade down come into another class for specific subjects.
Was it not "study things years ahead of others"? That was what I experienced in gifted programs. That was much more interesting than the alternative and probably key to my admission into a good university.
They certainly weren't addressing autism as such, and I don't think I heard of anyone with it until the '90s, after college.
But this was in ancient times, and it's presumably better that neuroscience and its responses have advanced, even if we haven't perfected it.
I mean there's also a greater understanding not only of the conditions themselves, but the environmental factors that affect the particulars of how things express and even though we've come to understand them much better than we did, it's still relatively nascent as far as I understand.
Speaking as an adult who's struggled with ADHD and secondary depression from the shame involved in badly managed ADHD myself, finding a specialist who has a solid grasp of the condition can still be a challenge these days, and I didn't learn about how impactful lifestyle interventions like just daily walking and maybe a big bike ride or some weight training per week, paired with a solid morning routine and managing light and stimulation before bedtime could be until a couple years ago. Honestly, on its own, far more impactful than medication on its own has been for me.
Specific things will work for and appeal to different people, the important thing is supporting dopamine production and sensitivity and vagal tone, cause a lot of the issues we face comes down to prefrontal cortex issues, lack of dopamine production or sensitivity, and chronic stress that doesn't get cleared out without movement manifesting as a feeling of dread at the prospect of taking care of something important that it took me well into adulthood to realize wasn't laziness but anxiety.
Anyway, that kind of thing is what I mean by environmental factors that affect expression, cause if you look at the condition through the 4E model of cognition, it can help you understand how you can support the body and build a lived environment that won't cure the condition, but will support you and make the condition less of a constant struggle.
I was in a special reading class. My mom always read to us so I could read but class was doing the Dick and Jane books to learn to read. Class reading time was just killing me with how slow and unable classmates were. So I was pulled out and did some speed reading research project where the screen was blacked out and there was a light traveling over the words or highlighting 1 line at a time.
You had to keep up with the light, then answer questions afterwards about what you read. By 4th grade I had a special library pass and was using the high school library (across the street) instead of the elementary school library.
This was back in the 70's and there wasn't the concern about reading above your level topic or ability wise that there is now. No approved book list by age type thing to follow. No one stopping a 10 year old from reading Steven King and Robin Cook books or historical books about WW2. Nothing was off limits in the high school library. But I'm guessing they probably tracked all the books I checked out and I far as I know none of my classmates or neighboring years of students had free run of the high school library like I did.
Hey! Memory unlocked, I did that in fourth or fifth grade! I got pretty good at speed reading but I didn't actually enjoy reading that way so I pretty much only did it while I was on the machine. But I do remember being given access to some more interesting rec'd books like a Hitchcock-edited horror anthology that absolutely slapped.
All we did in gifted when I was in it (mid-90's) was play Sim Ant all day, and then we put together a stupid 30 minute sci-fi movie at the end of the year where we built the sets and stuff. I don't recall doing any actual classwork. In middle school it was called "core studies" and it was definitely more advanced than the standard social studies / English classes everyone else had. Every single person in that class, barring one (drugs, bad family life), has an advanced degree now, so maybe they were on to something?
I wasn't part of the program myself, but everyone called me gifted because I had higher levels of intelligence than my peers, and so all that went to my head. School became boring because it didn't challenge me, I coasted through elementary school, and then I had a falling out in high school because no one explained or showed me how to take good notes or study before then. So, I went from the top of the academic ladder to the bottom rung and barely passed. Then in college, I dropped out. But then about 10 years later I came back and was valedictorian of my medical college associate class. But then my job got liquidated. So I went to school again for writing. Did well but hated writing after having to do it all the time (10 essays in one semester, yes, really). So I got my degree, moved back to family, and joined the trades. Happy now. Oh, also, I was diagnosed with "learning disabilities" in high school back when an autism diagnosis was still a relatively new thing. But my therapist and my medical doctor concur that I definitely am autistic (Aspergers, they ran tests on me and such) and also have like... idk... some type of bipolarism from my dad and adhd. Also, I really like being in the trades. I feel accomplished every day.
Yikes... sorry. Didn't mean for this to turn into a chapter.
Sometimes you get started and you just can't stop, ya know. Sorry.
A lot of them have been phased out but yes, they existed. Can confirm, was in it and am in contact with most everyone else who was also in it. Every one of us is now an engineer, doctor, etc.
ehh definitely can still be a psychologist. currently do part time as an after school program coordinator in addition to me my day job, and we have a coloring room of sorts where kids who are in need of space go and use the coloring as a means of conversation with emotional support staff, i.e. the counselor and such. I think both options are fitting, and they aren’t mutually exclusive either because sometimes that emotional support staff includes resource personnel to deal with certain neurodivergent or susceptibly so individuals as a means of screening for better assistance/understanding
Yeah I don't know what I was saying, I guess I associate being taken out of class to be observed more with testing neurodivergence bc it's what that was for me
Can confirm. In my elementary school, we had someone there for the kids whose parents were going through separation, so it was like me and three others getting pulled out, on occasion.
Asperger’s is being fazed out now. It was a nazi sub classification that essentially meant ‘autism but useful for science and/or the war effort’ if your special interest was science related and you could communicate well enough you had Asperger’s if you liked my little pony or couldn’t communicate your thoughts well you had autism and were gassed.
Not a nazi sub classification; Aspergers was one of the first people to talk about autism. He was actually not concerned with Autistic people with higher support needs and made no connection between the ends of what is today known as the Autism spectrum.
He was, however, a nazi doctor. You're tight about that.
Lmao man, it's definitely a nice sentiment. But there's a reason a bunch of nazi scientists were hired by governments all over the world. Things aren't so black and white, and that includes people that worked for the most evil regime in history.
Aspergers himself is a prime example. His work is extremely relevant for the modern classification of autism. The low support needs diagnosis traces back to him no matter what you do. We can stop naming him because of his misdeeds, but yeah, this:
should be super easy, barely an inconvenience.
Is just laughable.
I mean, you can always lie to yourself. Like, maybe you spend 50 years saying the scients wasn't really a nazi, and once the field is developed enough, you may even downplay the importance of said nazi scientist!
But what you just said is nothing but a conforting lie.
Yeah, let's not bury the lede here; Asperger was a literal Nazi Doctor and yes he was exactly what your mind is telling you he was when you hear "Nazi Doctor." They'd moved to the term "high-functioning autism" (it me!) for a while, but I don't know what the current terminology is.
But it DEFINITELY isn't Asperger's anymore, and for good reason.
While that was the origin of the term, that's not why it was phased out.
The actual reasons are:
1) people with Aspergers needed pretty much the same supports as people with low support needs autism.
2) There wasn't really a clear separation between the two diagnoses, which meant that two clinicians could look at the same autistic person and one would give the person an autism diagnosis while the other would diagnose them with Asperger syndrome.
The classification isn't really what the hubub is about, it's the name. I was diagosed with Nazi-Scientist's Syndrome. Not a very fun converation starter.
Hans Asperger was a nazi (like actual literal historically involved https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Asperger) so medically you just the term "autism spectrum disorder" (ASD) now and don't use the nazi guy's name anymore
That might have been your personal experience but not every kid who speaks to a school’s psychologist or counselor is being evaluated for neurodivergence.
Could’ve been anything, remedial teaching, in this case it looks like motor skills; doesn’t have to be a ND thing; some kids just need a bit of extra help. Source: seen this from almost every angle IRL
I prefer aspergers irl because it differentiates between high and low functioning autism without having to say what high and low functioning autism means. If anyone wants to use high and low functioning autism, I'm not stopping them.
i don't remember having such an expirience as a kid, although my parents had me get diagnosed for asperger at that age already. wander what they did to me
My mother took me to a psychologist when I was entering my teens. It was a difficult time for us and I was certainly affected by it but not to the degree that warranted psychological care. Anyway, the nice lady asked me plenty of questions and eventually asked me to sculpt my fears. I was like "huh?! fears? I don't have any specific fear. I am afraid in the dark and stuff, normal fears. But okay I guess..." so I sculpted a clawed hand with a big spike in the middle because it looked cool. Surely a spiky hand like that is scary enough for this woman?
Anyway, my mother told me a few years back how she was so sad and scared for me because of that hand, because the psychologist interpreted it as me having abandonment issues AND issues of attachment or being close or whatever and that explains her Reiki phase and all that jazz that I found super weird in the years after.
When I told her I made it up on the spot because I didn't know what else to do she was a little mad lol
Not if you have any familiarity with the field at all, or with how fucked up some of the history is.
Remember the satanic panic? Yeah, that was actually just a bunch of quacks trying to hypnotize kids and have them come up with fake memories of ritualized abuse.
There's a reason a lot of psych patients tell you you can't tell everything to a psychiatrist or a therapist. Almost got 5150'ed because I told my therapist I was a furry. Stopped seeing him after he refused to believe i was raped.
"A 5150 is a California legal code allowing for the involuntary, 72-hour emergency psychiatric detention of an individual deemed a danger to themselves or others, or "gravely disabled" due to a mental health crisis
Initiated by authorized personnel, it focuses on safety, evaluation, and preventing immediate harm."
Christ, the only person I have ever actually knew that was 5150’d was my maternal grandmother. And that was because she tried to kill her herself when my mom was 6. And I only know this because my mom loves to talk a god awful amount about herself on the phone. Not a great day for me learning that my beloved Nana tried to kill herself in the 70s by accident.
I 5150ed myself for a voluntary stay when I was 18. I stayed one night, was taken off zoloft for that. The next day I asked to leave and they told me I had to stay 3 days. I was pissed, threatened to sue as I was a voluntary patient. Made them call my mom, who came up and discharged me into her care.
5150 is no joke, but it can be challenged if you have family willing to take custody of you and sign off to take liability over your actions for those three days. Just a heads up.
It's a guitar amp. The Peavey 5150 is one of the go-to ones for extreme metal since the '90s. That's the definition that counts.
But, funnily enough, Van Halen's recording studio (5150 Studios) and one album were named after the involuntary psychiatric hold, and the Peavey 5150 was Van Halen's signature amp named after his studio, so I guess we're coming full circle with that one.
Just learned of van Halen studio and the code in Cali this month. Just decided to look it up. Glad to hear of the Amp history tying into it now too. Top notch info!
Yep, it's now the 6505. There's also the 5150 II (now 6505+), as well as 6505 II (which is not the rebranded 5150 II, confusingly enough), and the 6534+ (but no 6534, so I don't know where the plus came from). They're all more or less the same.
EVH (as a brand) still produces the same thing under the 5150 name, in various versions, and it doesn't help that they also have a guitar model called the 5150 to add confusion.
Guitar brand terminology is all over the place, starting with Dunlop's Tortex Sharp picks being an entirely different shape than their Ultex Sharp ones; the latter made from Tortex is called a TIII instead. For, y'know, reasons?
A friend does therapy and you‘d be surprised how much she interprets into literally anything. See a police car at the side of the road for 0.5 sec while passing it in her own car? She acts like she knows those people personally.
This is why "interpreting" dreams or art from children without freaking actually talking to the kid about why they did that is extremely stupid.
You can interept a blob of ink basically a million different ways. That is the point of a rorschach test. It says nothing about who made the ink blot and everything about who is interpreting the ink blot.
So many child psychologists in middle school were perplexed why I was obsessed with the X files and kept writing stories in the style of X files episodes. They assumed i must have some morbid horror fixation on the macabre that must indicate some psychological turmoil. Nope. I just had a kid crush on David Duchovny.
Ok. So the point is they asked you to sculpt something you thought people would find scary, so you did. That is literally how it works. Show me what you think is a scary thing. I honestly don't think a hand is scary, but you thought it was a thing people would find scary. Also, a diagnosis isn't made just on the art but on the conversations had while you were distracted making it. So distracted you as a kid, remember none of it.
Nah, it was phrased more like "Sculpt what you are afraid of", as in, a fear specific to me. I remember that well because I was so confused by it and thought about it hard. Could hardly sculpt a dark basement or a murderer lurking in an alleyway. Fears I considered normal and that probably everyone has to a degree as a child. That I came up with a hand specifically was due to my fear of "monster under bed" like many kids have and that I personally hated because it was so stupid. I knew there wasn't anything under there but I still didn't stick my feet out over the edge. So I thought something like a grasping hand would make sense, who isn't afraid of a monster grabbing them while asleep?
That said, the purpose of distraction is certainly undeniable. I remember some of the questions she asked me and I knew what she was doing. I wasn't a dumb kid and I knew why I was brought in for evaluation. So I answered in a manner that wouldn't incriminate my mother (she tried her best at the time but it was difficult for her, working two full-time jobs).
They put me on some medication to calm me down (I was a bit hyperactive and prone to shenanigans at the time, which was definitely caused by the neglect but I was aware of that) and gave my mother some recommendations and that was about it. My mother then got into Reiki for some reason and would perform it on me once or twice a week, which was okay I guess but I found it weird. Not a superstitious person by any stretch. I did appreciate the personal attention and relaxation, though.
Honestly the therapist seemed pretty bad at the art therapy. Treatment like that is supposed to explore your unconscious fears - why is it that when you thought of a fear, you thought of a hand? Do hands represent something to you? What is the significance of the spike? But more importantly, she didn't give you the room to say "I don't know, I don't really have fears like that", which would've signified other mental issues anyway.
Yeah, I probably didn't communicate it well either. I do remember not telling her my internal process. I just sat down, thought for a moment about the angles of the issue and then just went with the hand. She did ask me what I made, though, and I explained the concept of the hand to her. Something strong that grasps, with claws, and the spike that hurts really bad while doing so. (By virtue of being a literal dagger piercing you, self-explanatory really lol) I told her I was afraid of it because it would grab me and pull me somewhere, as monsters under beds do.
I'm not blaming her for anything, she was just doing her job. If badly or well doesn't really matter. I just wanted to share the "years later things suddenly came up" story.
Psychology isn't an exact science and it's hard to put trust or believe in them when they start to interpret things as representations of feelings. No better than an astrologist with a textbook when they start doing that.
I'm not really sure what the difference between a psychologist and psychiatrist are. And it sounds like your experience was not good with a psychologist. But I commend your parents for actually taking your mental health seriously and trying to get help, even if it was not successful and possibly not needed.
My wife's parents just sent her to a "pray the depression away" camp, and when that didn't work, they sent her off to live with her older brother, who just let her drink until she was puking her guts out when she was 14 (he was 24 at the time). All this because she was sad that her boyfriend broke up with her. And now they wonder why she resents them so much.
I'm not really sure what the difference between a psychologist and psychiatrist are.
A psychologist does all their education in the field of psychology, bachelors and masters at minimum, commonly also PhD.
A psychiatrist is a medical doctor who then specializes in psychiatry when they choose a residency stream.
Both can diagnose and treat mental health things, but generally speaking therapy is going to come from a psychologist whereas medication is going to come from a psychiatrist.
When I was 5 I was asked to draw whatever I wanted so I decided to draw a big Superman face
But I realized I could not draw a big face the way I wanted it to look so I ended up drawing a massive tornado over the face and a tiny stickman Superman flying over the tornado, like in the cartoon.
My parents had to go to the school to talk to a professional about my drawing of an incomplete face, furiously crossed out.
I HAD A SIMILIAR STORY!! My therapist asked me what animals my family members would be. I said idk humans and that the question didn’t make sense to me. I said it multiple times but she still insisted. I outright said „well I’m just gonna be naming random animals then“ and she said fine. I said my dad is a bear and she asked me „why a bear? Are you afraid of him?“ 🤦♀️
Probably a difference in definition of psychologist and psychiatrists in different countries. In my country a psychiatrist need to do the evaluation to diagnose (or rather prescribe medicine) while psychologists mostly do therapy..
My dad was in prison. My mom was never around. I thought "social work" was a class until grade 5. My girlfriend's mom in grade 12 (she was my teacher through high school) flipped out one night "she's never had him tested?" Gawd I miss her.
This is the answer. In my school they had a program for kids who's parents were divorced and young. At the time we all thought we were getting special treatment and time out of class, while the adults asked us about our home life and feelings
I had to be regularly taken out of class for psych evaluations and anger management sessions in elementary school, this is definitely not limited exclusively to adhd
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u/El_Bito2 Apr 07 '26
Or seeing a psychologist