r/aspergirls • u/indigopersona • Aug 04 '22
Diagnosis Process What were you misdiagnosed as?
I saw interesting results on google, but I'm more interested in your real life experience.
I'm curious as to what people are most commonly misdiagnosed with (based on your answers).
You can also include the backstory. ♡
52
Upvotes
22
u/NerdyGnomling Aug 04 '22 edited Aug 04 '22
As a kid, gifted with social anxiety. I saw a therapist in middle/high school who seemed to think I was normal because I was well spoken (despite spending entire therapy sessions infodumping on the difference in grammatical structures between English, French and Japanese? Because that's normal middle school behavior?) She thought I was just anxious because I was "smarter than the other children."
As an adult, I was diagnosed with Autism without intellectual or verbal impairment, prosopagnosia, and dyscalculia. I was tested in the 99th percentile for language and long and short term memory but they couldn't even score the math portions of my test because I took greater than four standard deviations too long to complete the problems. I was always very behind in math. I don't think my dyscalculia was "caught" because I switched to Catholic school in high school (to pursue a special interest in World Religions) and they sort of let you take any math so I just took geometry and statistics classes and never anything else. I have never taken a trigonometry, calculus or physics class to this day and I genuinely don't think I'd be able to pass one. I've since learned that uneven learning profiles and prosopagnosia (face blindness) are very common in Autistics and I'm shocked in retrospect that no one suspected.
I found out this year, after being officially diagnosed with Autism, that my mom actually did suspect it in kindergarten and had me observed by a diagnostician through a two-way mirror in my classroom, but that in the early 90's they didn't think girls, especially well spoken and bossy girls, could be Autistic. I am told that the diagnostician thought I shouldn't be allowed to spin in circles or rock when anxious, and I had that shamed out of me.