Drowning in “Functioning too well”
When you function too well to get diagnosed with what’s making you HAVE to function well
“You’re organized, doing okay in higher education and you got your high school diploma as an adult through self-study. Someone with ADHD wouldn’t have been able to do that.” She said.
“Your symptoms in childhood weren’t intense enough to warrant any note in your report cards, therefore you don’t fulfill the requirements to get a diagnosis.” She said.
“You’re definitely neurodivergent, but your symptoms are explained by other diagnoses. Aspergers (authors note: ew, use the right name!) would be a possibility.” She said.
I mean reading those sentences alone should make it clear why I’m in favor of self-diagnosing neurodivergencies if you’re an adult woman who likely has them. These were things said to me and written in a diagnostic assessment report LAST WEEK. 2025. For 500 bucks too, because getting an assessment non-privately here is a nightmare. I still waited a year for this privately paid one.
This isn’t a rarity. Women seeking ADHD diagnoses tend to need more attempts to finally get it diagnosed. I just never expected I’d be one of them because to me and every single person around me, it is so damn obvious I have it. The first reaction my friends had to the above quotes was outrage. Many of my friends are on the spectrum, have ADHD or they have a mix of both. I don’t know who started the trend of calling themselves “peer-reviewed as neurodivergent” but that concept definitely applies to me.
Don’t get me wrong. There are alternative diagnoses that could give you the same symptoms. The inofficial C-PTSD being one of them. Something I could have too and would’ve been fine being diagnosed with instead after this assessment. I guess I can be glad it wasn’t a BPD or bipolar misdiagnosis, that would’ve sucked so much worse than being told something I already know. I have a bit of the tism. Cool. Problem is: Any self-test I ever took for it that was made specifically for women, said I don’t meet clinical enough levels for diagnosis. You know which tests did that? ADHD tests. The best one in my language is so long it takes 40 minutes to fill out and that thing said I had picture-perfect ADHD. Just like my friends do. Just like I relate to every experience of other ADHD women. It’s a little hard to miss how I can perfectly sync up with another AuDHD person I’ve never met before.
What boggles my mind is…how could you suggest autism while completely ignoring that AuDHD would perfectly explain why my childhood symptoms were milder because the two diagnoses cover each other? How could you suggest autism and ignore that half of autistic people have ADHD (science is still arguing about the exact prevalence but the actual ND community agrees with that rough estimate)?
How can you see a WOMAN with suspected ADHD talk about anxiety in the past and argue that it’s its own issue and not at all connected to potential ADHD? That one honestly almost boggles my mind more about that assessment. It’s by far not a secret anymore that a lot of anxiety is caused by ADHD. She also didn’t even connect it to the autism she suspects. For her that shit is just standalone. HUH?
As someone who had a full-blown anxiety disorder with a known cause, I’m quite familiar with what GAD and agoraphobia are and the anxiety caused by neurodivergence is NOT the same. Like, at all. Anxiety from neurodivergence feels like an inner buzzing, a slow rise towards having either a meltdown or a dissociative brain. Sure GAD can do that too, but it comes with different thought processes and doesn’t feel quite comparable.
I think the thing that pisses me off the most is that my self-assessment and the assessment my parent filled out for me indicate ADHD based on the written assessment report. The tests I took definitely indicate a mix of concentration issues. The thing that took the diagnosis from me is this woman’s perceptions of what an “intense enough” symptom in childhood and adulthood is. Which…anyone with a brain and internet access nowadays can tell you those will be less intense in most girls and women, especially with inattentive type ADHD. Being intense enough on paper bur not in the eyes of a psychiatrist. Any a neurotypical would sit here and say “well, they know better” no the fuck they don’t we barely even have research on adult women with ADHD, what makes you think that the current generalistic ADHD specialists have any nuance to base their takes on other than diagnostic tools that were based on little boys for decades? It’s just one more reason to only get diagnosed by women who have it themselves.
I talked to several women who have the diagnosis and for them, the psychiatrist saw in their organization a coping mechanism to function better with ADHD. Same with higher education working well with ADHD and self-study being closely tied to the phasic experience of ADHD being focus-phases and then semi-burnt out and uninterested phases. I explained in my assessment several times “yeah, I struggled with this, but now I found a way to work with it and make it not a big issue anymore.” and this woman thought “Well, since you adjusted to your disability you can’t be having it.”
When I tell you I wanted to scream. I don’t wanna hear ever again that “everyone has ADHD nowadays” because this experience of someone obviously having it not getting the diagnosis is COMMON. Very very common. Go on the subreddit specifically for women with ADHD and read about the amount of dipshit psychiatrists out there.
I almost feel bad about getting the “you might have autism” experience because I know many women with autism wait years to even hear that suspicion for the first time. Meanwhile, my subclinical self gets it thrown at me because psychiatrists are married to that clause that says “if it’s explainable through a different diagnosis then it’s that different diagnosis” (can we get rid of that rule of thumb? It’s used wrong so commonly that I have several stories of being suggested with shit I didn’t have in my teens).
500 bucks to hear that and leave with not even an alternative diagnosis. Great. Now I’ll save up again and go to another assessor. You know…in a country where specialists are usually not psychiatrists themselves, but only psychotherapists capable of doing the testing and you still need a psychiatrist taking the test results and diagnosing based on those? Yeah, I’m certainly having a TIME currently. I’ll be going to a psychotherapist who does only the testing next time because at least that one is not just specialized in ADHD but specifically ADHD and autism in women (because she herself has both diagnoses). I already know that woman will shake her head at the report of this week’s assessment.
Off we go to find a local psychiatrist who will take the test results from that specialist therapist and diagnose based on them. If I didn’t want accommodations in the future so bad I wouldn’t even continue trying with a diagnosis right now. This shit SUUUCKS and it gives me just a slight taste of what people with endo must be going through.
So uh, for now I’ll remain as “100% certified neurodivergent by a psychiatrist, suspected ASD and they didn’t wanna diagnose me with ADHD because they seem too dumb to understand how AuDHD looks in little girls and grown women in higher education” which is definitely the longest way of saying “I AuDHD-ed so hard that I compensate too well to get diagnosed.”
Fanny said something to me last week that, reworded, sounded kind of like “It’s more important that the neurodivergent people see you as one of their own than a psychiatrist” and amen to that. People shitting on self-diagnosis likely never had to go through the chaos that is the lack of specialized people and seemingly specialized people with knowledge from 5 years ago that isn’t brushed up on regularly.
I’ll keep carrying around the label ADHD as a self-diagnosis, because everything and everyone around me tells me I have it. I don’t give a fuck if the pathology lovers out there find it invalidating or stupid when neurodivergent people are…diverging from what is expected of them. In this case following a system too rigid to diagnose them if they’re not a young boy.
If it feels like a disability. Shows up as a disability. Matches all the signs of a disability. I probably have the disability even if a doctor didn’t write it on a piece of paper because they only diagnose based on how debilitating shit seems to the outside in childhood. God forbid my disability doesn’t affect anyone but me, in that case the medical bias is literally a big “why even diagnose it?”
This rant was necessary because fuck people who go into the field of psychiatry to not practice any reflection on their diagnostic assumptions (no, really, suggesting autism to someone that had mildened ADHD symptoms in childhood is a different level of zero brain usage). Everyday I get closer to the radical opinion that every social job should required to take two semesters of a social work degree and every day I get closer to having the longest rant in history about how social workers being barred from becoming therapists in most countries is debilitating to society at large.
I’ll keep being the ADHD friend to all my friends and proudly so and if you think that’s horrible practice because some person with a doctor title said I don’t have it, go climb Mount Everest or something. Doing well in academia and research says nothing of note about the ability to diagnose someone accurately. Psychopathology is a game of educated guesses and I’d argue educated guesses about the symptoms you live with daily will be more accurate even if you account for the distorted few we have of ourselves.
Neurodivergent peer review seldom lies!
Thanks for reading my much needed rant about “experts” failing neurodivergent women.
PS: Did I mention that she said that an autism diagnosis isn’t needed unless I absolutely want it because there isn’t meds for it and I was the one to bring up that having a diagnosis is very much relevant to get workplace accommodations? That’s a rant for another time.
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