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It's Autism
I've written here before about my daughter who been a challenge to raise.
Since my last comments, I had connected with a Psychiatrist who did some blood work and recommended we give A some supplements. Vitamin D, P5P, L-Methionine. We've been at it for almost two months now and I think there has been some change in a positive direction. I've been trying to keep a record going of the behaviors that are most odd to us:
Here is the when we first started the supplements:
And here is where I would put her today:
We have some days where aggressiveness trends back up to a 4 or 5, but the trigger is often she does something rude, doesn't realize it's rude, gets mad at a sibling for saying she did something rude, and then lashes out. And this is more of a weekly occurrence than a daily occurrence. It feels like progress to me.
Well, we had a 1 year follow up with the Neuropsychologist who diagnosed her with ADHD, we told her about how we pulled A from school due to disruptive behaviors that kept her in the school office for hours every day, we emphasized how weird A's understanding of jokes and speech can be, and she agreed to test her for Autism.
She had a couple days of testing. Her ADHD symptoms have improved somewhat since last year. Her verbal IQ increased about 15 points to a normal range now. There's a test where the kid has to avoid kicking a soccerball before a signal is given and she did better than the average kid, instead of worse like you'd expect from ADHD. However, not knowing if she was giving the correct answer or behaving the correct way was driving A up a wall and she threw a fit at some point, so not every test was completed.
A week later, Dr. [redacted] gave us the results. Our daughter has learned human behavior like a Miss. Manners textbook but has definite signs of Autism on display during an ADOS-2 test. Repeating words and phrases over and over again for minutes, bumping her hands together to expel nervous energy, talking super fast then slow, not really conversing with Dr. [redacted] but rather having a one-sided conversation. Couldn't describe what made a friend different from someone else, what the experience of having an emotion is like, etc.
So now she needs to up her speech therapy to 1 hour a week, get some kind of occupational therapy, and maybe join some sort of support group with similar people.
Meanwhile I feel like I've been gaslit for the last five years.
She was evaluated for Autism when she was 2 and couldn't talk. They said there weren't any signs. Last year, with this same Neuropsychologist, they didn't give her the ADOS-2 test but gave her some other kind of test and said she didn't show signs of Autism. For the last year I've been going crazy, reading books on BPD in children (doesn't seem to exist but people will certainly sell you books on it), books on ADHD, dyslexia, nutrient deficiencies, ODD, etc. We've tried high carb low fat diets, elimination diets, supplements, you name it. And all along it was Autism, which honestly I suspected since she was 7 months old and made her first pile. (The second she learned to crawl, she gathered all her toys into one place and lay on them like a dragon guarding a hoard. The second she learned to walk, she started eloping at parks like being able to find and return to her mother wasn't a consideration for her.)
Meanwhile, now that I'm putting "Autism" in the search bar, it turns out there's all kinds of official sounding terminology for all the weird behavior she's been doing. It even explains her writing numbers and letters backwards. But before this week I ignored results with Autism, because I'd been told on two separate occasions that she doesn't have it.
It feels like the weight of the world has been lifted from me. The responsibility of being the parent of a weird kid has been lifted from me. There's a name. It's not my parenting style. It's not my fault.
The biggest head trip is how similar she is to me, if I wasn't a genius. I didn't get frustrated in school, reading came easy to me, I learned figures of speech like I learned the months of the year. But the social stuff, and repeating my own words, and the one-sidedness to my speech. That is a lot like me. A lot of things my daughter did, my mom would say, "That's just what kids are like," and "I think the school is being ridiculous, sending her to the office so much," when it was for things like chasing a teacher around the classroom. Maybe that's just what her kids are like (except I was better behaved at school, partly because I was in gifted classes, partly because I finished everything ahead of time and was allowed to read books most of class).
But I also feel lost in the woods without a map. I have to sign her up for therapies. Where do I start? I don't know. We're going to see if this diagnosis means the school can take her back. But we're also concerned about what that would look like. It's all a lot.
I've also started having dizzy spells since hearing the results. Don't know if that's related but it started a couple hours after the appointment. So that's weird. Overwhelming stress transferring from one bucket to another in an inefficient fashion.
If it helps, every non-alty I've ever met who has an autistic child has had that child misdiagnosed as ADHD. It's one of several reasons I continue to believe childhood ADHD diagnoses should be prohibited by law(you can just have a kid who gets bad grades and grows up to work in a warehouse. Sometimes thems the breaks.). Several of them had their eventual autism diagnoses made on the basis of 'duh. Did the doctor who made the diagnosis actually meet the kid?'
Uh.. Just because autism in children gets confused with childhood ADHD doesn't mean that the latter doesn't exist or isn't worth diagnosing.* There is still such a thing as hyperactivity or inattention beyond the "normal" range that responds well to medication, and waiting till adulthood for a diagnosis means that a lot of social/academic damage is unnecessarily allowed to happen. Being dumb is not the same as having ADHD, even if dumb people tend to be impulsive and lack focus. It is also possible to be smart and lack focus, I say, looking at no one in particular.
(This isn't the same kind of argument as for puberty blockers, in case someone leaps to pattern matching. Stimulants are rather safe drugs, the only minor downside might be slightly reduced growth rates.)
Most people diagnosed in adulthood have had the condition since childhood. It's not like schizophrenia where it can just "turn up" after you're 18. I know that's the case for me, and I'd have been way better off if someone had noticed when I was a child and put me before a shrink.
*ADHD and autism can coexist.
Be that as it may, doctors are not responsible enough to diagnose adhd in children, sorry. Maybe theres perfectly legible capitalist explanations that don’t apply in the nhs. Sure, willing to believe that. But in the USA, almost literally every child with some other developmental disorder was first diagnosed with adhd, and it just isn’t an emergency to have someone grow up to work in a warehouse instead of a hedge fund. We produce too many elites anyways. If your kid cant do school without accommodations maybe they just deserve bad grades?
I request citations.
An ADHD diagnosis is, in fact, significantly lower here, and much harder to get. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, that's because the NHS is operating far beyond capacity and it can take up to 10 years to even go from a referral to seeing a specialist for assessment. That's the worst case I've heard of, though 4-5 years is typical for schoolchildren. Not quite ideal either way.
I would rather my kids don't work in a warehouse instead of a better job, as would most people, and probably you. It's a false dichotomy anyway, there is no medication on Earth that would take someone from being only suitable for warehouse labor to being a quant, sadly.
That is more of an argument for cracking down on stupid and endless expansion of special accommodations.
Hell, I've never asked for special treatment because of my ADHD, even when it was specifically offered (they even suggested my own office, an impossible miracle in the NHS at my level). I expect that my medication makes me competitive with my peers, including in academics, and I don't want handholding in the process. My problems can be solved for <$100 a month, were I paying for the meds myself. I am all for exams being a level playing field and and a test of competence within certain constraints. If someone is genuinely worse at their job because of a disability, that sucks, but there's only so much society can do, or that I think it should do.
Besides, I disagree with this whole line of reasoning. Too much congestion on the highway? Clearly we have an over production of cars, and we should stop mechanics from using wrenches or people from changing their motor oil. There are far better ways of solving the problems of elite overproduction, should it need solving.
ADHD is real, in the sense that it is a useful term for a problem that exists in a spectra. So does blood pressure. Treating both does real good even if there's no firm line in the sand between 5th and 6th percentile levels of conscientiousness, or between 140/90 and 141/90 average BP readings.
Aren't the stimulants used to treat it at least moderately effective in non-diagnosed individuals at improving concentration and attentiveness? I have at least heard anecdotes of college kids using those off-label for performance reasons (studying). I assume the accomodations (extra time on tests) are moderately too.
Do you have any thoughts on where we draw the moral line for "you get to use these, you over here don't"? To use an analogy, if we had drugs that made kids grow taller, I don't see a problem with at least making them available to, say, ones predicted to end up under 5 feet, but there would be a huge moral hazard of 6'5" kids whose parents claim they're still "short" because they really want them to play in the NBA. I don't have an answer here, either.
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