meltdown time

Tags

asperger's, crowds, meltdown, noise, sensory overload, sound

Heading to the mall with a Christmas shopping list isn’t a fun-filled, exciting time for all kids.

Loud talking, perfumed candles and lots of shoppers can be a nightmare for children with autism.

"There’s too many people. It’s too crowded. It’s too loud. It’s an unfamiliar environment. It’s too hot," (from The Standard via Mike Keller)

around 2005 i started to suspect that i have adhd. i was diagnosed with adult adhd in 2009. i was immediately put on adhd medication. then suddenly a bunch of symptoms and behaviors, which my wife and i had identified as asperger’s’ in regards to her (she was diagnosed 2010) popped up. who’d have thunk, right?

sensory overload.

i hate crowds. i hate malls and shopping districts – especially on a saturday in stockholm. i simply cannot do buses and trains during rush hour. concerts and huge parties, no way. it fills me with such rage and panic that i just have to GET OUT OF THERE – or remove the people with a Kalashnikov.

meltdown.

i thought this was all part of my adhd.

now i know differently.

so now i am waiting for a time for an appointment with a psychologist, to be tested for asperger’s.

 

don’t ask, don’t tell 2

Tags

difference, don't ask don't tell, neurodifferent, neurotypical, shame, silence

you are not your diagnose!

no. i am not.  my diagnose is part of me. it is part of what makes me uniquely me. for better and for worse. one way or the other it is going to show when i express myself. some of it will be ‘strange’ and ‘weird’. fifty, seventy, hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago people with ‘strange’ and ‘weird’ traits in their personalities were incarcerated as criminals, unrepentant vagrants, or locked away in sanatoriums, insane asylums, mental hospitals or institutions for the mentally challenged. drugged to complacency, beyond recognition, incapacitated and chemically restrained so as to not disturb the good taste of the neurotypicals. as late as the 1970s children with adhd were routinely labeled ‘abnormally aggressive’ and ‘asocial’ and were institutionalized as ‘social deviants’, in Scandinavia. and what was done to the aspies were even worse.

these days there are accepted diagnoses/medical labels for the ‘strange’ and ‘weird’ of my kind. – adhd and asperger’s -but people still believe i am mentally deranged, mentally challenged and an anti-social half-criminal. so i still have to explain to people why i am ‘strange’ and ‘weird’. so i talk about my diagnose, i make pictures that relate to my diagnose and share about adhd and asperger’s. that does not mean i think i am my diagnose or that this is all that ever moves through my mind. it means that it moves there right now.

example: a few months after i had been diagnosed i saw a t-shirt with this image on it:

i loved it. i wanted one of those t-shirts – because above all i am PROUD of being an addie.

so when i saw the image there to the left on-line, i made an avatar and uploaded it to Facebook. and was yelled at, by a ‘friend’ because i was ‘wearing’ my diagnose. uhu. yes. that was BAD. should not have done that. bad, bad addie. someone might get upset and say bad things to me, and then it would all be my own fault, because i had my diagnose ‘up there as an avatar’.

uhu. (“if the Jews stopped being Jews, no one would harass them”.)

other entries on this topic: don’t ask, don’t tell