Hi! I’m 40m with:

• Major depressive disorder, recurrent, in partial remission
• Post-traumatic stress disorder, chronic
• Autistic disorder

The first one I’ve known about and fought, to varying degrees of success, throughout most of adulthood. Sometimes I’m fine; content, motivated, unmedicated, truckin’ along living my best life, and other times I need to ask for help. Luckily my depressive disorder manifests as a lack of executive function and disinterest in everything, so I haven’t had any struggles with self harm or ideation.

The last few years of therapy - I thought primarily only for depression - have made me realize just how much PTSD I had from growing up. I had an awful home life as a child with two parents in way over their head, way too young, and without any good healthy coping strategies of their own. I learned to survive by:

• be afraid of everything all the time
• never ask for help
• never indicate blame
• never suggest any failings in anyone other than self
• make everyone laugh as much as possible; if they think you’re funny, they are less likely to hurt you when they’re angry
• be aware of every movement and emotion people are feeling at all times, no matter what
• be afraid. don’t forget that part.
• oh, and it’s vitally important you never, ever let people know you’re afraid, because that makes them feel bad and they’ll react by justifying your fear

So when I found out I was a high functioning autistic - it finally made everything I was feeling and trying to do throughout my entire life snap into place. I must have known that at some level I had to work 10x harder than someone without my challenges to read people. It was critical that I read people correctly at all times, and any failure could end in disaster. I was exhausted all the time around other people, because I had to be at the absolute top of my game, all of the time, or else. I use italics there because the reality is that was only true for a very small subset of two people, but what you know cerebrally and what you know in your lizard brain are two very different things.

I’ll be untangling this mess for the foreseeable future, but I’m finally starting to extend myself grace and dabbling in some exposure therapy; simple things like “I’m sorry, this isn’t what I ordered” are now possible, albeit hard.

31, bipolar

I’m a retired science teacher and union president. I’ve had a history of depression. I like science fiction.

Thanks for making this post! I (30NB) was diagnosed with cPSTD a little over a year ago and just this week my therapist is referring me for ASD screening. I find Discord utterly overwhelming and I like the reddit/lemmy kind of forum stuff over twitter/mastodon.

I’m looking forward to lemmy making progress! I’m a SWE and I wish I could contribute but I’m focusing on EMDR and general trauma processing right now 😕

16, almost 17, professionally diagnosed as Autistic!!!

Hi! My neurodivergence is ADHD. The same goes for my wife and two kids. We participated in a little study at one point looking at children of ADHD parents.

I’m Chris.

This sounds bizarre but I think I was diagnosed when I was a child (I remember lots of tests and conversations with professionals before being removed from mainstream education) but put it down to being a bit messed up about my toxic parents overwrought divorce. I had parents that would hide things so I wasn’t told the truth about a lot of things.

I’ve always known my brain works differently to others and on occasions its made me a target.

It was during the pandemic that it all came to a head. I felt an immense relief not working in the office, where it felt like a sensory overload of noises, smells and touch. I started reading online and finally took an online RAAD-R test but got some friends to also take it.

One scored 17, the other 65 but he said he had issues with the questions whereas mine was 189 and I was making an effort to temper my answers!

So I’m currently self diagnosed but its pretty obvious and when I get my full medical records, I’ll find out what happened when I was a kid.

Hello, everyone! I’m 26 years old, living in New England and was diagnosed with Asperger’s Disorder at a young age. I strongly suspect inattentive ADHD as well. I really wonder about getting re-diagnosed to see whether I’d be placed in the autism bucket or stuck with PPD-NOS. In any case, I consider myself autistic. I enjoy reading, history, pretentious video games, TTRPGs (especially Mythras) and BattleTech.

Parent of a kindergarten aged kid on the spectrum here. Undiagnosed myself, but there are lots of parallels between what my kid is going through and what I experienced as a child, so I have a strong suspicion that I’m likely neurodivergent as well. I intend to mostly follow the community for the sake of my kid to ensure that as a parent I’m doing the best possible to allow them to thrive.

Hi y’all, I’m socialgaff, or Liam. I’m pretty likely AuDHD, diagnosed and medicated for the ADHD side of things (if anyone has questions about what Stratera is like, I’m not a doctor but I’ve been on it for about a decade now). Self-diagnosed dyslexic and dyscalculic. Glad to have another community to talk brain stuff with!!

Hello! I’m Cave. I have ADHD, and I’ve been on Stratera for 2 years now. I’m also rather bad with social graces, but its likely just the adhd.

I’m Demondice, but I’m nowhere near as demonic as the name might suggest. 40 years old, and just going through the diagnostic process now as I’m very likely autistic. It’s a bit of an anxiety-inducing time as I worry that I’m just imagining the symptoms and I’m wasting everyone’s time. However, pretty much everyone I speak to tells me that I’m one of the most obviously autistic people they’ve ever met and find the concept of me doubting it hilarious.

I’m 31M with Dyspraxia/ASD. Diagnosed since I was very young, grew up with quite severe developmental delays and hypersensitivity etc. Nowadays I mostly get along fine.

I’ll certainly follow this community but I must admit, perhaps controversially, that I’m not fond of the term “neurodiverse”. I’m not just diverse, I have a disability. And if it were possible to cure it, I would.

I’ll jump in as well. Parent to a 10 yo boy that has ADHD. He’s a great kid and while he struggles with reading, we always receive praise from his teachers for his attitude and treatment of others. We’re struggling with medication right now as his previous medication, methylphenidate delay-release, wasn’t working as well as it did in the past. We switched to Vivance and while it has worked well for him during the day, it seems to have really increased his mood swings in the evening. He’ll get periods of…I dunno… depression? Saying things you don’t want to hear your child say (he’s worthless, not good at anything, no friends, etc, when its not true - he has friends and he’s great at drawing and baseball). Anyway, that’s my intro. Hoping this community takes off.

I’m dyslexic (self diagnosed until I save up for a diagnosis) and aphant (no images in my mind except when dreaming).

I like Euro Truck Simulator 2, chess, and travelling 🌍