It made it easier for my shitty abusive ex to get custody of my son. And then his shitty parents. For a decade of court battles because having an autoimmune disease means you can’t take care of your kid. To which I say fuck family court, fuck the American judicial system in general and fuck the state I was dealing with court in.

MS can also go fuck itself.

Getting diagnosed with ADHD allowed me to make sense of how my brain works. Spent years going down the antidepressant route only to discover that Adderall works way better for me than any SSRI.

It created a permanent record in my hospital file and since then every single fucking lazy specialist points at that as the source of all my health issues.

Nevermind that the psychologist I spoke with regularly for several years determined that I didn’t actually have depression or needed treatment.

Instead I used our sessions to create resilience in my life and learnt a few things about myself.

I went through a lot of mental health stuff for around a year. I still to this day wish I had a diagnosis to feel more “legitimate” and connected to why I am the way I am…as well as finding people to relate. I’m for sure doing much better now, but it did and still does always frustrate me to never get a true diagnosis of anything.

A lot of mental health providers I’ve seen are not overly keen on diagnoses because they feel that they are too limiting, as many people don’t fit in discrete boxes. It’s totally fair and I get it, but I just wish I had an answer to help validate me and look towards others in a similar boat as well as treatment research. Instead they seem to just put generic diagnoses like “depression” and “GAD” for billing purposes, but I don’t seem to relate to these.

Nothing really, ASD part was slightly surprising, but ADHD was already known since childhood.

My wallet was more effected than me, especially from the completely useless locally available ADHD meds.

The accompanying talk therapy was kinda pointless as well, like i didn’t get the point of it. I already analyze my behavioral and thought patterns myself from a bystanders perspective, therapist was doing the same just with much more limited information die to limited timeframe.

To me, ADHD diagnosis helped me to start making sense about the way I do things, and the reason for it. Accepting it is still quite a work, though at least now I understand it, and can make at least some movement.

It’s been kind of a mixed bag because it’s taken a long time to get to the current diagnosis and it’s not necessarily done. Bipolar, Borderline Personality Disorder, ADHD, and Major Depressive Disorder all sort of look like each other and I have been diagnosed with a few of them by different providers. I’ll get one and some medication to go with it and spend a few years ruling it out.

Some of the meds I’ve tried have been rough and others haven’t put a dent in symptoms. I’ve been at it trying to find the right diagnosis and meds for about ten years and at this point I keep trying because I have to know definitively.

Every provider I’ve tried has been hesitant to go with Borderline because of the huge stigma it can have on your chart. According to one doctor she thought that might be the right call but didn’t want to put it on my chart because it would change how every doctor would treat me for the rest of my life, even my gp because it’s a common misconception in the medical field that people with that disorder are pathological liars.

I just got diagnosed with cPTSD and it helped so much. I had suspected it but had so far only been diagnosed with severe depression. I had so many years of treatment for depression that never fully helped, so I’m hopeful that being treated properly will make my life better.

The socialised health care paradise I live in has accepted my psychiatric diagnoses as part of the reason why I am unable to work. I cannot express how grateful I am for that (and how scared I am looking at how the system is slowly starting to be eroded from the edges).

But also, knowing that there is something in my brain that prevents me from being like others has helped with the negative self-talk. Hasn’t stopped it, of course, because my brain is still my brain and will absolutely doubt a diagnosis if it means I can blame myself instead. But in general, I have a better understanding of what is happening and why I do things. That’s nice.

It would add to legitimizing myself, suffering and needs but on the other hand nothing can magically fix being different and the people outside don’t care.