When I was younger and researching the autism diagnosis criteria and symptoms, I thought “oh I couldn’t POSSIBLY be autistic.” Because when I read “takes everything literally” I thought it literally meant EVERYTHING and I was like “I don’t take EVERYTHING literally, just most things!” And I just realized the other day that it didn’t actually mean EVERYTHING and that was an overstatement.
#these tests always do shit like this#and its just like why would you phrase it like this when its specifically a symptom to misinterpret this (via @tbhliteraltrash )
ok hold on actually i rb'd this before with just tags but im going to come back in on this again
any medical diagnostic you will ever undergo does not mean "always 100% Every Time Ever you have this problem". And it sucks because they will phrase it in a way that SOUNDS like 100% Every Time including on the testing for being a person who has trouble with how specific phrasing is supposed to be.
literally the example I always use is I spent way longer without glasses then I should have because the eyesight chart diagnostic is "identify the letter", so I went 'ok the point of this is to do good identifying letters'. Then i realized
they want to know if I can see. Not if I can identify that a blurry shape is an A because of its unique outline.
So i started qualifying my answers with "blurry". Blurry A, Blurry Y, Blurry Z. Now I have glasses.
they do not make this clear. I do not know why. But you can more or less apply this to any medical diagnostic, and if it's a written diagnostic if your answer is 'sometimes' and the only answers are 'yes or no' you put Yes.
Do I have trouble getting out of bed? Sometimes, yes. So the answer is Yes.
Regrettably tests are made for and by non-autistic people and aimed at non-autistic caregivers and medical experts, which isnt how it should be, and makes it one more complicated thing to navigate. World a hell.
Similarly, if the answer is, "No, because I have a strategy," the answer is really yes. If the question is, "Do you have trouble being on time?" and your thought process is, "Not any more since I started setting four different alarms and putting everything in my planner as starting a half-hour earlier than it really is." the answer is yes, because you've had to use unusually complicated techniques to address the trouble that you have. Having figured out away to outsmart the problem means that the problem was there to begin with.
Having a system for a seemingly effortless-to-neurotypical-people task is a symptom until proven otherwise.
