I’m asking because I’m suspicious I might have autism but I cannot access a psychiatrist.

If I do self diagnose and no matter how much evidence I find that I have autism at the end of the day I don’t know that for a fact.

So if I go around claiming I’m autistic when I don’t even know for a fact I am, it feels extremely disrespectful to people with autism right?

It’ll be even worse if I do get access to a psychiatrist and they tell me no I’m not and I’m just weird or something.

EDIT: I don’t want to reply to everyone one by one but I do wanna say thank you for everyone’s kind and helpful answers. I appreciate it.

  • AceFuzzLord@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    On a personal level, I don’t trust personal diagnoses for things like autism because, from my understanding, it could be something similar to ADHD or something else that might be confused for autism that’s causing any issues you might have.

    I would personally at least let people you tell this to, if you go through with using a self-diagnosis, that it’s not confirmed so they don’t get confused or whatever else they may feel if you ever somehow get diagnosed in the future.

    Can’t speak for everyone, but I’d be a little annoyed if someone kept confidently claiming it’s gotta be autism and then they get diagnosed and it turns out to be something else. Not annoyed enough to wanna do anything, but more annoyed about the confidence about a self-diagnosis.