When Someone Refuses a Diagnosis
If you’ve been diagnosed as autistic, I bet that you have a family member you think is more autistic than you are who insists that they aren’t autistic and they can’t see the traits that you think are SO obvious about their autism (which is very similar to your own). So what do you do?
My advice is to move toward talking about your own diagnosis and to let go of the need to get other people to accept the same diagnosis. Some people are never going to see autism in themselves. Other people need time to slowly accept the idea. I don’t know why it is, but I suspect that some people simply don’t find a diagnosis as useful as I do. In some ways, I think autism is often a barrier to diagnosis because autists don’t feel the same need for a connection, a community of other autists, that neurotypical people do. I also think that autism can prevent people from seeing themselves as autistic because they don’t think that being autistic is a deficit. For many years, I didn’t see my autistic traits as a deficit. I couldn’t see the value of social traits because of my autism.
When I talked to my mother about my autism diagnosis (I think both my mother and my father were/are autistic), I remember her saying, “Well, it sounds like autism is a good thing then, and it sounds like all my favorite people have autism.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. Indeed, all her favorite people (most of whom are her family members because she has never had much of a social circle) are autistic. And yes, those are the people she likes because she sees autistic traits as desirable: blunt honesty, lack of manipulation, inability to see social hierarchies, pattern seeking, a certain kind of technical intelligence, precise language, etc.
I’ve encountered a whole community of autists since I was diagnosed six years ago, but not all autists (diagnosed or not) have an interest in a community like that. Many autists have zero interest in the kind of self-reflection that I enjoy. They don’t care to see themselves from the outside, and they don’t see a value in identifying traits that they lack. And for that, I can only shrug and remind myself that if they don’t want a diagnosis, that is a perfectly valid way to live. They have already figured out how to live in the world with some balance of their own terms and the world’s terms.
If it comes to children who are struggling, however, it may be harder to bite your tongue. Still, going back to describing autistic symptoms without assuming that you know best is my best suggestion. I offer it to my autistic friends with the reminder that we tend to see things in black and white, as true and false. And perhaps a diagnosis need not be that way. After all, most people are only diagnosed if they see a problem, if they want to be diagnosed, or if someone else sees a problem in them. If we can make the world a place where difference is accepted more easily and more naturally, maybe there would be no need for any diagnoses at all?
