The weather has cooled off some, but I’m still somehow lacking motivation to do much. For this reason, I scrolled aimlessly through some journaling prompt books I have in my Kindle app. In one of them, one of the prompts that caught my eye was to recall a time when you spoke up for yourself.
I am usually not one to speak up for myself easily. Especially not when the person I’m needing to advocate to is an authority figure. The memory I’m going to describe involves my last psychologist at the psychiatric hospital.
She was somehow convinced that I have dependent personality disorder. There are good reasons to think so, but her reasons were not among those. To put it bluntly, she thought I misused care.
More importantly than her diagnosis of DPD though was her removing my autism diagnosis that I’d had for nine years. She believed that I could not possibly be autistic because I had a brain bleed as an infant and that instead my diagnosis should be some form of brain injury. She ended up putting hydrocephalus (which I’d developed as a result of the brain bleed) on axis III of the DSM-IV classification and that apparently should suffice in explaining my difficulties. That plus, of course, DPD. Well, it didn’t.
Like I said, I have trouble sticking up for myself. This is indeed a DPD criterion. Honestly I don’t even care whether I might have DPD actually. I can see how I have some traits. But DPD is different from care misuse. And that’s what my psychologist was accusing me of.
So I finally decided to stand up for my rights and demand an independent second opinion. This was extremely hard and my psychologist had been successfully trying to talk me out of it before. Not this time though. In February of 2017, I had an appointment with a clinical neuropsychologist at Radboud university medical center in Nijmegen. Three months later, on my would-be discharge date from the mental hospital, I got my autism diagnosis back.
Autism, of course, doesn’t explain everything I experience. I might have DPD too. And God knows what else. But I don’t misuse care.
My psychologist, interestingly, claimed that I spoke up for myself really well. That’s a rather contradictory statement to the DPD diagnosis. After all, dependents are often seen as passive. I still wonder why she didn’t have the balls to “diagnose” me as a malingerer.
Hey, sometimes you have to be your own patient advocate!
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Agree. Quite often, in fact.
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I am not good at speaking up for myself either but I will for my girls.
Good on you for standing up for your rights and getting a second opinion. Sometimes the professionals are wrong x
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Agree. I’m so glad you are able to advocate for your girls.
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You did a great job speaking up for yourself, and that indeed is quite contradictory to DPD, as much as I know about DPD, at least!
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Yes it is. My psychologist even used my lack of opposition to her as a reason to diagnose me with DPD, so I countered that if I fought hard enough against it, I’d prove her wrong by default.
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Weirdness! If this would happen to me, given that she used your lack of opposition as a criterion and then said you stood up for yourself really well, I’d feel like she was testing me or something, rather than actually diagnosing. 😀
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Well she was using this diagnosis as a grounds to kick me out of the hospital. At the time, there were huge budget cuts so maybe higher-ups told her to kick out some patients and she chose me because I was relatively young.
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Makes sense.
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I am not confident in speaking out sue to my autism and I hate confrontation. Well done for speaking out because it takes real guts X
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Thanks so much! I understand speaking out is hard.
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