labels help you find your people, and help you find the right professional for your experience

[belenen]

icon: "ADD-PI (two electromicroscope photos of crystallized acetylcholine, overlaid & warped in several ways)"Neuro-divergent and mental health labels serve two purposes: helping you find your people, and helping you find the right professional to aid you in building coping skills and/or healing from trauma and/or prescribing you medication

Comments

[rotating]

Yes yes yes yes. This is very dear to my heart. I got diagnosed with ADHD in 2021 after years of torture and self-hatred re: ADHD-like behaviors. Yet neither I nor anyone else suspected I might have it because I'm not "hyper" and I was outwardly successful in life, on balance (as a result of kicking furiously underwater and hiding my problems). It was only when I read a post on tumblr about ADHD in women (and then the book this post drew from) that it dawned on me that I absolutely have this, and I'm not a fundamentally lazy bad person - I have an unaddressed issue that can be treated. To say that this discovery was "empowering" feels trite: it literally turned every part of my life around.

I am extremely fortunate that I was able to parlay my self-labeling into a formal diagnosis by a psychiatrist. I credit the fact that I am calm in affect, articulate, highly educated, employed in an "impressive" field, and hyper-aware of how my words can be interpreted after years of lawyering experience. This is not to boast - I find it completely disgusting that without any one of those factors I would likely not have successfully navigated the mental-health-professional labyrinth. And I absolutely would not have been able to do so without the community of largely self-diagnosed ADHDers who launched me on this path and are a source of so much learning and comfort.