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.
Also, if you’re filling out Disability paperwork, you’re supposed to answer it for your worst days, and without accommodations.