paradoxical
firemonkey
Citizen
Spent ages trying to open a tin of curry sauce to have curried eggs and rice. Oldest granddaughter had to come round and do it for me. A small thing in itself, but a pointer to deeper and wider things. Not something a standard interaction with a pdoc/other MH professional is geared to pick up on.An automatic assumption of global competence can be far from helpful.
Leads to addle brained and unhelpful accusations of contrariness/laziness/passive aggressiveness etc. You're more likely to be labelled with a PD than get the help and support you need and deserve.
Comments
Yes, it's a general problem of spiky ability profiles. For some reason, people have hard time even acknowledging it.
The person who's noticed far more than anyone else is my stepdaughter. She works as a branch manager for a care and nursing service.
This is her experience.
Thank goodness for your stepdaughter firemonkey. I have followed your posts in the past praising her knowledge and assistance. Hope you enjoyed the curried eggs!
The curried eggs were OK, but really needed a better curry sauce. Will opt for a jar of curry sauce next time.
That sounds like a plan! I use curry powder, but that does involve a little more culinary investment in the preparation. I have a special rubber circular grip that a friend bought me to open stubborn jars, it works like magic. I have diminished strength in both wrists due to past fractures and this grip does all the work for me.
As males go I've never had that strong a grip.Nowadays I can find it quite hard to open jars. Sometimes running the jar under hot water helps.
Yes it does!
You should probably purchase that “opener” that Teach referred to.
This is my preferred stubborn jar opening method
Yes!! I do that too!
Oddly enough I had a similar issue with a screw-top glass jar of curry sauce earlier in the year, as I had had a major seizure and my muscles were aching too much and my nerves were mega raw so that it was agony touching stuff ~ so getting leverage on the screw top lid just did not happen, nor incidently did the boil-in-the bag fish, frozen spinach, instant mash and curry sauce combination I was attempting to go for.
I just went for ready packaged fine ground porridge oats in almond milk with butter, cinnamon and black pepper instead.
The thing I find amazing (in that well and truly baffled lost in a maze kind of a way) is the firmly held misnomer shared by some psychologists and psychiatrists that the body is somehow a separate state of affairs from that of the mind.
One of the most astounding instances of this was when one therapist insisted that the reason I had not shown any improvement over the previous course of treatment at that mental health unit, was that I was not applying myself regularly enough and a three session a week treatment programme was therefore the answer.
I stated that this was fundamentally impossible given the nature of my there reported and elsewhere medically recoded symptoms ~ i.e., stress induced seizures and a highly restrictive dependence upon a set routine ~ but was refuted and disputed on every single reference to which.
So I got in contact with my General Practitioner (GP) who got in contact with the psychologist, but despite everything stated to the contrary ~ the psychologist maintained their position that I was a demanding patient intent on resisting treatment, and until I applied myself I would make no progress.
In my case I have a perfectly well diagnosed Personality Disorder ~ i.e., Schizotypal Personality Disorder (STPD), which unfortunately masked most of my traits in terms of having Asperger's Syndrome ~ aside from not being able to be convinced of having a distorted awareness of reality, given that my sense of reality is an Aspergenically pragmatic one ~ which has proven a bit too complex and divergent for most people with a neurotypical awareness to comprehend, bless them.
Anyway, after about four and half decades of having problems with health care professionals imagining I was being inappropriately wilful, purposefully resistant to treatments and a vexatious complainer; In 2018 I paid £150 for an Occupational Therapist (OT) to do a "Lee-go~Medi-co Report"(LMR) which is a medical report written in legal terms so that a judge will not have to rely on a doctor to make sense of it in court, and so that any healthcare professional or service provider is legally informed about the particularities and requirements of one's condition/s ~ or else if ignored they can face the administrative or legal consequences of trying to make-out otherwise.
It has been very impressive thus far how helpful people have suddenly become once complaints have been made to the administrative level of the NHS etcetera, as domineering attitudes have soon become facilitating aptitudes with civility and decorum aplenty.
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I know this is for a tin, but following Amity's video another, method is to turn it upside down an hit against a surface, it be should easier to open after that.
Alternatively you can throw the jar against the wall, which works great for pasta sauce.
Does anyone has preference for tin openers? I prefer openers that cut round the side not the top. Amity prefers the top cutting openers. We have different openers... Though I have used the wrong one to open the round the sides, which is not recommended but possible. I noticed she has gone through a few of them
Lol, yes, top tin openers tend to have a shorter life span when, erm ...someone uses them like a side tin opener
My current mental health team are good in what they haven't done(i.e treat me like I'm awkward,troublesome and demanding) compared to the mental health team in Essex. I got the Asperger's dx within 8 months of my moving here. The MH pros in Essex had constantly turned a deaf ear to the possibility of more going on than mental illness.
There is no psychological help for people on the spectrum in my area other than chemical control, or going private as I have been advised to do by the NHS types.
Fortunately my primary GP is very competent in respect of caring for people with psychological problems, and my secondary GP has a child on the spectrum so everything goes very smoothly with either one of them.
After having failed twice before to get assessed for Asperger's Syndrome in 2007 and 2012 with two different psychologists ~ I tried again but this time with my GP in the latter part of 2013 , who said, "Of course! Why didn't we spot it before! We will get you referred at the earliest opportunity!"
I got mine in 19 months which I really needed time-wise to settle down and prepare myself, as I had the most major breakdown of my life in mid 2012, and in early 2013 due to the malpractice of the psychologist I had to discharge my myself from the mental health service on physical and mental health grounds.
After going through the AQ50 checklist with the first psychologist in 2007 ~ they just rolled their eyes in that bored as hell 'Oh for the love of life not another one!' way, and in 2012 after I had gone through my symptoms and traits with the second psychologist, they said, "Well that is all very interesting but we have work to do!"
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Back in 2008 my then care-coordinator arranged an extra appointment with a pdoc to discuss things. It was a total disaster. The pdoc asked a couple of totally irrelevant questions, and then very abruptly and very huffily shut the conversation down.
I mentioned autism a number of times after that between 2008-2017 to be ignored. I've heard that it's not unusual for those later dxed as being on the spectrum to have been treated in a hostile manner by mental health services.
One of the more common reasons for the hostility is firstly that many people bring up autism whilst being treated for something else, such as anxiety or depression etcetera, and the therapist is only trained or contracted to deal with one treatment methodology alone, and strictly nothing else. If private therapy is affordable clients can go for as many treatments or assessments as is reasonable, or as many as they like if the doctor likes their money.
Then secondly if patients do not complete their treatment plan ~ the therapist's chance of getting a pay rise and meeting financial commitments is put at risk, as is their professional reputation and future employment status. So deviations from the treatment plan are not appreciated, nor are likelihoods of the treatment plan failing. Hence some patients end up getting made to seem disreputable in order to make the treatment, the therapy centre and or the therapist seem reputable.
Due also to the fact that the NHS has been seriously underfunded for years, mental health professionals like others tend to work with more severely affected patients rather than being able to treat them before they become severe in their presentations. So in working with patients that are severely upset and or angry, doctors can by degree become temperamentally normalised as such themselves, along with dissociation of cognitive and emotional empathy becoming part of the problem also.
Another problem is the authoritarian "Doctor~say~patient~do!" approach to therapy ~ in that when patients focus on other considerations not introduced by the doctor, this can somewhat grind on the doctor's sense of authority, unless the doctor happens to agree with their patient. Unfortunately though, the most generally recognised traits of being autistic are still the more obvious or blatant ones, so all the social camouflaging and personal masking we learn as we mature ~ this really makes it difficult for doctors to recognise autism as such, and really easy for them to erroneously dismiss it too.
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I never mentioned autism during my short spells seeing two therapists. The reasons they were short? Both did the 'If you want to be a good person..' routine as if they were Christian missionaries out to convert a heathen savage . There was a lot of moralising and no attempt to actually help me cope better with stressful situations .
Where I am MH professionals can definitely be very dismissive and don't seem to be eager to work with patients, especially autistic patients. They seem to get frustrated easily and are eager to label me as attention seeking, as I wont allow them to just tell me to do things with absolutely zero input from me. I haven't received a solid diagnosis yet due to them not listening to me and being very dismissive of my overall issues.
An example: When I got assessed last and was diagnosed with GAD, the lady I was referred to for therapy (who didn't specialize in autism/developmental disorders and I was essentially going to just for my anxiety) told me I didn't "seem autistic" after 5 minutes of talking with her, and that she didn't think I would be given a diagnosis later on so I shouldn't bother with it (for context, I was told by the assessor that if I didn't improve socially after months of therapy I would probably be diagnosed).
In the same or the next visit I had with her she repeatedly insisted I be unenrolled in online school and go to a regular high school, because it would "help my anxiety" (which I have now realized was due to transitioning from middle school to high school and having absolutely no assistance doing so, that I wasn't going to be given if I went back anyways). This was despite the fact I started online schooling due to health problems that prevented me from regularly attending school since I was a small child, and thus had caused truancy issues and me to be vastly behind my peers. She told me it was not her concern that I would probably fail because she was focusing on my anxiety and not my grades.
That was still the most "helpful" experience with a MH professional I've had so far.
This is terrible and highly unethical. But I've had one of them pushing political propaganda on me when I was young, so I get it.
I've had this happening too, I think treating the patient with any kind of hostility or making them feel like an enemy or someone whose will needs to be broken is just going to inflict a lot more damage on them.
My experiences were of such nature that I cannot even understand how people can actually open up and allow themselves to be vulnerable in front of their therapists.