Depression = Autism

It has been nearly two years since I found out that I was Autistic. In that time, I’ve gone through many emotions: disbelief, anger, avoidance, contemplation, remembrance and finally, acceptance. I’ve listened to what other people have thought about my disorder. I’ve buried my head in the sand for almost a year trying to convince myself that I was not, in fact, autistic. I’ve mentally gone back over the parts of my life that I can remember, from childhood up until now. I’ve accepted what I was never going to be able to change. I’ve developed a new level of comfort with myself. And I’ve read and read and read…as much as I could about autism and more specifically, being on the spectrum.

Discovering that I was autistic, learning what autism was and deciding how my diagnosis would affect my life was, well, life changing. It also helped explain who I really was and why parts of my life had developed the way they did.

My first experience with “psychological assistance” was in middle school. My mother noticed that I was not happy anymore. She noticed that I was not showering or washing my clothes. She noticed that friends that I once spent time with were no longer coming around. She noticed that what usually soothed me – my dog and my books – was doing so no longer. She contacted the school guidance counselor and I visited him three times a week, to talk about my “feelings.” He was a nice man and he tried very hard to help me. He told my mother I was suffering from depression and I needed more help than he could professionally give.

I began seeing a psychiatrist regularly. I don’t remember her name, I only remember that she was a very tall woman and I spoke very little in our sessions. After a year, I told my parents that I didn’t want to go anymore. They didn’t push me and agreed that I could stop my sessions. I was pleased to no longer make the thirty-minute drive into the city, where I would sit and not talk, but that didn’t mean I was no longer depressed.

The older I got the worse the depression got. I also developed crippling anxiety, OCD and severe separation anxiety. I knew something was wrong with me, but I continued to deny it, choosing instead to make negative social, educational and all around life decisions. I wanted to be clear-headed and happy and start making positive decisions…I just didn’t know how. What seemed to come easily to other young women my age completely confused me.

I made the decision to return to therapy because life had become impossible. This time I didn’t resist using medication to deal with my mental illnesses. I tried several different medications before I found a cocktail that worked for me. With tweaks every few years, this medication plan helped with my depression, anxiety, OCD, the whole lot. Life was tolerable and I was able to deal with most of it. But the feeling that I was drifting, separate, not in step somehow.

After years of living as one of the “mentally ill,” one of my therapists explained that while I truly was depressed and anxious, that she believed that my mental illness was a symptom of something different. That something was autism. She told me that people with autism can suffer from a wide variety of mental illnesses as a result of the autism itself.

While genetics and heredity play a large part in whether or not you develop mental illness, sometimes they can be the result of another disorder. In my case, undiagnosed Autism may very well have had a hand in causing my depression and anxiety. And OCD seems to go hand in hand with all levels of autism.

Now, I have family history of mental illness, so I know that I do in fact suffer from it. Learning that I was on the autism spectrum explained that my feelings of being separate and drifting and not being in step with my peers were symptoms of Autism, which in turn intensified my mental illness.

My disorders were connected. This knowledge gave me a new perspective through which to view my life. It also gave me an awareness of who I could be if I took the time to understand the unique opportunity I had been given.

Knowing that my mental illness could be a symptom of a disorder I only recently learned I had didn’t mean that the depression, anxiety, OCD or separation anxiety would magically go away. It did, however, give me new tools with which to fight. Traits I thought made me useless and different in a bad way, when viewed through an autistic lens, now made me creative, brave, more independent than I thought I was. Those tools gave me the courage to share my writing.

For me, mental illness will now forever be linked with my Autism. It will also forever give me a reason to share parts of myself that I never had the courage to share before. It doesn’t make them any less painful to live with, but it does give me the closest thing to an explanation as to why I am a mentally ill Autistic . And I can live with that