Hi @sjpersonal,

Welcome to the forums. I'm afraid I don't have any magic solution for you, but I can certainly relate to your predicament. I am a 40-year old woman with ASD. Although I have been in the mental health system and with one therapist or another since I was 19, no-one picked up the minor little detail of autism. All of my issues were seen only through the lens of my primary psychiatric diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. I finally figured out for myself that I had ASD when I was 36 years old and I then paid to get formally assessed at an autism specialist clinic.

I have had one awful experience after another, trying to get support. Last week I saw my eleventh therapist in eighteen months. It did not go well, to say the least!!!

I have pretty much given up hope of finding anyone who genuinely gets both the ASD and the mental health stuff. My uni counsellor was awesome with it, and so was a psychologist that she found for me (but who then closed her practice a few months after I started seeing her). I simply haven't been able to find anyone else who gets it.

I was on the waiting list for a private psychiatrist for 18 months. When an appointment finally came up, my GP sent her information about my situation. The psychiatrist then called my GP and said she would not see me because I was "too complex."

So...as I said, I don't have any answers for you, I can only tell you that you are not alone in facing this predicament. It seems to me that most mental health professionals know very little about ASD and those who are very interested in it, then tend to work exclusively with ASD clients and thus don't have a strong understanding of complex mental health issues. Thus those of us who have both ASD and a complex mental health issue kind-of live in a gap.

I hope you are at least able to feel supported here in Forum Land @sjpersonal.