Meet The Doctor Who Diagnosed Me
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- Опубліковано 6 лют 2025
- To celebrate Autism Awareness Week, Ben chats with Renata Fialho, the Clinical Psychologist & Researcher who diagnosed him with Autism & ADHD.
If you're wondering how autism is diagnosed - Ben Branson shares his autism diagnosis story as they delve into the private autism diagnosis process, the inner workings on the NHS and why neurodivergent women are frequently misdiagnosed with depression.
Renata also bravely shares how she tragically lost a neurodivergent patient in crisis, delving into the emotional impact and the need for mental health support.
#autism #adhd
On THE HIDDEN 20% - a Dyscalculia, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, Tourette's, ADHD and Autism Podcast - host Ben Branson chats with neurodivergent creatives, entrepreneurs, and experts to see how great minds... think differently.
Host: Ben Branson
Producer: Bella Neale
Video Editor: James Scriven
Social Media Manager: Charlie Young
Music: Jackson Greenberg
Brought to you by charity THE HIDDEN 20% 1203348
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![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #60 РОЖДЕНИЕ ЛОЛОЛОШКИ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YoR0pAV9FVQ/mqdefault.jpg)
Another great interview.
As a person who wasn’t diagnosed until 60, it’s not cool. It’s a relief to know I am not a reject, failure, dysfunctional, scatterbrain, useless, waste of space. I am thankful for my diagnosis and as I learn and heal from decades of trauma I can appreciate my difference and give grace to myself and others.
I like her. It's refreshing to see how excited she is about the whole thing. Inflammation is indeed an important topic to be aware of. That's why so many of us have gut issues.
I agree with this I had severe IBS for months when I was 14 and no dr had good advice but the pain was so bad I took matters into my own hands and found a diet that works for me
How does this only have 300likes????? What?? these are the kind of talks I want to see more of..
Autism is cool to a small subset of the population in my experience.
I feel less unique since my autism diagnosis. Because now I have found all these people online who are more like me.
I relate to that. Finding out most of my personality traits are in fact... autistic traits.
Yeah. But also, when I meet other neurodivergent people, in my experience there is an incredible variety there. With all their traits (neurodivergent and other traits). The neurodivergent traits express themselves in a variety of ways. For example, I have problems with sustained attention, for less interesting tasks, like other people with ADHD. But when I don’t need to pay a lot of attention, then I can switch to “drone mode” and just drone through it. For example for dish washing. Other ADHD people may not have this. (I believe my “drone mode” is due to my particular combination of ADHD with autism, and certain aspects of my upbringing and my personality.)
Honestly just try remember you are still unqiue, every persons experience is unqiue to them. There will never be an exact copy of you born, so you are still a very special person to walk this earth even if the lists can make us feel very generalized.
It kinda feels related to how anxiety and depression is being over diagnosed like they said (cause I can fully agree) You will always be the most aware of your own journey, and it's very easy for the outside to see things only surface level.
Thank you both so much. I wished I'd found you 10 months ago when I got diagnosed at 51! What an incredible offer than you Renata. So incredibly generous! X
anyone else notice the second green light pop up in the background about half way through? then it turns off, and then it turns back on again!
I wish I was properly diagnosed. I use veterans administration (VA) health. After waiting 4 months for an appointment, the Dr. agreed with my self diagnosis after asking me some questions out of the DSM. He said the VA doesn't have any autism specialist and the most the can do is treat the symptoms like anxiety. I feel as though I'm headed down the wrong path. The VA deals more with war injuries, addiction, and mental health issues.
What an amazing interview! I really loved to hear the perspective of a diagnostic medical professional. And how kind she is. Cause when I went in for my ... basically re-diagnosis as adult, the psychiatrist wasn't this comfy. And the process was fairly swift. Cause I had a childhood diagnosis that went completely under and got lost, thus turns out my family doc didn't have that document and thus literally buried his face in his hands with a sight and muttered "I'm so sorry. I'm not blaming your mother. The system failed you!" to me, after I gave it to him.
That was when was requesting that I'd like to have an adult ADHD "re-evaluation" and: "I have this. I went to some specialized psychiatric clinic as kid, due to school problems and then nothing happened and it was forgotten, cause they only recommended meds n mom was scared of these meds" (back then meds were also still significantly higher dosed and everything was super stigmatised and rather poorly understood and communicated). Basically noone explained to her what it means and how to proceed. She just showed it the school, who were the ones rasing questions due to my smartness but poor performance in certain aspects of subjects and "daydreaming" :'D And the whole bias with girls and ADHD wasn't helping. And we had switched family doctor, too (the other one had passed away suddenly).
Wild times. I'm glad books & the internet saved me again and again throughout my life, really. I raised and saved myself with the help of this "library" and it's countless "librarians" :'D
I was diagnosed almost two weeks ago and ever since just that my body and mind has so much tension to release! And exhaustion
I found this enlightening and reassuring. And Renata seems very competent while being very human, approachable and sweet. I wished my ADHD diagnosis was happening within the next months, so that I could consult with her afterwards. Realistically, it is probably another 6 to 12 months for me (after having waited for nearly 3 years already). (My autism diagnosis will probably happen even later, if ever. After waiting for nearly 2 years now.) Oh well.
This is a cool podcast- curious about the numbers in UK school aged populations and the supports available to neurodivergent learners.
The scale from mild - severe has been critical, speaking as special education teacher in the US who utilizes multiple strategies (research based) to successfully teach students with moderate - severe ASD, ADD, ADHD+, significant ACES scores. Wow-self diagnosis for adults maybe I can see that for mild cases but pretty slippery slope with regard to school system and matching learners to appropriate equitable supports.
Thank you so much for this video!!!!! 🥹🙌🏻👏🏻☮️
hooked right from the intro, thanks for what youre doing
cried at 34:00 too. Please make her come back!!!!
Very interesting, thank you!
Thanks for this interview. Very interesting, and comforting to hear things framed that way by a clinician.
I'm waiting to be assessed (NHS waiting list for now) and have been a bit puzzled working this out in my 40s. It would explain everything.
I have a diagnosis of M.S. and so asked my neurologist if he could spot autism on a scan (wondering if he would have told me had he noticed anything!). He took the time to explain by comparing the brain to a car and said that with his MRI scans it's like looking at a car in the garage, but for autism one would need to take the car to drive on the road to observe how it works.
You're saying there are structural differences?
Yes, there are structural differences. For example, there is the default mode network, that is the network of brain cells that are active when we let our mind wander and do nothing specific. And it tends to be larger in people with ADHD. And certain areas of the frontal lobes and other parts of the brain develop more slowly in people with ADHD.
The problem is, generally speaking, brains come in slightly different sizes and shapes anyway. So, to find out if there are differences between brains of people with ADHD on one side and brains of people without ADHD on the other side, studies have looked at large numbers of people with and without ADHD and compared the sizes of parts of their brains, and found clear differences, on average. But, looking at a single brain, it is still somewhat difficult to say: this part should be larger. Because we don’t know exactly how large any brain region would have been in this specific person if they didn’t have ADHD.
That being said, it seems people are beginning to find ways to recognize structural differences in single brains. They are refining their methods. But this needs to become highly reliable. And I am not sure how reliable these methods are today.
Russell Barkley (a prominent ADHD clinician) has a youtube channel where he also talked about this.
Ben and Alex from ADHD Chatter should interview each other - they could take turns, one for half the show then the other for the other half.
This channel is great. After 5 years of ignoring my diagnosis I started working on myself 2 years ago and now I understand way more and I'm starting to feel better. Just a random thought since I'm in the middle of it myself, maybe this can help someone else. I think group therapy is great, it was incredibly scary at first but talking to 6 other people while learning more about autism really helped me.
What an absolutely fabulous conversation. Refreshing, compassionate, and inspiring. Well done you two, and thank you so so much.
This is the first time I have heard inflammation connected to neurodivergence. I was diagnosed with chronic inflammation and connected syndromes but always thought the inflammation was due to Hypermobile spectrum disorder. My ADHD diagnosis came later (this February, & I’m 60).
I subscribed to the newsletter but never heard back from them about the post-diagnosis support mentioned in the video… anyone?
We’ll send out another email about this soon 🙌
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I don't think it's cool to have autism or adhd😒 it's fukken exhausting
I must say that there are many things I see neurotypical ppl do and stress about that I find to look VERY stressful while I find myself somehow ... almost magically warded from it. So I have to say I often flt excruciating internal pain and "why did I have to be like this", as a teen, but whenever I then thought about ppl around me, I oddly found that I didn't wanna be in their skin either and preferred to at least have my known struggles, rather than theirs :'D
So, yes it sucks. And: the grass looks greener and sometimes it is genuinely greener on "the other side". But I can highly recommend to observe closely. Ppl do not seem good at appreciating what they can. And they, too, seem to be frequently staring at the "greener grass" of someone else and feel that their live is incredibly hard. They're and we're not wrong. Life is genuinely and even objectively more challenging for brains than ever! 😣
I personally find it oddly soothing to remind myself, that I'm likely often bling to the struggles and exhaustions of neurotypical ppl as they seem to be oblivious to mine, even if I try to explain. It makes me wonder how often they tried to tell me and went unseen.
Either way, your feelings and struggles are very very valid. That's more reason to extend kindness to yourself and rest up in any aspect you can possibly find to be "a net-positive....somehow". May you find that things get a little easier as awareness spreads.
I think that for me autism and ADHD are cool in a few ways but mostly difficult.
I still struggle to understand this as well. I remember that the same thing happened when being gay was becoming “cool”, at least for young people. But I guess it was interesting, and it started to be seen as a positive to accept gay people as they are. And gay people could also be a very colorful and fun bunch, with interesting sub-cultures.
But what exactly it is about neurodivergence that is cool is still not really clear to me. Maybe people believe neurodivergent people are all savants in some ways - which is not true. Or it is about hyperfocus. On the other hand, the truth is, society in general is still not very informed and accepting wrt to neurodivergent people. (Heck, I am still learning about it too.) And that contributes to the challenges and struggles ND people face.
I want Renate to show us about the brain.
Don't it worry you that talking about the "superior mind" we have, is just a variation of the master race...
If I take a neurotypical as intelligent as me, that person has no problem competing with me, if anything my learning disability means they do better, until I catch up, but that is rather hard to do in fields with dynamic changes in it. Sure I could get better at knowing everything about some old discontinued anima show, mostly because no one intelligent would waste their time on it to compete with me. That not the same as me being smarter.
Intelligence is not a factor when it comes to being neurodiverse. We are not the modern day "master race", we are simply different not better.
I agree 💯
LOL I got a high score too! Yay! I got an A!…DHD 🥸