A LITTLE VENT I was on reddit on the r/autism and i read something on the rules that made me doubt my autism (that the raads-r is not a reliable tool for diagnosis, but i accidentally glossed over the part that said "unless the results are evaluated in a clinical setting", which happened in my case) and this user came and said that the RAADS (which is not the test i took) and the AQ (autism quotient, which i never took) have a high false positive rate, followed by, get this, links from a paper funded by autism speaks and old research. When i first read their reply i explained in the greatest detail i could the proocedings of my diagnosis, but then when i called my older brother (he's kinda my anchor in this chaos that is my life and even assisted me during the diagnostic process) he reassured me that my diagnosis is valid because it was interpreted by a professional clinician and helped me sort it out. That's when i found out that the papers the redditor sent were either pretty old in modern neuroscience terms or funded by autism speaks, and not only that, they seem to be one those "elitist" autistic people that bash self-diagnosed people in spite of them mostly not having the money for an assessment, and them just invalidating them thinking they were all influenced by social media to think so. I've felt so down these few days because of this self-doubt and seeing this really pissed me off, to send outdated research and autismspeaks funded research to a person struggling with doubt, it is downright cruel in my opinion. moral of the story: to hell with reddit unrelated pic