Having anxiety over this again

I sometimes try to forget about Asperger's... but it's popping up again. I found out they put the schizo suffix on my dx because I have social difficulties and they think it's because of negative symptoms of schiz.

Also, my relatives say my social skills are bad, my therapist told me I wasn't picking up social cues, etc...

Plus the obsessions I have that the mental health people acknowledge, but they don't think it's a sign of anything, just a personality trait.

Anyway, I want to know the truth and to be tested... but I've been told in the past it would cost a lot of money and it's not worth it in an adult, that there would really be no other services I could get. But I read the website of the nearest testing center to me, and it said that if you were poor, you might get up to 90% of costs covered, but the testing costs a few thousand dollars and what if it's not covered?

Retaking online tests for this and putting myself lower on the social stuff because of feedback, I now score in the asperger's or near asperger's range.

I think I need more social skills training though. As a kid, I went through social skills therapy and groups and stuff, I have or can get the childhood psych reports to prove it. In fact, I am thinking about swinging by there again and picking them all up. In fact, I wanna see if I have any later high school dx reports, who knows, I might have already been dxed and not know about it.

sigh...

Yeah, that's frustrating. When you've got schizophrenia/schizoaffective/schizoid/schizotypal/etc. going on, it complicates diagnosis pretty badly, because what's required for a combined autism/schizo-whatever diagnosis is that the autistic traits be present in childhood, before onset. And, of course, you've already got schizoaffective disorder, which makes the problem quite complicated both for you and for anyone trying to figure out diagnostic labels.

Okay, so here's a proposal: Talk to your shrink; tell them about your childhood memories of being in social-skills groups, and delayed on social skills, and your suspicion that you might have had an autism spectrum disorder before the onset of your schizoaffective disorder. Mention that you would like to take advantage of social-skills training--which is useful not just for Asperger's but for other disorders as well, including schizophrenia-type problems that involve social isolation. If your shrink will make a note in your record that you have autistic-like traits but the diagnosis can't be determined because you also have schizoaffective disorder complicating the picture, then maybe you can go about addressing individual problems without worrying about pinning the diagnosis down exactly.

Actually they have my childhood records, they have read them, they know I was in social skills counseling and groups back then. The pdoc has already acknowledged I have some autistic-like traits, as he puts it "a little bit" but they won't do formal testing.

As a kid, I was dxed with ADHD and severely emotionally impaired, though now they think I might have had childhood bipolar... all these childhood stuff is confusing anyway.

Yet another reason to de-emphasize the diagnostic labels and work on specific issues, I think...