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So my first question is, how solid of a diagnosis is your apnea? was it borderline? Was it confirmed with a follow up?
It seems sleep apnea is the go to for a lot of things because its easy. A true diagnosis is nuanced and requires a high quality doctor and equipment. It also is distorted by the fact that the equipment and/or location of the study means your sleep will not be typical and thus you may demonstrate some symptoms that you wouldnt otherwise present at home when well rested.
The best sort of sleep study is one where they do the full study in the hospital, and then send you home with a light weight monitor for you to sleep with for a week or more at home. If your sleep study didnt include both of these aspects I would be a bit suspect of that part.
> I get periods of hypersomnia where I can sleep for 14 hours plus.
Hypersomnia is slight counter to apnea. Apnea usually makes it hard to get deep sleep, so I'd be a little suspect (not too much) by this property. I too have this pattern. My sleep disorder is delayed sleep phase disorder, but it manifests as going to bed every night 1 hour later and then having hypersomnia once I fall asleep (10 - 14 hours is quite normal for me). For me this appeared to be cost first and foremost by the low-t, that treatment alone is improving it already, and secondarily by my hypothyroidism. If you havent been checked for both of those that would be my first suggestion, with or without the apnea.
> I’ve been putting that down to autistic burnout.
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> However, I’m still not 100% sure about the autism diagnosis. Most of the time I don’t feel any real problems but other times I’m like no I feel autistic af.
So this is where my opinion may get a bit divisive. I am of the opinion that in the UK and the USA (and maybe canada) that autism is massively over-diagnosed, by atleast 90%+ in high-functioning cases. Not to say there arent high-functioning autists, there are. But they are far more rare than the diagnosis suggests.
What i think is happening is a bit of an underlying flaw in psychiatry in how it reasons about disease and a bit of a runaway effect in the societies of those countries. Psychiatry assumes the majority of a population is "normal" and as such any of those in the minority struggle to cope with society are the ones experiencing disorder. Psychiatry utterly fails once 51%+ of a society enters into psychosis because the tools stop working. What I think has happened is our societies have become so overwhelming toxic and bad for mental health that an overwhelming majority of these populations have developed one of the many forms of personality disorders, leaving a small minority of healthy "normal" people. Since psychiatry operates on the fundamental assumption of normality in a society psychiatry unfortunately tries to find a reason why normal people in the minority are struggling to function and thus assigns them as the person with the disorder, and deems the larger majority with the personality disorder as the "normal ones"... this causes huge amounts of false autism diagnosis instead of addressing the real cause, the personality disorders the other half of people have.
This only became extremely obvious to me once I started living among European people and seeing how I went from feeling "what is wrong with me" to "wow literally all of america is diseased"
