I think I might have been wrong...

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I'm feeling the same way... thinking that I just have a bunch of different conditions gathered together instead of it being just one disorder. I had friends as a kid and didn't seem particularly unusual... and isn't it one of the big requirements that AS traits have to be prominent in childhood?

My sensory issues aren't outside the realm of normalcy as far as I know, and I don't have meltdowns. I do have strong back-to-back obsessions however, and I stim constantly throughout the day, and my unusual social habits in my preteen years combined with those two things were why the possibility of me being AS made me so happy. Finally, an explanation!

But now I wonder... maybe I am just plain abnormal, with nothing to go on, nothing to explain how utterly irregular I've been since I was 11.

Need I mention that, if I were to get professionally diagnosed, it would still be AS?

I have all the criteria. That's all a psychologist would look at. If I had to put myself in a binary category of either having AS or not, I still do have it. It is just that, in my self analysis, I have found that a lack of social skills really isn't my primary problem. If I could take a pill* to rid myself of my AS, yet still keep my intelligence, I can say for certain that very little would change. I might be a bit more social and not be as quirky, but that's all. I suspect that not only is this true for me, but many other people here as well. I'm not referring to anyone in particular, so don't ask. Maybe about 5-20% of the WP population as a whole.

*I am not advocating self medication in any way. This is purely hypothetical. Even if it wasn't, I would still not do such a thing, as I do not believe in medication unless I am absolutely dieing without it.

Sorry, perhaps I wasn't clear. Why do you think, given that you were studying the same subject, the neurotypes of the two groups were so different?

That "non-trivial number" is meaningless since you have absolutely no idea at all what proportion of people self-medicate based on what you see posted on the boards. All the people who don't self-medicate are hardly going to be shouting to the rooftops about their lack of medication are they? It's like the truism where you only ever hear the complaints and not the satisfied customers.



And why would it not surprise you? Why should they be more prone? Care to share the basis of this feeling you have?

I never said it was common - I said that it occurred, and that with it occurring it makes sense to me for people to worry about it.

That's not at all why I'd worry about people self-diagnosing anyways. I don't think people not self-diagnosing will mean that nobody self-medicates. My worry is that people who aren't really on the autistic spectrum identifying as on the spectrum causing people to assume that aspie means something entirely different than it means. I've seen people falsely identify to the point where people have entirely wrong views of people on the spectrum, causing actual damage to people.



It wouldn't surprise me if there wasn't a bias in that manner either.

The reason however, is that one of the reason that people self-diagnose is because of them not trusting doctors. This would mean that they also don't trust doctors for treating them, even if "treatment" is various types of therapy. I could see people who don't trust doctors to treat them trying to treat themselves more.

Why would you suppose that self-diagnosis has anything at all to do with not trusting doctors? Just where do you get your information from? Totally unfounded with no basis in reality.

You compound your error when you extrapolate from this "feeling" that you have and claim that because people may not trust doctors then they must also be more likely to treat themselves.

Oh oops, sorry about that. I think the main reason was that one was an "Institute of Technology", and the other was an all-around school. I was also surprised that the neurotypes were so different. I studied a science subject, so I had assumed that all the nerds/geeks/dorks in grad school would be just like the ones in college. But they turned out to be much more socially adept and well-rounded than I had expected.

One of the reasons that people self-diagnose is not trusting doctors. This is not the only reason at all and I never claimed that it was. However, people will blatantly state that this is why they self-diagnose rather than can an official diagnosis.

Of course there are other reasons, however I trust people when they say that they don't go to a doctor for an official diagnosis because of not trusting doctors.

I never made statements about all individuals, I've made statements about a possible correlation.

I have no way to study whether this is actually true - it'd take a huge sample size to figure out if there is correlation and whether there is any statistical significance.

But its a potential justification about people's feelings - why people are scared of people self-diagnosing leading to self-medication. I'm not talking about being scientific, I'm talking about why people might be biased against people being self-diagnosed for reasons that Fnord was talking about that are not my reasons to worry about self-diagnosis.

I think it is. Because children have no coping mechanisms and just behave naturally.

They need to be visible in childhood as its a developmental disorder. It is possible that the traits become more prominent later in life - often around puberty this occurs, but the traits had to be there even when you were a young child.

Another possible developmental trajectory is being quite severely autistic in childhood with very little social or communicative capabilities for years, then starting to improve a lot towards the end of grade school. One of my headshrinkers told me that fourth grade was the time that higher cognitive functions really started to kick in for most children, so around that age is when an ASD child is able to start systemizing all the social stuff that is intuitive for the other children. In this scenario, the kid may continue to improve into and past puberty, without major setbacks in middle school or high school, because the original starting point was so low. No friends and not being lonely when little ---> several friends/acquaintances when older vs. several playmates/friends when little ---> no friends and being lonely when older. Assuming that diagnosis didn't happen in early childhood, I think the second case is more likely to be diagnosed at that time.

The two situations are completely incomparable. Drugs that work on your mind are the most dangerous of all drugs. The possible side-effects are massive. Aspirin, on the other hand, is one of the least dangerous substances you can take.

Of course, proving it decades later is the hard part. Any memories will be vague, partial, and clouded with layer upon layer of interpretation. For example, my mother remembers me as being popular and sociable. I remember hiding from my one friend and having zero interest in anything others did. It's hard to prove either way at this distance.

I remember one instance when I was in nursery school. I was bored, so the teacher told me to go to the "library". She of course meant the bookshelves over on the other side of the room, but I thought she meant the literal library across the street. I started to cry, and said, "But it's too hard!"
Ahaha.
I did a lot of crying at that nursery school. I was the only crier there. All the other kids were just looking at me, like, 'Wow, what's up with her?'
Ohoho.

Last edited by Ellytoad on 31 Aug 2011, 2:19 am, edited 2 times in total.

Interesting. But you said the grad students at both schools were like that... So maybe most of us burn out before grad school or something?

Honestly, I'd have expected the position of grad students and undergrads to be reversed.


Well... They have to be there; I'm not sure they have to be prominent.

The proposed DSM-5 criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder say this:


The DSM-IV criteria for Asperger's Disorder oddly enough don't actually say anything about age of onset, while the criteria for Autistic Disorder do require:


In the DSM-IV, PDDs are within in a category called "Disorders Usually First Diagnosed in Infancy, Childhood, or Adolescence." In the proposed DSM-5 that category is renamed "Neurodevelopmental Disorders." (List of DSM-5 Neurodevelopmental Disorders here; list of DSM-IV Disorders Usually First Diagnosed in Infancy, Childhood, or Adolescence here. They're the same things, just shifted around a bit.)

TL;DR: There seems to be a growing recognition that while traits must be present in early childhood, they may not become fully obvious until much later.


I wouldn't describe myself as having been severely autistic in childhood -- noticeably autistic, but not severely -- and I was never diagnosed as a child, but more interestingly, I was recently talking to a friend of mine, who has never been diagnosed with an ASD (but is not neurotypical either; he has ADHD), about his childhood, and he said he never had any friends until middle school. It occurred to me that hypothetically we may have been rather alike as young children, but that our lives took different paths after that. For him, he was pretty severely bullied in elementary school, but middle school was better, and high school was better still, and college is probably even better (he has a pretty active social life, at least by my standards, and he is still very close to some of his high school friends). For me, elementary school was not necessarily easy, but my life took a huge turn for the worse in middle school, and didn't noticeably recover until I was several years into a college career prolonged by setbacks. (Ironically, one of those setbacks may be undiagnosed ADHD, which is how I had this conversation to begin with... Whereas that has not been a problem for him since his was long ago identified.) It seems possible to me that when we were about the same age he started adapting and I didn't and, compounded by other issues, i.e. a non-supportive environment, that caused me to have a lot of problems he didn't have. Mind you, I don't know that this is the case since I didn't know him when he was a child, but it certainly seems possible from what he described to me...

Not really. They don't just sit there with a copy of the dsm and check off the symptoms. The interviews and testing are much more in depth, and if given properly, are designed to determine if someone has an ASD, just a few ASD traits that resemble having an ASD, or something else entirely. It is more complicated than just listing off a few symptoms.