Halligeninseln wrote:
XFilesGeek wrote:
Very few things annoy me more than when people say, "Everybody stims!" or claim that stimming is exactly the same thing as tapping your pencil on a desk or bouncing your leg.
"Stimming" is what happens when your repetitive movements exceed what is considered "normal" for your developmental level and the culture in which you live.
I have extensive repetitive movements, and they're not "voluntary." At times, they're downright annoying.
As for the difference between Stereotypic Movement Disorder and autism, one has autism and one does not. It's like how you can have Sensory Processing Disorder without having autism.
My repetitive movements exceed what is considered normal for my developmental level and the culture in which I live. I don't think it's normal as a teenager, adult or mature adult to just sit there for hours waving objects in front of your eyes to stimulate your visual sense and go into your own world, or to spend hours playing with water as an adult. I think most people would be freaked out by it, which is the reason I only talk about it here on WP. My movements are not like sneezing, so in that sense they are voluntary, but if I don't do them I get more and more stressed out until I do do them. When I have been around people for a while I need to withdraw to perform one of these "behaviours" in order to release the pressure on my brain, but it isn't literally involuntary because I can just stay in a stressed out, irritable state instead. You distinguish between Stereotypic Movement Disorder and autism. I genuinely do not know if what I have just described is just Stereotypic Movement Disorder. I thought it was.
That sounds about right.
I stim to relieve "pressure" too.
I think STMD is only diagnosed in the absence of ASDs, so if you've already been DXed with an ASD, you probably wouldn't be DXed with STMD.
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"If we fail to anticipate the unforeseen or expect the unexpected in a universe of infinite possibilities, we may find ourselves at the mercy of anyone or anything that cannot be programmed, categorized or easily referenced."
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29 Apr 2012, 10:17 pm
