Differences between mild Aspergers and severe Autism?

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Joe90
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08 Feb 2011, 10:45 am

Well I'm like a NT then, because I don't fully understand about other people on the spectrum. I've never met another Aspie before, hence I don't no any different to myself.

I don't uncontrollably hit myself in the head. Sometimes I hit myself once in the head when I am angry with myself, because I hate my brain so much. But I've never had people holding me down or anything.

By the way, my brother's NT friend once was hitting himself in the head when he was depressed. He as also a bit drunk. I saw it.


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08 Feb 2011, 1:47 pm

Joe90 wrote:
Well I'm like a NT then, because I don't fully understand about other people on the spectrum. I've never met another Aspie before, hence I don't no any different to myself.

I don't uncontrollably hit myself in the head. Sometimes I hit myself once in the head when I am angry with myself, because I hate my brain so much. But I've never had people holding me down or anything.


Okay? I don't hit myself in the head either, but I used to bite myself, dig my fingernails into my skin as hard as I could, peel skin off the palms of my hands, chew my fingernails down to the quick and draw blood, and other relatively mild forms of self-harm. Not in the same category, obviously, and no one had to hold me down, but it's hard for me to see some kind of sharp distinct line that you can draw anywhere and say "this is where they are completely different from you." Obviously, they are different, but just as obviously to me, there are often commonalities.

There's a reason people say "If you've met one autistic, you've met one autistic." You can't expect that everyone will have the same traits, and not having a particular trait doesn't mean you're NT, it just means you don't have that trait. It also means you can't say "This trait belongs over here and that trait belongs over there" because the borders are quite fuzzy and some people are diagnosed as Asperger's simply because they had no speech delay, despite fitting the criteria for autism or PDD-NOS (which is clearly autistic, but not directly fitting the autism diagnosis). Also, some people who fit the criteria for autism or PDD-NOS at an earlier age are diagnosed as Asperger's simply because they're adults and appear to function well, whether or not they had speech delays.

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By the way, my brother's NT friend once was hitting himself in the head when he was depressed. He as also a bit drunk. I saw it.


Once? Okay... Is this one of those "NTs do these things too?" comments? Because doing it once isn't symptomatic, and self-injury isn't restricted to autistic people.



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08 Feb 2011, 4:17 pm

This may be a bit off topic, but, what makes autistic people prone to head banging? I have an urge to bang my head against something sometimes but I usually just hit it against something like a pillow or hit my head with my hand.

I definitively think that it hurts so I don't really want to do it. Maybe everybody gets the urge to and it hurting defers them?

As for mild vs. severe, I think a large part of it is all based on people's perceptions of communication ability in a normal manner. I even put people in such categories of low functioning or high functioning and I don't know why I do it. It just seems like how they meet society's demands and how they appear to others is a large part of it.

This topic is like a huge wall of text to me so I'm bolding parts of my post and if this has already been answered, I apologize.



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08 Feb 2011, 4:22 pm

Joe90 wrote:
Well I'm like a NT then, because I don't fully understand about other people on the spectrum. I've never met another Aspie before, hence I don't no any different to myself.

I don't uncontrollably hit myself in the head. Sometimes I hit myself once in the head when I am angry with myself, because I hate my brain so much. But I've never had people holding me down or anything.

By the way, my brother's NT friend once was hitting himself in the head when he was depressed. He as also a bit drunk. I saw it.


Personally, I understand quite well why someone would hit their head, I just don't do it myself and never have. That's not to say I've never hit myself, or even that I've never compulsively hit myself a whole lot, but I've never done it to my head. I wonder how much what seems like a huge dichotomy comes down to tiny differences in level of overload, willpower, priorities, other coping mechanisms... and by adulthood, not even that, but just what habits you've gotten into.


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08 Feb 2011, 4:59 pm

Unfortunately, head-banging is done for reasons as diverse as self-injury and stimming in general; so I don't think that's a question you could really answer. Any number of things could make somebody prone to it. Better to look at it case-by-case and try to determine why a particular person is prone to self-injury.

Personally, my tendency to hurt myself comes mostly from my discovery very early in life that I could think better and handle stress better when my fight-or-flight system was activated. In order to try to meet the demands of the NT world, I regularly forced myself into overdrive, sometimes using physical injury to do it. Burnout was the natural result, but it worked temporarily.


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08 Feb 2011, 8:02 pm

I hit my head when I have a meltdown. It does make the anger subside. I also sometimes have no feeling in my head and hitting it doesn't hurt. Same with other parts of my body. I just become physically numb.


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09 Feb 2011, 6:38 am

I don't hit my head, it's more my face I hit, and only once during a meltdown. Sometimes it's to let others know that I am angry with myself. But I don't do it several times. And it does hurt. I've given myself a black eye before by hitting myself right on the bone under my eye. It really hurt. I done that because I felt angry with myself for not outgrowing certain things what most people outgrow by the age of 8. For example, I still don't know how to behave normally in public, and I thought I had learnt all the ''invisible rules'' by now, until my mum told me that I do this and do that in the street. My actions have calmed down now - when I was an older child, about 13 or 14 years old, I used to stamp by feet and pull my own hair if a baby started crying in restaurants. I don't do that anymore, and I don't even react anymore. I just quietly sigh inwardly, and not where it shows to the obvious to other people.
But apparently I keep saying embarrassing things loudly in public, and it makes my mum feel embarrassed to be with me. When she told me this at home, I did smack myself in the face and yell, ''what the f**k is the matter with me?! !! Why don't my f*****g brain know what I am doing?! !! Now I'm the village idiot!! !'' And then I cried, angrily. My mum had to calm me down by saying that I am not the village idiot at all, and that there are people who do far more embarrassing things than me.

I do hate my brain with a vengance.


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09 Feb 2011, 3:12 pm

I love your new signature!

It's really frustrating when you're trying so hard and yet you just keep embarrassing yourself. You're not alone in suffering that, trust me.


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10 Feb 2011, 11:18 am

I'm NOT saying that NTs exhibit symptoms in a way we do. I found this little quote what somebody else had wrote on an unrelated thread to this, but it does fit in with what I'm trying to say (although what I'm trying to say may not match the title of this thread.) Here goes:-

ASD traits are not traits unique to only ASD individuals. They are human traits, often taken to an extreme, that when grouped together in one individual usually indicates an ASD. NTs may stim, feel anxiety in social situations, have black and white thinking, be literal thinkers, have narrow focused interests, have language delays, etc. NTs may grow out of their traits, or may continue to exhibit them throughout their life. The main difference is that NTs dont exhibit all or most of the traits concurrently like autistics do, and often not to the same degree.

That has made me feel better about AS. I have seen people who are not on the spectrum exhibit Aspie traits, even though they are 100% NT. It confuses me too. It makes me so confused that I'm beginning to wonder that this confusion is causing me to hate being me so much. It is all caused by confusion.


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10 Feb 2011, 12:16 pm

Joe90 wrote:
I'm NOT saying that NTs exhibit symptoms in a way we do. I found this little quote what somebody else had wrote on an unrelated thread to this, but it does fit in with what I'm trying to say (although what I'm trying to say may not match the title of this thread.) Here goes:-

ASD traits are not traits unique to only ASD individuals. They are human traits, often taken to an extreme, that when grouped together in one individual usually indicates an ASD. NTs may stim, feel anxiety in social situations, have black and white thinking, be literal thinkers, have narrow focused interests, have language delays, etc. NTs may grow out of their traits, or may continue to exhibit them throughout their life. The main difference is that NTs dont exhibit all or most of the traits concurrently like autistics do, and often not to the same degree.

That has made me feel better about AS. I have seen people who are not on the spectrum exhibit Aspie traits, even though they are 100% NT. It confuses me too. It makes me so confused that I'm beginning to wonder that this confusion is causing me to hate being me so much. It is all caused by confusion.


To be perfectly honest, the paragraph views autism as a group of traits you show, rather than as a way of thinking, making it way off. But never mind.

Your theory that you're feeling bad because you're confused is interesting. I suppose this is confusing...


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Joe90
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10 Feb 2011, 1:12 pm

Quote:
To be perfectly honest, the paragraph views autism as a group of traits you show, rather than as a way of thinking, making it way off. But never mind.

Your theory that you're feeling bad because you're confused is interesting. I suppose this is confusing...


Well each time I hear a NT say something what I expect more from an Aspie, it makes me think, ''huh???''

Like the other day at work one of the NTs there said, ''I cut all my tags out of my clothes because I can't stand the itching they sometimes cause me.''

And once I read in the paper that people who are unemployed need some sort of ritual or activity to do, because they can become Agoraphobic. And this wasn't referring to Aspie people - it was referring to anyone in general. I also thought, ''huh?''


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10 Feb 2011, 6:36 pm

Joe90 wrote:
I'm NOT saying that NTs exhibit symptoms in a way we do. I found this little quote what somebody else had wrote on an unrelated thread to this, but it does fit in with what I'm trying to say (although what I'm trying to say may not match the title of this thread.) Here goes:-

ASD traits are not traits unique to only ASD individuals. They are human traits, often taken to an extreme, that when grouped together in one individual usually indicates an ASD. NTs may stim, feel anxiety in social situations, have black and white thinking, be literal thinkers, have narrow focused interests, have language delays, etc. NTs may grow out of their traits, or may continue to exhibit them throughout their life. The main difference is that NTs dont exhibit all or most of the traits concurrently like autistics do, and often not to the same degree.

That has made me feel better about AS. I have seen people who are not on the spectrum exhibit Aspie traits, even though they are 100% NT. It confuses me too. It makes me so confused that I'm beginning to wonder that this confusion is causing me to hate being me so much. It is all caused by confusion.

That's a good quote and I completely agree.
I think autism is only a different way of thinking because of the severity of these traits.
People say that autism is hardwired and cannot be changed. Wrong. It's just much more difficult to change. Hardwired is a very old term used to describe an adult brain. We have since learnt that the brain is plastic and changes every time it experiences or learns something.


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16 Feb 2011, 3:24 pm

I've just learnt another thing about what I've been saying about. I don't really know if it's right or not, but I'm not bothered about right or wrong answers here - I'm more bothered about the things I experience in other people on the spectrum:-

I thought I had never met another Aspie woman before - until just yesterday, at work. A 50 year old woman had joined at the beginning of last summer, so she's been working there for about 8 months now. And I had to help the manager sort out some of the applications what were from everyone in the past year who had applied for volunteer or paid work there, and the manager wanted me to put the applications in alphabetical order by the names of the applicants. When I came to this woman's application, I saw that she had written ''Asperger's Syndrome'' in the mental health box. I was so surprised. I knew she had a few social difficulties (you could actually see that a mile off), but I never guessed it was AS because she always talks constantly and expresses her feelings and she's not bothered at all what people think of her, (whereas I'm more shy and sensitive and placid, and I worry too much of what other people think of me, therefore I don't tend to have the right confidence to step forwards and express my opinions much, although I don't find it hard to express my feelings either but I express them in a different way to how she does). She has issues with loud noises, and has always had very big difficulties with friends and relationships, even though she's chatty and friendly.
So my point is, I see what you are saying about everyone on the spectrum are different, just like NTs are from eachother. She's not at all like me, but she's got AS, just like me (I don't know what other disability she might have). I understand how she sees things and the difficulties she faces, and I know that whatever she says wrong or does wrong isn't nasty or intentional. But, she may be a completely different person to me in personality-wise, emotional-wise, and everything else related to your individual needs, but we're still on the same developmental......social.......level......I really cannot explain what I mean. She's different and is more chatty than I am, and I'm more shy and sensitive than she is, but we both still seem to meet in the middle.....do you get what I am saying? I probably haven't explained it properly, and somebody is still probably going to take it the wrong way and think I'm on to something else, but I know what I'm on about, and I've explained it as clearly as I can.


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16 Feb 2011, 4:05 pm

What you said appears to make sense to me.

You're talking about having met another woman who has Asperger's Syndrome and seen how her functioning varies from yours in particular ways, that you're not expressing the same symptoms in the same way?

I don't see anything wrong with that. :)



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16 Feb 2011, 5:03 pm

pensieve wrote:
People say that autism is hardwired and cannot be changed. Wrong. It's just much more difficult to change. Hardwired is a very old term used to describe an adult brain. We have since learnt that the brain is plastic and changes every time it experiences or learns something.


If autism is indeed an issue with hyperplasticity, higher than normal short range neuron connectivity and lower than normal long (inter-region) connectivity as recent research suggests, then any new neuronal pathways coming from experiences and learning will simply result in more pathways with the same underlying atypical connectivity. I think flatly stating "wrong" is way oversimplifying the situation. The autistic brain may not be any more hardwired than an NT brain, but even as it rewires itself, it rewires itself differently.


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17 Feb 2011, 10:20 am

@anubuend

I mean this with all seriousness.
I really learned a lot from your posts.
Thank you for sharing your ideas.

I have noticed that the difference between non-verbal and verbal means a lot to others.
Also how independent one is (as in how much assistance one needs) means a lot to others.

For example, due to my sheer ignorance, I never would have guessed some of the struggles that some autistic people deal with.
I have been labeled as aspergers now (I'm thirty-eight) but when I was a child I would labeled as "more autistic" except it the early 80s and I was quite verbal and learned to read at an early age.