Not 'knowing' you have aspergers could be counterproductive because it's beginning to look like suicide ideation is the worst aspect of having it. I've been well aware that I'm subject to that aspect since my first determined wilful attempt at age three and a half (for details see my book, Dafydd Bach: Death of Innocence: The Beginning). It's a family thing with me, so I didn't associate it with a 'disease' as such, but our bloodline 'idiot savantism'. However, I began voluntarily coaching and counselling colleagues with diagnosed or suspected Asperger's Syndrome in 1994 after being diagnosed with it myself by a private consultant clinical consultant commissioned by my employer as I had a severe nervous breakdown in the office; and it was from that networking by the office intranet I first realised it was Asperger's related, not just a family trait. I became compulsory obsessed with saving these other aspies' lives, and went global in 1997 when I realised that it wasn't a trait of my profession, but was far more widespread than I had imagined. By 2012, I had figured that adolescents (between age 10 and 21) with Asperger's were more than 20 times more likely than the rest of the population to contemplate or attempt suicide and my suspicion was confirmed by the Penn State University reporting research findings of them being between 25 and 30 times as likely. I knew that it tailed off after the age of 21, as that had happened to me, but I still suspected we adults with Asperger's were vulnerable, as I had made a determined attempt to kill myself again, at the age of 55. So I wasnt surprised earlier this year when Cambridge University reported it had been involved in similar research as the Penn State University report, but with adults, and found they were about 9 times as likely as the rest of the population to think about or attempt suicide. My mathematical faculty switched on an alarm bell in my head to let me that it had compared these statistics and concluded that about two-thirds of the adolescents that suicide ideate, fail to reach adulthood, due to the disease. And the American Psychiatric Association seem so powerless to prevent it from happening that they have dropped the name and characteristics from their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Diseases, so they no longer are obliged to diagnose the disease and, having diagnosed it, treat it. And the US Fed. Gov. has panicked and announced it will fund the provision of GPS tracking devices to fit to encumbents of the disease who might run away from home or simply wander off and try to top themselves, be it consciously or unconsciously, but equally tragic results.
So I think it is better to 'know' that you have Asperger's than 'not to know' that you have it. So I recommend you do the RAADS-R test and RDOS aspiequiz on the Web and get back in here to discuss the results if they say you have it. The truth will not hurt you, but not knowing could.
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adriantesq - Born 1945, diagnosed as Savant 1949, Autist 1950, Unfulfilled musical genius 1953, Autistic Psychopath 1960, Aspie 1994, appointed as the County Surveyors Society Chief Instructor Suicide Avoidance and Prevention in 1995, became Amazon Best Selling Author in Biographies and Memoirs of Childhood Autism and Asperger's Syndrome 2014, and Ambassador for Autie and Aspie Students of Energime University 2016.
23 Aug 2014, 2:11 am
