Visual stress? Tinted glasses?

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Ouch! Yes, it does happen and it still needs people to call for careful examination of all the potential problems.
A week ago I saw a 25 -year old with headaches. He had been diagnosed as having learning difficulties when quite young, and no-one had spotted the dioptre and a half of oblique astigmatism in each eye which was his only problem. No wonder getting him to read and study had been hard work. For him is was a literal pain. Grrr!

I'm terribly sensitive to light and see weird patterns if I look at the sky or a brightly lit piece of paper. Sunglasses help, sometimes. The patterns usually go away if I go inside or focus on surfaces with more structure. But no ophthalmologist or physician until the Doctor who diagnosed me with AS has had an explanation.

Sometimes I also get small spots in my field of vision. They stay where they are for a day or so, and then disappear. Eye migraine, said an ophthalmologist, but I'd never heard of it, so I thought I was going blind.

Visual migraines are disturbing, and would be frightening if not understood. If it is certain that's what is happening, they leave no permanent effect at all, and are a damned annoyance, not a danger..
(there are RARE but more serious conditions which can give similar symptoms, which a doctor or optometrist would consider on first presentation)

The incidence of visual stress reported here has been amazing. I'm going to put the same simple poll elsewhere, in a non-AS group, just as a cross check, though it's utterly short of a scientific study. It looks like we might need one... Somewhere the scale of this is not being picked up.

Yes, it certainly looks like visual stress in Aspies should be further investigated. This is a fascinating thread to

As far as I know, the Doctors I saw gave me a very thorough check. The problem was that I didn't believe them. My eye thing became an obsession and I spent several months thinking about nothing else.

Since I started this thread two possible (just possible) contacts for helping with research may be materialising.
One connected with an expert at the University of Essex,
and one with an expert at the university of Cambridge.

Odd thing is, with the former I'd be on the research side,
and with the latter, being researched!

Go on, put the electrodes on my brain!
Nurse! More voltage!

Heh, how apt I should be replying here. I have had ECT three times and am going back for more tomorrow....off topic I am.
I voted Number Two. I do not know how differently I see compared to other people.
I bought Irlen Lenses, but when I got them in the mail, I tried them on and found they had got the axis in the right lense wrong. Argh!
I recently went to an opthalmologist who wondered why previous optometrists had not worked out that I needed a prismatic lense on the left side. He told me that if nothing had been done, I would have gone blind in the left eye within two years.
I rely on my peripheral vision a lot on that side, so it was a shock to receive that news.
When I can afford it and have the time, I will reorder the Irlen Lenses again..

Sorry to hear about the ECT. The Cambridge lot only want to measure my brainwaves.
At least, that's what they're telling me...
"We need your brain prepared... diced..."

Without a prism you would have gone blind?
ALERTMODE
I know of absolutely no condition in adults where that applies.
/ALERTMODE

You will have to judge whether to doubt me, doubt that you heard correctly, or doubt that last opinion from the ophthalmologist, but I would stand pretty firm on that. Prisms or the lack of them just can't do that. Ocular discomfort and double vision is the tops.


Some days I worry about my profession,
but then some days I worry about me.

Yes, my left eye tends to wander off centre, so I have double vision all the time, as well as no depth-perception. The prismatic lense is there to direct my left eye inwards. Unfortunately I still see double.
I was told that if my left eye wasn't being used, my brain would no longer use the information coming through.
Brains are strange things...

I will respond to this question as someone who has never been diagnosed with Asperger's and with a son who has.

When I was younger, 6-13, I lived in Florida. While the rest of my family thrived, I was sick (nauseated) and had headaches on a daily basis. My mother gave me tylenol at least twice a day. The glare and contrast of the sun on the cars, sidewalks, and buildings (particularly windows), was excruciating! It caused much stress in me. When we moved back to Indiana, all of these symptoms disappeared. We lived in the central section where there's almost always a "haze" or cloud cover.

My son, is quite a puzzle. He used to squint quite often but when we had his vision tested, the optometrist said that he had better than normal vision. (ditto with hearing) When he was a toddler, he would effortlessly find his way around the house in the dark in the middle of the night and scare the crap out of the unfortunate family member who happened to get up for a drink or to use the bathroom! He was never afraid of the dark.
A couple of months ago, I was in the kitchen, talking to him and he had a grimace on his face and looked like he was struggling to communicate. I asked him if his eyes bothered him and replied with a yes. I took him into the dining room and his face relaxed and he finished telling me his story. The difference between the kitchen lighting and the dining room lighting was that the kitchen had one bulb out and a barely perceptible flicker. The dining room light was brighter but more constant. This is also the reason he squints at school. I alerted his teachers and they took note of it.
Another funny thing about my son: (I could sit here all night and talk about him; he's so awesome!) He has a very difficult time recognizing people; even those that he knows pretty well. One day, we had his friend over, (his only friend; an ADHD poster child; give me an AS kid anyday!), and we'd been with him for hours. We went swimming, the boys were playing together, my son got out of the water to relieve himself, when he commenced swimming he swam up to another boy and kept calling him his friend's name and talking to him, fully believing that this kid was his friend. Finally, the kid said, "Hey, quit calling me that; that's not my name". My 12 year old was stunned. In fact he replied, "It's not???". I called out to him, telling him where his friend was and he promptly swam over to his friend and carried on like nothing had happened. I noticed also that often, when we're in town, he greets people and then realizes by the surprised look on their faces that they're not the person he thought they were.
I thought about the swimming incident and realized that the boy whom he mistook for his friend was exactly the same size, build and had the same hair color as his friend. He must not recognize people by their facial features or voice but more from their size, shape and shading. Does this ring a bell with anyone else?
I have a terrible time recognizing people also, but I assumed it was just a case of bad memory.

Sorry so long.

No. Ambyopia, the eye losing effective connection with the brain due to disuse is not a condition for adults. It's not an issue for people over 12 (7 according to some more recent sources!) After that you cannot really get or lose a lazy eye.
With someone with intractable (technical term = not readily fixed) diplopia it is perfectly acceptable to blur out or patch the less useful eye *if* the individual finds that, overall, a more comfortable visual environment*. Contact lenses exist with a black pupil so that can be done very cosmetically.

*It's a tentative suggestion, but you might prefer that, for example, in a pair of glasses just for TV and reading when indoors on your own.

I'll just pick up that one detail if I may, it's illustrative. Flicker and glare are issues too.
Flicker classically in females, who are much better at detecting it. If the female officeworkers complain about flickering fluorescent tubes, and the male manager looks at the lights and says "they're not flickering", it's quite possible for them both to be right, by their own perceptions.

I've found the results here so interesting that I've put a couple of mirror polls on other sites, one AS and one non-AS (though hardly normal, as they'd themselves admit).

I'm building a suspicion that, looking for eye problems, we optical professionals may not be asking all the questions we need to, to elicit the difficulties that people are experiencing.