If you voluntarily stim, you have asperger's/autism right?

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It can be edited by anybody, so therefor can be inaccurate at times.

I think everyone stims, even NTs. But there is a dividing line between how an NT stims and how an Autistic person stims. An NT person will stim when they are nervous or bored, and are aware they are doing it, and do more socially appropriate stims (like shaking their feet, tapping a pencil non-stop, pacing, etc.) While an ASD person will usually be unaware that they are stimming until either someone points it out or they themselves are intentionally looking out for it. ASD people also tend to do more "socially innapropriate" stims like body rocking, hand flapping, "pacing in circles", spinning things, etc. That's my view on this.

Actually, the quality is surprisingly high. It isn't just a messageboard where any idiot can make a major impact. But it's not ascholarly source; it's more of a pointer, with the citations and all.

I heard somewhere that Wikipedia is 10 to 25% more accurate than the average encyclopedia most of the time.

Anyways, back to the aspergers/stims. I think I'm going to finally quit debating whether I have aspergers or not and just say that I have it since I have MOST (not all) of the symptoms. The reason why I don't display every symptom is because I have a somewhat mild form of it.

Last edited by patrick6 on 03 Apr 2008, 2:37 am, edited 1 time in total.

Is pacing actually normal? I get weird comments about it all the time.

I pace whenever I feel overly stimulated, it seems to kind of calm me down inside.

My stims are semi-voluntary. They start on their own, and after a while I notice them. I can suppress them, but if I stop focusing on them they start up again.

1. Stims are not exclusively AS.

I know NTs who rock back and forth. In public. That's a rather unusual 'stim' for a NT I think.

They just don't do these 'more autistic stims' more often than they do their other strange, subconscious stims.

Since stim = self-stimulation... yes, all people do that. All people who are in a situation in which they feel the need for self-stimulation.

NTs also get nervous, overwhelmed, excited in different situations than autistic people. Like, maybe, NT people usually don't have a problem with crowds. So they won't stim in that situation whereas an autistic person might need to stim.

2. AS criteria say 'stereotypical' or 'repetitive' movements. Stereotypical movements are described as movements that are not appropriate/do not have a (visible) connection to the circumstances.

Hmmm... is that maybe why self-stimulation in NTs is often appropriate (not all is) and why it isn't in autistic people? Who, maybe, have other issues next to autism and this have additional and/or different ways of self-stimulation?

3. I don't think tics and stims can be compared. From what I understand of the research of tics, tics are not 'involuntary self-stimulating behaviours'.


From my personal experience, tics also feel different from stims. It would be interesting to know how other people experience stims as opposed to tics.

mine has mostly been with my hair involved. flipping, chewing, running my fingers over the ends when it is up in a pony tail. I also like to bend my eyelashes until they spring back. sometimes it is conscious and sometimes it is not. I couldnt tell you much about it except that i have done it since i was very small.

I dont care if it is socially acceptable or not. It keeps me from biting my nails til they bleed.

My son does a hand flapping type of stim. He's not AS.

Hand flapping is considered normal in kids up to 6. after that is when i gets into the stereotypical range of things. My 3 and 5 yo cousins hand flap and nether are autistic ( that i know of). My 13yo cousin does it and is considered PDD-NOS ( not just for that, bunch of other symptoms).

My boy will be 11 next week. His hand flapping is pretty recent, within the past year, anyway. He says he likes the sound it makes. He's not hurting anything, so it isn't a big deal to me.

I've just encountered the term "stim" on this board tonight, though I already knew the concept(s) it refers to.

In terms of the original question, I find them to be usually *voluntary*, because it feels good.

One thing I will do is go into a kind of voluntary catatonia. If I'm *really* stressed, I will find a spot, scream at the top of my lungs, curl up and just stop moving or responding to anyone. I know exactly what I'm doing, and I can stop at any time, but I just can't handle the stress anymore, so I jus tclose myself out.

Not sure if that's a stim or not.

I will do many of the things mentioned in this thread. Sometimes, I become absolutely fascinated by some image and just stare at it (in terms of chickens and eggs, i am also visually impaired, almost legally blind, so I like to "rest my eyes"). I might do something either involuntarily, accidentally, or ona whim, and think, "Hey! This s neat!" And just keep doing it, which will drive my wife nuts. It may be playing with something weird (yesterday, I confiscated a broken Easter Basket handle that my son was whacking his sisters with. It struck me that it resembled the mandible of a giant spider or ant in a movie, so I put it around my head and pretended i was a giant bug). Or I'll speak in Seussian rhyme, or a Southern accent, or an English accent, or sing everything I say, or wahtever, till she threatens bodily harm if I don't stop.

But, as others have said, it usually starts as something involuntary or accidental, and I think, "hey! This is neat!"

The owners have a political bias.

Same here, i even tried to convince my cousins to rock when i was like 4 cause it felt good. But my rocking has changed since i was a kid, i rocked much faster and more violently back then. Now its not as obvious. I wasnt even aware that i was still doing it before i started to research AS. Now ive caught myself stimming when i dont really know that im doing it many times. It seems odd that ive been doing something for so many years and that i havent really connected it to any of my problems. Also the obsessions i have, i never thought of that as a symptom of anything so i never even told my psychologist about it till i discovered AS. I thought all people did these things.

Did you get that figure from wikipedia?

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nah, really wikipedia is quite accurate. There's the problem with vandalism but there are always people ready to revert the vandalized edit.

Falling in love with someone is a socially acceptable OCD.

I love my computer so what...


edit:wikipedia is trendy.