Hi Everyone! :o)

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Great to find you guys! At last I know why i've always felt completely sane but everyone else thinks i'm barking!

A week or so ago, my partner said i should take a look at the symptoms of AS and read this group. It's been a revelation! We've been together for 5 years or so and things have not always been easy. She thought i was just being knowingly difficult until she hatched the theory that perhaps I have AS. After much exited reading of this and other sites, it's obvious. I'm low on the spectrum but it's bad enough for things i say to kill a conversation stone dead, lose jobs, be considered strange, uncaring, too literal, too logical and a myriad other things that seem to me perfectly normal, but really annoy, alienate, bore or just plain confuse normal people.

It's a bit late at age 41 but better late than never. I'm a van driver (great aspie job, briefest of interactions at each stop and your alone the rest of the day. Just me, radio4 and lots of time to think!) Just did the IQ test linked to at the top of WrongPlanets homepage. Scored 135 with a hangover.

It's been exiting here lately. Every now and then one of us will pipe up with "So that's why you had 24 broken car radios over the front room carpet for 48 hours straight trying to "fix" them!" or "Know you know why I have this symmetry hang up and can't leave the volume control on the car stereo on an odd number, 17 bad 18 good!"

What i would really like some input on is getting diagnosed here inthe UK. I understand that diagnosing an adult with AS is difficult because of all the learnt behaviour covering up the AS. And that someone used to diagnosing children, who haven't yet learnt to hide their AS, may miss it in an adult. Any tips here much appreciated.

I'm happy to be like i am. I can think of no other way I want to be. Proud to be an aspie! If we didn't have something to offer the species we would have been selected out long ago. It wsn't NT's who started to bang the rocks together in our dim and distant past. It was that strange chap at the back of the cave, away from the main group, with a huge collection of shells, a stash of "interesting" stones and an irrational hatred of elderberries. If it wasn't for us, we wouldn't be where we are today and you wouldn't have the computer your using right now.

If you'd like a better handle on who I am, check out my blog at http://armsofmorpheus.blogspot.com/.

Cheers! & thanks for this little oasis of calm

Welcome. I hope you like this here place. I look forward to what you have to say.

Another big BBC Radio 4 fan here.

Have a small battery / earphone radio for days when i'm in a vehicle with no radio, couldn't face a day with no news etc. Nothing better than a decent radio and 400 miles to the next drop.

Les

Just thought of a bumper sticker for stimmers... "Aspie's Rock!"

I'm afraid I can't do that Dave, err, Les. Oh, all right, then.

Welcome to WrongPlanet!

I was diagnosed, as an adult, last year.
I had to pay privately as I was unable to persuade my GP that it was a reasonable thing to fund out of his area, but the expertise does exist:

http://www.autismresearchcentre.com/clinical/class.asp

"This is a clinical service for adults with Asperger Syndrome. Currently there are very few clinics in the UK specializing in the regrettably very late diagnosis of adults with AS. The clinic primarily offers a diagnostic opinion, and takes national referrals."

For my money I was put through an extensive set of questionaires, a three hour interview, and my mother was also interviewed (By letter and phone, in my case). There was the another two hour session discussing the findings and conclusions, and formal reports, for both me and my GP, who has had to give considerable ground, but unfortunately not a refund!


Radio 4 fan too.
This aversion to elderberries: your mother wasn't a hamster was she?

Thanks for the link.. i'll take a look. How much did they charge if you don't mind me asking?

I had a thought that perhaps if a university or somesuch was doing research it may be i could get diagnosed for free. Mind you, havn't even approached my GP yet. May leave that to partner...

Cheers...

Les

(The elderberries came from my asociation of the colour "duck egg blue" with feeling nauseous. I got food poisoning as a kid (cod in parsley sauce) and vomited in a projectile fashion accross my nans front room. I was building a model He111 at the time. The plastic was duck egg blue. Now, just the sight of that colour makes me feel sick, even after all this time. As I was writing my first post i needed a few aspie symptoms to apply to the early human aspie in the cave. An irrational hatred of the colour duck egg blue sprung to mind, but thought it wouldn't really work, so changed it to elderberries for comedic effect. Nicked directly from Monty Python as you noticed...

Bugger.. this kind of thought process happens to me all the time and I have to filter so much when around NT's. last few weeks when realised that i'm meant to have these thoughts is bloody brilliant!! ! Erm.. do you have such convoluted thoughts? A pretty mild example above, but typical of the genre..

In reverse order, yes. A detail can catch my eye/mind and if I'm not very careful I'm off pursuing it to the most unusual, entertaining and just occasionally useful places. An odd case of single minded focus and not single-minded focus at the same time. Especially when the implications proliferate and I'm suddeny confronted by a whole expanding web of thoughts, and find it difficult to put down one (lest I lose it) in order to pursue another (lest I lose it).
It is not a good thing to contemplate the subatomic interaction between tyre and road surface while driving to Cambridge. Attention, but an inappropriate wrong level of attention. Focussing on an interesting or mis-used word and missing the drift of a conversation thereby might be more common.
I'm slowly putting a piece together entitled "lost in the levels" to try and explain this, but I keep getting, err...

The website says £1000 if you can't persuade your NHS GP/psychiatrist/psychologist to cough up, but I think I got mine for £750-800, and that was with one of the named specialists , not an assistant. (Just checked, I did, but that was earlier in 2005, before the latest price rise)

After so many years living in fear of letting thoughts like that slip out, knowing somene else thinks like me is.. BLOODY BRILLIANT!! !



Les