Hi, I'm new to WP

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Hey there!

I'm new to this site so I thought I'd introduce myself.
My name is AJ, I'm 19 years old and about to start University in approximately two months. I have Asperger's Syndrome but am undiagnosed though. I have been to a therapy centre in my area where I've met and talked to somebody working there (I don't know what her qualifications are though) but it turned out that they don't diagnose but merely estimate whether a person could or could not be on the spectrum. I was given the contact informaton of a few places to go if I want to be diagnosed but I'm not sure about this yet, so I guess I'll stay undiagnosed for another while. I don't think any other family member of mine has an ASD mainly because they either deny its existence or seem to have developed pretty good soft skills and enjoy interpersonal relationships.
I have been dealing with some depressive phases ever since my childhood and have an autoimmune disease affecting both my joingts and eyes. But since that's nothing mental I guess it's rather unimportant and not really bothering me anyways.

I'm very interested in crime and forensics -concerning both the scientific as well as the psychological aspects-, fiction- and non-fiction-literature, english as a language, the Nazi regime and television. Other than that I had some very intensive though short-term interests in the past; so I've been, for a couple of months, obsessed with the us-american military, terrorism, intelligence agencies, rain, astronomy and Israel. My interest in these topics has lessend after three to twelve months but I still like doing according research, especially since many of them overlap in certain aspects.

Oh, and I don't know whether this it the time to mention it but while I have almost always had at least some brief friends I do have a bit of an experience with bullying, too. Nothing physical and it mostly were just a few people (but then, again: this weren't only fellow students but at times teachers whose classes I thankfully only had very few times a week) , therefore I wasn't an "extreme" case, I guess... but yeah, just sayin'.

So for now, this is all I can think of. I don't really know what could be left to say... so, anyways, I'm quiete looking forward to maybe exchange opinions on anything with other members of wrongplanet and to have a look at the forum threads and such,

AJ

Regarding the diagnosis, part of what it means to be a "spectrum disorder" is that it extends all the way to what is regarded as "normal" and different shades of "normal" (introversion/extraversion) might, too, be part of the "spectrum". So it all depends on where you draw the line. If you don't hurry up and get diagnosed soon, then DSM 5 will come out which has much higher threshold for diagnosis and you will be "normal" under new criteria; but if you do hurry up and get diagnosed while DSM 4 is still in use, you might qualify for Asperger. But neither DSM 4 nor DSM 5 is either right or wrong; these are just different ways of drawing the line. The main reason it might be important is in order to decide which services you can be qualified for, which is more on the economic side rather than medical side. Unfortunately psychiatry is not a hard science.

So it sounds like you have a lot of interests you can literally put a date when they started and when they finished. WOW. Is there anything that "trigger" you to become interested in a particular subject, and/or "stop" on that topic? Do your interests follow some kind of logical progression (as in, Nazi regime was the reason Israel was created and subsequent American support of Israel encourages terrorists to attack America)? Or do your interests just randomly pop up and the logical links are coincidental?

I didn't know that there was going to be a DSM5 next year! I'll probably try to get an appointment before Unioversity starts then, so I can get done with these things before having to concentrate on something else...

Sometimes I can tell what triggered a certain interest, sometimes I can't. I started being very interested in the Nazi Regime when I was in second grade. It was the first time that we really learned about what happened and were told some more details. However, I just wanted to know a lot more and asked my parents about it, those mentioned Anne Frank and this is, for example, how I ended up reading Anne Frank's diary at the age of seven. Then I found some more books about the entire topic - but when I was done with those and ran out of new input I began to lose interest quickly and I remember having found something different in thrid grade already (the Nazi Regime and WWII have been reoccuring interests though).

While I did read quiete some articles and papers about the founding of Israel and some stuff on people who survived the Holocaust and went to live in Israel later, my interest in Israel wasn't connected to the Nazi Regime. I started intensively researching information about Israel when my interest in Mossad lessened... but again, there wasn't really a trigger. "The Great Santini" by Par Conroy kind of triggered my interest in the us-military but most of the time I can't really tell what does. I metaphorically stumble over something rather little, like a keyword about which I only want to get some brief information, and then one topic leads to another and so on and while a lack of new information used to be what stopped an interest so that I would still research it, just not as obsessively, I don't know for sure what's stopping them nowadays. It just ends. I found myself starting a book and when I was halfway through I realized that I preferred reading about something absoluetely different, just like that...