Aspergers the syndrome of the year

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hey folks , lets just say we have aspergers and self diagnose ourselves because its popular. I read these threds and wonder what the heck is going on ?? Only Doctors and Psychiatrists can diagnose you. My son has it and had to go to 4 diffearant doctors and shrinks to be diagnosed. Self diagnoses is dangerous. Its like what i call the pill of the month club. they advertise a pill and everybody has to take it because they may have a symptom or 2.
Now I am a 46 year old adult and I may have it too , since my son does. But I am far from qualified to diagnose myself. And as far as i have read here aspergers does lead to secondary symptoms- I am bi-poler (diagnosed). So dont go off on all these tangents i read here. Get a real diagnoses from a doctor trained to recogize aspergers.
Many other sydromes can mimic aspergers. Its not fair to the ones that really have it and have had it to be mimic'ed because all of a sudden its popular. For years now I have had to explain what aspergers is. I finally got my son into the proper special education he needed after 3 years or torment and torture to both of us from the school/teachers/kids.
So unless you have a doctors degree , dont self diagnose. Get a real diagnoses and then you qualify for SSD/SSI for the rest of your life. Yes they do pay for aspergers ! !
go to http:***************m.net my forum and sign up we have alot of professional help given to us from doctors and psychiatrists. And maybe a game or 2 for fun

Hm... Well, sometimes I question whether or not people who self-diagnose really do have it or if they just say they have it to be 'different'. On the other hand, doctors are very expensive and some people may not be able to afford getting an official diagnosis. So with this in mind, if someone says they have AS, I believe them.

Actually, doctors are just as able to make mistakes as a hypochondriac. They can be just as ready to throw pills at a problem that requires a change in philosophy or outlook. And they can have their own biases. If I make a mistake in diagnosis, I can acknowledge it possibly faster than a doctor who doesn't want to admit he or she was wrong. And, considering that homosexuality was once considered a mental illness, I wouldn't say doctors are any more qualified to say what's an illness.

It's ironic that you tell people not to diagnose themselves, but suggest that they go on disability for life. Did you get permission from all the taxpayers to say that? Are you economically educated to say such things, or are you "self-diagnosing?" financial solutions? Shouldn't we leave that to trained economists?

I see your point sinsboldly, but as one who works with psychiatrists full time in a mental health hospital, I can tell you that diagnoses are assigned in the most casual way in this profession. When someone is admitted after hours, a diagnosis is assigned by psychiatrists on the basis of a nurse's report over the phone. I agree that there probably are people who are anxious to call themselves an Aspie, and may inappropriately diagnose themselves, but you assign far too much professtional competence to psychiatrists when you assume that they can accurately diagnose Asperber's on the basis of a few office visits or a few hours spent with a patient in the hospital. You would not believe the multiple diagnoses of some patients that have been admitted several times to the hospital where I work. Every time such a person is admitted, they are likely to pick up a new diagnosis, depending on which psychiatrist happens to be on call. I have seen some very, very seriously disturbed psychotic patients dubbed 'Asperger's', and I can tell you that these patients are far removed from behavior patterns that would even suggest Asperger's. I am an older, self-diagnosed Aspie, and I know that if I wished I could get an 'official' diagnosis if I chose by simply saying the right things to someone evaluating me. So the potential for misdiagnosis isn't really decreased in the setting of a professional evalutation for someone determined to acquire the diagnosis, and that would be true even if psychiatry were a far more rigourous science than it is.

Well, there are probably two different people that say they are self diagnosed. One of them might be the kind you described, that wishes only to use Aspergers as a popularity label, not realizing what it might imply to other people, or possibly because they don't want to admit they have a particular other disorder, possibly worse than Aspergers. The other kind of people who call themselves self diagnosed know who they are and what they are like (and I believe that nobody knows you better than yourself, not even your doctor or psychiatrist), and know that their characteristics match the ones that commonly describe people with Aspergers, as it is defined. These people say they are self diagnosed, not because they like to throw around a label, but because they really believe they have Aspergers. At the very least, they might be honest in admitting that they diagnosed themselves by saying it was a "self-diagnosis", not a diagnosis done by a professional, and may even admit that they might not have it if a professional diagnosed them and said they had something else. It is not necessarily implied that you are a professional if you are self diagnosed. It simply means you suspect you have Aspergers, and may or may not be interested in getting a real diagnosis.

I have a partial diagnosis (frontal lobe developmental disorder with elements of AS).

I went for this because it was suggested to me that I had AS when I described my stimming.

The doctor said he would need independant confirmation of what I was like as a child before he could give me a full diagnosis - in other words, he did not say that I do not have AS, merely that he did not have enough information to diagnose me.

(Oddly enough though, he was quite happy to "diagnose" my dad as having AS just on the way I described him, without even meeting him. I think I am much more "aspie" than my dad, although he does have many of the traits.)

Also, looking back at my schooldays, I cannot think of one single child in my year group who was more obviously aspie than I was - although I can think of at least two others that may well have been aspies too.

I went to a very large school, and if you look at the incidence of AS in the population, there should have been several in my year group.

If I was the one that stood out the most... do the maths!

Of course, what you also have neglected to mention besides the costs of diagnosing (it requires several office visits to a psychiatrist, psychologist, neuropsychiatrist, etc.) is that since this is a fairly new diagnosis in the US, lots of us who are older have slipped through the cracks on being diagnosed. Also, being older presents its very own set of problems. Often we have alienated (either by choice or by behaviour) those that would be able to provide the most significant information as to our formative years. Some diagnosticians use these things as a criteria. Our own memories, and especially the older we get and the higher functioning we are in the NT world, makes the diagnosis difficult as well. The criteria basically boils down to the fact that we have several behaviours that are indicative of several forms of attention disorder, ASD continuum, etc, but not enough for a definitive diagnosis for any one of those things. Asperger's, and you can all jump me if I'm wrong, is basically the catch all diagnosis that acknowledges that we have speech/sensory/processing/behaviour/etc issues, that can not be pointed out as Tourette's, ADD/HD, OCD, bi-polar, etc. on a more permanent and individual basis.

Having AS can be like a really demented House episode because of the high occurence of co-morbidity with other attention disorders.

Another problem is finding a doctor that is actually qualified to not only diagnose AS, but also is able to treat the various co-morbid things that go along with it and understand how they all react together. There are only 3 people in Indiana that I would really consider qualified to work with AS people.

What I am saying is that it's not incredibly ridulous to diagnose yourself under these circumstances. My son diagnosed himself at age 12 and by 15 we had an offical diagnosis. Now given that the features that are indicative to his AS are the very things that I do, I can reasonably assume that I have AS as well. It would be silly to assume that the opposite is true. The opposite being that I made him AS by teaching him to behave in an AS fashion. There would not be enough accurate indicators in this case to warrant a diagnosis.

Really, I don't relate to WP as a forum for specifically AS people, although isn't it nice how that worked out for all of us? But instead a way for me to relate my individual weirdities to others and find that I AM NOT ALONE. The labels don't matter in the sense of the label in and of itself. The labels matter because we as humans all need an identity (and those of us on the spectrum often lack the social skills to identify with other humans) for our self esteem and that in some cases, such as in the case that you mentioned that the AS so significantly impairs a person as to be able to function in the "real" world and they qualify for SSI. The important part of the label is that the significant impairments can qualify you for other adult services such as Vocational Rehabilitation so that you can get a job and actually function as a contributing member of society. Other than than, you can call me blue with yellow polka dots and silver stripes.

represent!

I can't speak for other people, but my "self diagnosis" is just a technicality because I haven't completed the diagnostic process yet. It takes a long time and a lot of money. I was breifly diagnosed with Autism when I was 5, but then the doctor switched it to ADD - Predominantly Inattentive Type because I had no language delay. Many people with AS were diagnosed with ADD-PI in the 80s, before AS was being diagnosed. These people had their diagnoses switched to AS in the 90s, but I did not get reevaluated at the time because it is costly.

Now my psychiatrist thinks that I have AS, but I still have to go back for more tests. "In the Process of Being Diagnosed" was not a profile choice, so mine says "Self-Diagnosed" because I have yet to complete the process.

I have no interest in trying to be different. I've been different my whole life, and suffered because of it. I've had to work hard to learn how to act normal enough to get a job and do other things that many people take for granted. I don't want to change myself or be seen a certain way; I just want to continue to exist independently.

Ironic that this guy suggests that self-diagnosers are on a gravy train. Actually, self-diagnosis, for me, anyway, is a misnomer: I thought I was fine. It was everyone ELSE telling me that I was wierd, freaky, odd, asexual, dyslexic, etc. When I learned about Aspergers, all it did was confirm what everyone else was saying about me. And explain things like sensory issues, which is the only reason I even came to accept it; (before that, I was adamantly on the side of Thomas Szasz.)

Stitch, let me ask you this: you claim that self-diagnosed aspies are only doing it because "lets just say we have aspergers and self diagnose ourselves because its popular." I But if you believe in the profession so much, you would know the error of diagnosing people you've never met, let alone a whole group of people with blanket condemnations/diagnoses. What is your justification?

And incidentally, I self-diagnosed myself as gay. Does that make it any less true? Does that mean I did it because it was popular? Hardly. Especially since I was suicidal about it for years. Coming to the knowledge that I'm aspie/autistic does not make me more popular, more accepted, or life easier.

ITA!! !! Yeah Space Player.

The whole thread reminds me of when the judge asked my ex husband if he was aware that my son "suffered" from Asperger's. He doesn't suffer from it. He suffers from having an as*hole for a dad. Not from Asperger's.

stitchimage,

So why did he have to go to 4 doctors if they are so perfect? I wish I diagnosed myself more and earlier, than I did. I would have been better off. I've only told 2 people in person that I have it! I didn't even know it was so "popular"! My real mother didn't know about it though. My step mother probably wouldn't have if she didn't spend some time with an organization that worked with "disabled" people. She said they didn't see any point in paying for AS. They weren't "disabled"! BTW, NEITHER person changed how they treated me, and they still respect me.

To be honest, I don't see a problem here. When each of us signed up on Wrong Planet, we were asked whether we were diagnosed or fit into some other category.

People are obviously free to have their own views on the validity and reliability of self-diagnoses. Personally, I tend, speaking very generally, to treat them with a degree of suspicion. However, I don't allow my views to interfere with how I relate to particular individuals. IMO, what others do is none of my business.