Rant about people with "self-diagnosed" AS

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There are doctors who misdiagnose AS, you could as well not really have AS, just that you, like "the undiagnosed guys that aren't aspies by default", show some traits + your therapist did not make a proper diagnostic and thus accidentally gave you AS.

There are also doctors who wouldn't diagnose AS, call it lack of experience or knowledge or just plain incompetence, there are people out there who got AS, don't know it and perhaps were diagnosed with something else that's not what they have.

Just saying... doctors can be lame.

I don't know if I have AS, I think I might actually be borderline, have no idea, but I still show the traits and have had issues in the past, so I can get helped from this site and help you as well, anyways, don't assume that all the undiagnosed guys are just geeks who want to get rid of having to be social, that's probable but that's probably not the majority, I am sure many undiagnosed people that think they are AS are working on it just like you are.

2ukenkerl,

Professionals as a majority, know what "severe" is compared to laypeople. "Severe" is such a subjective term when people use it, and it's this reason why official disorders actually exist; a group of professionals define what "severe" is in relation to a normal level of difficulty.

Everyone can be wrong, but I'd trust the professional who knows more than I do about these disorders from a clinical standpoint, in relation to myself in how the disorder manifests compared to those with the disorder, and those who don't have it.

The only problem with the HMOs, et all, is that there are too many loopholes. It basically ends up being like a paid socialized medicine. Many of the problems, and few of the benefits. We also have PPOs that CAN be worse.(Greater choice, but limits are imposed on that, and the cost can be MUCH higher) And then there is regular insurance.(More choices but potentially higher cost). As for prescriptions, they are supposedly FAR cheaper in Canada.

BTW Massachusetts has a MORONIC plan! They insist that EVERYONE has insurance, but THEY MUST PAY! If they DON'T pay, they get like a $1000 fine. Where does that money go? WHO KNOWS!?!?!?? You don't get any insurance! SO, if you came up short one year, the next year you have to get that much more just to break even. If they want the $1000, they could AT LEAST provide some meager coverage!

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt65126.html


Oh please click on my just new post! Pretty please. With sugar on top.
It's that cute. Plus, Lab Pet posted it.
So appropriate right now...sigh

I think that the following is pretty accurate:

This ivory tower attitude isn't helping our case at all you know.

hey! don't you go dissin' Merlin's magic!

Merle

There may be a few people here who have latched onto Aspergers as an excuse, but I think you'll find that most people who claim to be Aspergers probably have a reason to do so. Enough of this "You're not really Aspie" BS.

What if your diagnosis was wrong? Maybe you're just a fruitcake with no friends? Then you'd look pretty stupid for coming here and telling all the undiagnosed how much better you are.

Well, it IS interesting that they left some explanations out and people are left to guess. What I consider severe because I can't take certain jobs, stay away from certain things, can't really socialize, am overly shy, am heavily involved in interests, and have such skewed senses, may be laughed at by someone like you. Like it or not, Psychiatrists DO tend to be subjective to some degree. Maybe all of them are quite a bit so.

It is like going to school and saying that a student must be able to do math. One teacher may think 2+2=4 is good enough, and another may ask that if one person goes 40MPH heading west and another goes 100MPH heading north, when will they be at precisely the same point, assuming the started in the exact same place and the E-W radius is 19000M and the N-S is 20000M and the first guys vehicle broke down for an hour! And they would try to see if the student can find the answer to five deceimal places in a minute!

HECK, some argue that the 2nd amendment of the US constitution means something ENTIRELY different because of a "misplaced comma". Of course, they don't seem to care so much about commas elsewhere, and it would make the 2nd amendment out of place and illogical, and fail to explain the history of the us. but oh well.... As for saying "the majority" you, at least in part, recognize that Who_Am_I is right.

Every time I see discussions like this, it pushes me more and more to wanting to have an OBJECTIVE way to test.

the problem i have is this, I worry that i've just convinced myself that i have AS, I mean if you study on something and then you take a test on it, like the aspie quiz you can take on this site, you can fool it because you can find the right questions to answer to sound more like an aspie. how can they make a test where you can't fool it, makes people who really want to know if they have AS not get a diagnosis because they think they just fooled the system.

I'm a diagnosed aspie who went through the utter hell of trying to get dxed in adulthood-- and on top of that, being a female trying to get dxed in adulthood. It ain't necessarily easy. So coming from a once-self-dxed-aspie-turned-professionally-diagnosed-aspie, I don't personally doubt someone who also has a self-dx. They're clearly getting some benefit from the knowledge, even if it's just understanding themselves a little better. In adulthood, sometimes that's the biggest gain with getting dxed; I know it has been for me and it's changed my life.

Autism is a spectrum, and it doesn't just relegate itself to the diagnostic labels humans have come up with. There ARE going to be LOTS of people who fall in the border regions and those who fall a little bit outside. Personally, I think those people are still autistic, because to me autism isn't a set group of observable traits and if you don't have all of them then you're not autistic. To me, autism is a type of cognitive processing, and that processing is shared by a larger minority of people than just officially dxed autistics. To me, the brain is autistic, not the behavior; the behavior's just an indicator.

I'm guessing probably about 1-2% of the human population is diagnosable as autistic; but then probably another couple percentage points go to people who aren't diagnosable but still share similar modes of processing.

I wish everyone would stop pointing fingers of "You can't be autistic because I'm autistic" or "I'm more autistic than you are". It's childish and what good does it do? Only makes people feel worse. And we have these same threads over and over and over again. It's just a bitchfest. It doesn't prove anything, and usually just gets people angry.

Autism isn't a club, even though many people treat it like such. You have to be initiated, meet all the requirements-- hell, why not come up with a secret handshake??? It's that ridiculous.

It can be very difficult to design such a test. What you're talking about here is Face Validity. Face validity means an instrument is measuring what it seems to be measuring; a certain amount of face validity is desirable. However, too much and the problem is that the testee can also tell what the tool is meant to be measuring and can more easily fool the test and get the score they want.

The MMPI-2 is a good example of a test which has appropriate face validity yet also has built in traps essentially to make sure a person is answering as honestly as possible.

But you're right, using a quiz or even a few (since most of the quizzes out there have excellent face validity) doesn't diagnostically suffice for exactly the reason you brought up.

Other ways to counter that while not completely redesigning the test itself would be to have another person, like a parent, who knows you well to fill it out and compare answers. Now, as far as some issues, like maybe sensory issues and sexual issues, they won't know as much, but for other things, like your history, it'd be easier to match their answers to yours to make sure you're not exaggerating or making too light of things.

In a diagnostic assessment, if such a tool is used, hopefully the interview portion of the assessment will always bring some balance, as well as an interview with your parents or other family. It's for that reason in diagnostics that the diagnostician never uses just a single tool but usually a collection of things, including interview.

If those built-in traps are so great, why do they detect more "dishonesty" the more educated the people taking it are?

Also, I know one of the validity scales on that thing measures whether you have the same answer when the question is asked in a different manner, which can trip up both people who are extremely literal and do see a difference, and also people whose answer is really "in between yes and no" who answer it differently every time because they're really indifferent to the question? And, in the scale that measures validity by saying things that are supposedly true of everyone, what about people those things might not be true of?

Not only that, but there is so much on that test that gives inaccurate results when taken literally. For instance, "do you ever lie?" could mean if the person had ever deliberately omitted information they didn't want to talk about, or ever told a white lie, they might say yes, whereas someone else who thought "lie" meant major lies would say no. And same with "take things that don't belong to you," which a person could interpret as many things other than theft, or other than serious theft, and which would also depend heavily on the person's notion of property. And so forth.

Edit: Post removed.

Last edited by Zancaur on 08 May 2008, 8:46 am, edited 1 time in total.

I'm afraid I don't know the MMPI-2 well enough to knowingly respond to this. It sounds like you've studied it more than I have.



http://www.rdos.net/eng/Aspie-quiz.php

I have that much, a verbal diagnosis. I just prefer to keep my problems off of paper. Whether people do or not is purely up to them and their specific situation, in my opinion.