Rant about people with "self-diagnosed" AS

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I scored 136 of 200 on the aspie quiz. My neurotypical score was 60 of 200.

And I can understand your concern. It happened with Fibromyalgia. When I was diagnosed with that by a rheumatologist I stormed out of her office because I truly believed the diagnosis was a total B.S. diagnosis. It took me two more years of pain and debilitating fatigue AND a second opinion to finally admit she might be right. I've been suffering with the symptoms since I was about 12.



It's all good.

But you still haven't seemed to absorb all the other reasons people have to not get diagnosed.
Do you need me to summarise them for you?

You make it sound like getting a diagnosis is easy, as it probably was for you because (a) you were a kid, more services for kids, and (b) you were financially dependant.
If you can point me to a place that specialises in Adult Diagnosis that is within 6 hours drive of my geographical location AND doesn't have a two year waiting list, I'd like to hear.

As a consequence, then, you (the diagnosed AS) don't get to claim any accomplishments by any non-diagnosed (or non-verifiable diagnosed) people. That includes anyone who died before AS was added to the DSM.

Hello Zancaur,
thanks for the apology. I understand about not knowing how it is with other people and how we think that our circumstances are universal. I do understand why you would not want to feel 'not normal' and less of a person in other people's eyes. It feels pretty rotten!

I scored 187/200 my first time on the Aspie quiz and 10/200 neurotypical, until some one here on WP suggested I do it with out taking into consideration all the decades I have had to adapt in neurotypical society. Then my score was higher in the former and lower in the latter.

The most eye opening for me was in the face recognition tests, where I scored about 32% recognition. now THAT was amazing to me, as I realized I had not been able to tell people apart in movies, or in real life, either.


If it is any comfort, just remember that out of all the world, Aspies come to WP, so it just SEEMS like there are a lot more of us in the world. In real time/non internet life, we are quite rare, actually.

all the best,
Merle

that is very harsh. You have to keep in mind that Asperger Syndrome is much easier to diagnose as a child, and for those of us who have matured past the optimal age of diagnosis have great difficulties just getting a diagnosis. And that's not to mention all of those who grew up before there were standard diagnosis criteria. It is NEVER and I repeat NEVER!! okay to say that someone is an "eccentric, antisocial nerd with nearly no friends". I think that at the moment, you seem to epitomize antisocial. You can hold whatever opinions you may, but don't hark on other people who are exactly like you, but have been less fortunate as to receiving an official diagnosis.

and before you start, no, I am not "self-diagnosed;" I have been referred to many licensed psychology professionals, none of whom can reach an easy consensus, especially now due to my age.
Even if I did have an "official diagnosis" I would find you to be abrasive, a bigot, and someone obviously suffering from a superiority complex. Good day to you.

NO NEED TO GET HOSTILE?? Are you serious? You must be joking. >.> After going out of your way to target a group of people who have done absolutely nothing wrong to you, you tell someone else that there is no need to get hostile?

Don't make a blanket accusation, and then pull some punches just because your argument is obviously flawed. If that is seriously your opinion, then I suggest the first thing you do is alter/remove this thread.

hmm, technically that would exclude people like me, but I suspect includes the creator of this thread.

Sorry to you all for the late posts, but I've been out the last few days, and missed out on one heck of a counter-rant. :D Anyways, I think I'm done (for now)

congrats to the thread creator for one thing; this is the only thread I've ever felt compelled to read every page of. I'll let you know how mad I still am in six pages :D

am have at least three aspies in family-dad,sister and uncle.
neither dad or sister are bothered about diagnosis because they have been hf enough to cope.
sister is a councilor and dad still works as a fork lift driver in his sixties-both of them own their own houses,why would they need to get diagnosed when they dont have any need for it?

why should people have to prove themselves to others,unless they need some sort of support/help?

most self diagnosed WPers overstate they are self diagnosed, because of this elitism,that is not faking.

a undiagnosed aspie,autie or spectrumer is the same as many diagnosed on the spectrum-they went through the same difficulties,the same challenges and the same differences-the only difference between them being one group has it written down that they have it.


why bother about what others have and dont have,what is the point? what harm are they doing?,use wps ignore settings if self diagnosed users bother that much.

Who is a sixteen-year-old to tell anyone that they don't have Asperger's? Do you have to march into the forest and tell every tree "you are a tree" before they can say "thank God I'm finally a tree"? I think that generalizations are inherently bad, because no two people are affected by the same circumstances, and you should evaluate each and every one of our reasons for not having obtained a diagnosis before you make accusations of hidden motives.

hi Zancaur
i am so far a self diagnosed aspy and i am waiting for my apointment with the mental health team. i am over 40 and had to live with
the symptoms all my life. my life has been allmost hell, allthough i have got through life ok i am a total failure. the longast time i have held a job down for is about 6 months. i have had mental breakdowns, and loads of other stupid problems. if i new then what i know now
things would be totaly different. put urself in my shoes and imagine trying to get through life with aspys but not ever knowing whats wrong with you, drives you insane. fortunatly i discoverd this sight and the more posts an threads i read the closer to the answer i get.
i am not eccentric nor a nerd i have chosen friends and i am antisocial but not by choice. to come to terms at my age that i have aspergers takes alot of courage and self understanding. but i understand your concern but like i say imagine living through life not knowing

I know how OP feels about the self diagnosed.

I used to be against it too, I used to think it was wrong to say you have something you haven't even been diagnosed yet because you could be wrong.

I had a bad experience with someone who wanted to have the condition so what did he do, he started to change and act like he has it. He didn't care what I said, didn't listen to me, didn't take me seriously, and he was harassing me. Then it turned into stalking because I'd block him and he IM me under a different sn. He was basically following me on AIM. And c'mon I had spoken to lot of aspies on IM and none of them acted like that, they were all respectful and sensitive. Even they agreed with me he was a jerk and a stalker and the fact he was trying to control me.
he also happened to have brain damage because he was hit by a car when he was almost seven so I couldn't say if he had AS or not because head injuries can cause the symptoms but if he was so sure he has it, I told him he should talk to his mother about it and go see a doctor. I even tried asking him questions about his early childhood to know if he was an aspie or not but he couldn't remember so I told him he would have to ask his mother then.

For a while I thought self diagnosed aspies were just like him, all rude people and stalkers and don't care about other people or even listen to them, curse at them, using AS as an excuse to manipulate people. But I learned from reading on the forums that is not true. I learned why people don't even bother going for a diagnoses, it's also obvious they have it because they have lot of the symptoms and a lot of it in their childhood so it explained everything about themselves. Also the fact that some had already been evaluated as kids but couldn't find anything wrong with them because AS wasn't recognized back then, but instead were labeled 'odd' or something. Some even said they were told someone suspected they were a little autistic or acted it so that also hints to them they have AS.

But what does disgust me is people finding out they have AS and then they start using it as an excuse and they like give up on themselves, say they faked being normal instead of learning how to cope in life. My ex is an example because I believed he used it as an excuse because he acted like he did, even one of my own aspie online friend's thought so too.

I certinally don't see myself as faking anything. Am I faking social skills I have learned when I do them, am I faking knowing personal space because I know how far back to stand away from people now after my mother had told me to stand an arm length away and if my hand goes past them, then I am too close so i have to back up. If I am more than an arm length away from them, I am still fine.
Am I also faking flexibility, am I also faking by not talking about my obsessions over and over to the same people?


Even NT kids go through the same thing, they also learn how to behave and act but does that mean they learned how to fake it?

That depends on what exactly people are learning.

Your experience sounds very far removed from, say, learning that some strings of sound go with other strings of sound, without knowing (or without always knowing) the meaning of said strings of sound, and learning to listen for some so you can say others out through your mouth, while in situations that cause you tremendous amounts of overload, and at the same time suppressing every unusual movement your body does that normally allows you to deal with overload (or suppressing it until you get in private), making excuses for the times when you can't speak at all or when you say things that have nothing to do with what you mean (because you can't let on that these are due to a speech problem, nor would you even necessarily be able to), regurgitating a whole lot of rote-learned social conventions without much understanding, and all of this while people are constantly touching you (which is painful), talking to you (which is painful and often incomprehensible), etc.

And then, on top of that, all that stuff you're doing means that you have nothing left to understand or properly react to the situation left, because there's no energy left for comprehension even if you'd otherwise be able to understand. Nor is there any energy to actually socialize in the ways you'd normally be capable of, because you've just spent all of that energy elsewhere. And wondering daily when you're going to be unable to hide certain things anymore (because you're running up a massive debt in cognitive and physical energy), and what is going to happen to you at that time.

(The "you" in this is "you-plural" although the person I'm replying to is included in this.) If that, or something like it, is not your experience, then you should be aware that this is similar to the experience of most people who actually talk about what that was like. If it was, even if not easy, still not unusually difficult for you to maintain this stuff once you learned it (and/or if your only obstacle to doing these things was not having known to do them before), if your climb uphill was one in which you ended up with your feet touching the ground at a higher altitude instead of dangling off a cliff by your fingernails at the same altitude (that's a post about a metaphor I've used for this particular difference in experiences), then you shouldn't judge the people who did experience it as dangling off a cliff, and as impossibly hard to sustain. It's two totally different experiences, and they can't really be considered equivalent to each other just because the outward results might seem similar to some people.

Edit: Post removed.

Last edited by Zancaur on 08 May 2008, 8:47 am, edited 1 time in total.

I guess not everyone reads every single page before replying you know. A bad habbit I have too but luckily I read every page before I replied.