Individuals wishing to be afflicted with Asperger's Syndrome

Post Reply New Topic

I have heard of people acting more aspie after finding out about AS. On another forum, one aspie who claims he recovered from it wrote that aspies act more aspie because they keep being shot down for it and everything they do keeps being blamed for their AS. Plus they quit trying because of being shot down so they start using it as an excuse. I do agree what he said there even though I don't like him. The last part is what I added, not what he said there about people using it as an excuse due to being shot down for their condition. I think when parents are over protective over their child and don't let them try new things and keep telling them they can't do this or that, they quit trying. So they start using it as an excuse by not even trying or bothering to do new things and they let it stop them from doing things and let it limit them because they have been brainwashed into believing they are worse off. My mom on the other hand never shot me down for it. She has always told me I can live on my own, get married, have kids, have a job, instead, she's helped me move forward.
I have an online friend who I talk to on the phone and his parents are ridiculously over protective and he views himself as ret*d and thinks he can't do lot of things. I think he can if he took the effort to try but because of being shot down, he believes he is worse off. But luckily he is working on moving away from his parents and getting away from them. His brother is helping him.
I used to think my parents were over protective but after seeing some aspies online who had parents who were also over protective, they were a lot worse than mine and I realized mine weren't so over protective and holding me back. I had a lot more freedom than these aspies.

I had an online friend who learned AS from me and then decided he had it and started acting like it.

I've come across several people jealous of my intellect.

even though I've been familiar with symptoms of AS/ASD for quite a few years, it never occurred to me that the symptoms fit me, until after years of trying to "fix" myself with therapy I found that I have an AS sibling. once I read first-person perspective of having AS, my life made sense for the first time.

I lived my whole life being told I was "too literal", a nag, a b***h, depressing, that I didn't dress girly enough, that I wasn't submissive in a feminine way, that I'm too loud, that I'm narcissistic, selfish and my conversation topics of choice are boring and narrow. believing that all those things true because I was bombarded with complaints over the years, I really wanted to change into someone people would like, someone that my mother would approve of and love. it never happened and led to depression and social anxiety, and constant verbal abuse led to PTSD.

I looked for an answer but nothing fit. my mental health care professionals could see the depression and anxiety and knew I suffered from some additional physical ailments, but ruled out personality disorder, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. finding out that I actually do fit the criteria for AS and possibly HFA was a relief. why? because now I know there's a reason for certain difficulties and hope that I can use my strengths to adapt a bit better to a world that I've always found confusing.

I don't want anything to be wrong with me.... but, there's less wrong with me than I was afraid there was. hence, relief.

on the flip side of the coin there are people like my mother. she seeks out diseases to have, and I grew up with her "ailments du jour" and having to wait on her hand and foot because she was too weak to move (usually from partying from days on end in between classes and job and inevitably crashing, which somehow entitled her to use me, her child, as her caretaker). she would never face up to what's really wrong with her, which is histrionic personality disorder and/or narcissistic personality disorder and possibly some autistic spectrum issues, if not HFA. her longest-standing association with a community is with Lyme disease survivors. having a respectable disease gives her an opportunity to celebrate her suffering and get attention for it. she even uses Lyme disease as an excuse for failings that predate contracting the illness.

I believe that a greater concern may stem from a fear (a justified fear, in my opinion) that people may falsely lay claim to AS - and then, when they're caught being too tired to act in a way not normal to them (that is to say, in a way normal to NTs), someone will claim that this or that obscure bit of quack medicine was responsible for "curing" their autism! Then we have to face yet another wave of people "concerned for our own good", who want us to restrict our diets or take dangerous chemicals or avoid necessary medical procedures...

This topic makes me feel conspicuous because I haven't been diagnosed, but I don't want to shy away from it either. I would hate to be thought of as a "wannabe" but I've never felt the need to get a professional diagnosis for depression or social anxiety, so I guess I don't see why I should feel the need to be diagnosed as having Asperger's. I came across it while googling my symptoms in the past couple of years or so, because I was getting so tired of struggling and not feeling like I understood myself. I identified with the syndrome and then watched America's next top model with the girl who had Asperger's and identified with her as well. This forum is the first time I've ever read about other people hitting themselves in the head, which is what I do when I'm stressed.... I'm not looking for an excuse, I'm just looking for acceptance, from myself and others. I think I look fairly normal to the outside world; I dress with the times and try to present myself in a way that I won't be an outcast, but when I am unable to have a casual conversation, I feel like people look at me like I'm strange. I find when I DO talk it sounds so foreign to the listeners that I'd rather just keep my mouth shut and smile...or I'm just super fake... Anyway, I'm sure no one really cares about my opinion about this, but I wanted to address it... I also do not refer to myself as an aspie.....

I hope you understand how insulting it is to some for you to assume that Autism is a choice. You do realize what you're implying here don't you?

Don't feel conspicuous dude. I wouldn't like to be thought of as a "wannabe" either, but I am pretty well assured that anyone who felt that would be dead wrong. I never thought about AS for one minute in my life before my shrink told me he was fairly sure that I had it (citing mainly my manner of speaking, information processing, sensory issues and some "stim"-type behaviors) and my initial reaction was something along the lines of panic. That night was the night I found WP while doing research, and that was the night I joined, as a means of trying to gain some perspective. Turns out I found a whole lot of like-minded people, and I dig it, but in reality I haven't gotten much closer to deciding that I do in fact have AS. I don't call myself an aspie either (frankly I don't really like that term), and I never made any bones about where I stand.

I actually would like to get a diagnosis one way or another at some point, although there's no hurry. Like you, I have issues with anxiety and depression (primarily anxiety)--that is 100% certain, I don't need a professional to tell me as much. The picture is less clear when it comes to AS.

This is a very common troll topic and it was your very first post... Can't blame zen_mistress for jumping to that conclusion...

Not really, I would not say 'high'.

This is common for just about everything, not only AS. You'd be surprised how many things have been "diagnosed" to Einstein.

AS people are not the only ones with high issues when socializing, but it is more hyped right now. When you have these issues you wish to look for an examplanation, and AS is about one of the first options...

There are too many description of AS in the web (not on official, true sites) that sound like what you would find in a horoscope (they can apply to anyone) . Anyway, people carve for an explanation for all the problems they've had specially not being able to be a social human being which is just about one of the worse impairments out there. That's the reason they first get convinced they have AS, and once they do, it is hard to convince them otherwise.

Of course, besides of all these guys that have a different 'syndrome' , there are also guys that are incredibly clueless and got confused into thinking that AS is a cool thing and so they decided to have it... But these are very rare cases...

[quote="Vexcalibur"]

I love your signature.

Nice positive post glider18. It got me thinking --

It's mind boggling to imagine all the autistics, from now to the beginning of time, who never knew there was anyone else like them in the world. That probably all of them died not knowing, perhaps hoping that g-d or someone in the afterlife could explain what they were, and why things were so strange.

This is truly an historic time in the history of the world -- large numbers of autistics connecting. Large numbers sharing experiences they can't get from the culture and people around them. That has literally never happened before.

I think I've had that, well, sort of.

After I found out about it, I FELT like I was acting more like it, because I became more self-aware of what I was doing. the people around me noticed no difference. For my entire life I worked on hiding my stims and trying to act normal around people. I never succeeded in acting normal, but I can have conversations with people, and I can keep my aspietivities to myself, when I think nobody is looking or if I can make it look lke regular average people fidgeting. Anyway, not I'm afraid that I might use it as an excuse, so I'm extra careful not to use being an aspie as an excuse, so I seem to be acting more normal now than before, but it's harder to do, now that there's a word for me and other people who have the same things.

I'm really annoyed at that NT girl somebody mentioned who pretends to be aspie every time she's in the room. That's really bad, and you should tell her to stop. Maybe she needs attention, but tell her that if she wants attention, to stop acting different around you. or maybe you shouldn't say that, I don't know.

Oh yeah, I was also gonna mention, about the original post, there's also the opposite, the kind of person who thinks that all diagnoses are fake, and anybody who thinks they have something is misdiagnosing themselves, and also that some disorders don't even exist, but are made up by psychologists or drug companies. Even though this position is ignorant, it is also very annoying and presumptuous, and I dislike it.

As someone with an exceptionally deep understanding of time, I have to say that free will is not something you can really get rid of due to how our brain records our position in time, which adjusts the state of our self in a very complex 4 Dimensional manner.

I don't blame it for what I've done, it just makes more sense of things.

I have to comment on this because I have personal experience with people who feel this way. I think there are two sides to this issue, neither of which is really understood by the autistic community. On the one hand, a person suffering from a real mental problem, but one that is unrelated to autism, may seek an explanation to what he or she is going through from "mild autism." On the other hand, the "mild autism" explanation seems to have become a popular way to write off symptoms of what I will refer to as "alienation," i.e. feelings of estrangement, awkwardness and "not fitting in" which are perfectly normal for anyone living in a modern society.

The former are using the "mild autism" label as a way to mask actual psychiatric issues. The latter are just ordinary human beings who feel they can't cut it in the modern world, believe this to be deeply abnormal, and want to find an explanation to it in the from of a simple diagnosis. Both types of pseudo-autistics are probably motivated by the same thing: a need to come up with a common name for a mixed bag of feelings and experiences that would otherwise be difficult to grasp with a simple description. The difference is that the former type tries to give an incorrect name to existing psychiatric problems while the latter tries to reduce a complex social and societal problem to a "simple" medical one.

I personally know someone who for years and years tried to explain his psychotic and other symptoms as "Asperger's." He was convinced that active use of Google had furnished him with the expertise to diagnose himself and his family and pretty much everyone else close to him with Asperger's syndrome. You only had to mention about a book you had managed to read over the weekend and it was enough to convince him that you have Asperger's. After all, only someone with Asperger's could maintain interest in a particular subject that intensively. He would also point to other completely random phenomena, like a glass of milk you had accidentally brushed off a table last year (this told volumes to him of your "motor problems") or your preference for loose jeans over tightly fitting ones (a dead giveaway, in his mind, for "hypersensitivity"), as evidence of your supposed Asperger's.

Needless to say, he was also completely out of touch with reality and diagnostic criteria when it came to his own self-diagnosis. On the one hand, any random event could swell in his mind into an Asperger's symptom. On the other hand, he counted many personality traits as something entirely unique to "asps" so that any individual quirk he recognized in his own person became a symptom of Asperger's. This lead to his believing, among other things, that his very interest in the topic of Asperger's syndrome is an indicator of his having Asperger's! I did try to tell him that this kind of circularity sounds more like a self-fulfilling prophecy than a diagnosis.

As I already mentioned in connection to his obsession to "diagnose" other people, he was completely fixated by this idea that extended interest in any special field of knowledge is always a giveaway for Asperger's. I guess in his mind anyone with a college degree or a cherished hobby was automatically ASP.

The situation culminated in his being hospitalized for several months after a psychotic episode. He would continually hear conversations in his head and waver between different personalities (he was eventually diagnosed with "psychosis with schizophrenic features"). I thought it was interesting that this obsession of his about Asperger's featured in his psychotic delusions. It was almost as though it had been one of the key factors leading to his ultimate meltdown. (He had tried to get diagnosed with Asperger's for years without success and this seemed to make him depressed). At one point he snapped at me, "Are you Asperger's or are you the Anti-Christ!?" (There was this theological theme in many of his delusions and it was mixed with the Asperger's thing.) It was terrifying.

When I visited him at the ward, even there he continued to talk about his situation as typical for someone with Asperger's. At the same time he exhibited the thought pattern typical to those who don't have a diagnosable disorder but interpret generic alienation as a medical condition: the only other subjects he would talk about in addition to Asperger's were finishing his college degree and his uncertain status in the professional world. I got the impression that he was trying to mask as Asperger's on the one hand his psychotic disorder and on the other his maladjustment to and victimization by modern society.

I just wanted to tell him that (1) there is no shame in being psychotic, so he doesn't have to mask it with a false autism label, and that (2) it is common even for healthy people to fail to deliver all that modern society expects/demands of them.

Incidentally, this is also the message I wish to give to others who cling to the "mild autism" label as an answer to their situation (i.e. when actual autism just isn't there). Please don't fool yourself by latching on to a diagnostic label simply because you are afraid of the true nature of your problems. Please don't think that you have to make up for not fitting in to this streamlined modernity by getting a diagnosis; there is nothing abnormal about being human and imperfect. And why should you think that fitting in to a fundamentally warped society is a merit to your health in the first place?

Scare quotes truly are a "wonderous" thing. You seem to be assuming there is no such thing as mild autism, and working from that flawed assumption into your argument that anyone who does identify with that label fits into your dichotomy. However, if we deconstruct the initial assumption, the branches that stem from it collapse.



I know someone who thought he might have mild autism, got an assessment years later, and was diagnosed positive.

Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal, that's the problem with it. You cannot base a generalisation of a subgroup of people off of your relations with your friend.



Please define. You seem to be presenting the position (again, with the help of scare quotes) that 'mild autism' and 'actual autism' are intrinsically opposite. This is in fact not the case, or we wouldn't have people with Aspergers/HFA/etc. But please, continue.



This last part seems to just be a rant against the perceived opinions of others. There's not really a lot to say on this paragraph, because it's just setting up a position no one has taken up, and then knocking it down again. You have deftly thrashed the argument that you put forwards, but I can't actually see anyone supporting it. If a swarm of NT people suddenly appear in the thread claiming that fitting in is good, being imperfect is abnormal, and that they are in mortal fear of their 'true problems' (heaven knows what those might be), then your argument may well have merit. But so far, this crisis has yet to arise, so your staunch diligence in that area may well be misdirected.

I have not argued that there are no degrees of autism. I have merely suggested there are people who are attracted to the idea of belonging to the milder end of the so called spectrum of autistic disorders.

I do believe there lie definitional issues at the mild end of the spectrum. The spectrum way of thinking about autism leaves much room for subjective interpretation, particularly when the social norms and conditions against which the individual is evaluated (and against which he evaluates himself) are not properly interrogated. Some criteria for milder forms of autism I have encountered are so broad as to be applicable to practically any pubescent awkwardness.

But why do people who identify with autism get so defensive when someone points out the simple and really quite obvious fact that every person who believes to be X is not necessarily X? Because deep inside they are concerned that their own diagnoses may not be so accurate after all? And if they aren't accurate and are called into question, then what? An identity crisis ensues?

Listening to the discourse about Asperger's, for instance, I sometimes wonder how many people actually depend for their identities on this diagnostic label, what with the overpowering urge of some people to get diagnosed with Asperger's (this is the topic of the present thread).

I told you about this person who spent years clinging on to a disorder he didn't have because he longed for the comfort a diagnosis can bring. It lead to his ignoring the real problems and eventually to his being committed to a psychiatric ward. I don't think he is the rare exception, seeing how popular these botched self-diagnoses have become. I think of him as an example of the dangers psychiatric fads present to people suffering from mental disorders.

There are many more who do not suffer from a disorder to begin with but become victimized by society's narrow definition of what is normal. These people may want a diagnosis like Asperger's because it is a fairly non-stigmatizing psychiatric category which would provide a guilt-free explanation to their inability to adjust to society's changing expectations. For them, getting diagnosed may be an unconscious effort to escape from shame, a face-saving mechanism.

I know I'm not alone in my opinion that diagnoses are much sought after and that they are often false. I recently read an article by someone called Thomas Sowell who has worked with late-developing children and he said most of them turned out to be just that, late developers, as opposed to the autistic children they were thought to be. And I think it is just sensible to scrutinize the current rush to diagnose every perceived abnormality. So much harm can be done simply by delaying the accurate diagnosis (including the diagnosis that there is nothing to diagnose), not to mention potential harm from unwarranted treatment.



Not against any opinion expressed in this thread. Just against the general ethos of individuality in our times which dictates that any shortcomings of the individual in the social world can and must be traced back to some specific fault in the individual himself, as opposed to some fault in the wider social context in which the individual exists. This is what I see behind the frenzied interest in categories like Asperger's (and, I must add, ADHD); a blindness to the fact that the individual and his problems do not exist apart from a social context and, therefore, can not be addressed simply by looking at the individual.