What motivates Self-Diagnosis?

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I wanted to know the answer to a simple question I had in my own head..."What is wrong with me?" I knew a girl with OCD and concluded that wasn't what I had without doing any research. I knew a guy with ADHD and concluded that maybe I have that but it's unlikely. I looked up autism and immediately noticed something right away that I had always hated myself for. Children with autism have frequent meltdowns, where they sometime injure themselves, often by self biting. This almost made me cry right away but I didn't want to jump to conclusions. I had a severe problem with this as a child, but I was clearly not autistic. Then I discovered adult autism. As soon as I saw the words "socially awkward" I was convinced. I've never considered myself awkward but hordes of people have told me I was. I then promptly became obsessed until recently the obsession has subsided. I've been professionaly diagnosed and yes I do still doubt it. Especially because my diagnosis is PDD-NOS (atypical autism) not AS. I've also been diagnosed OCD. Since then I've been doing research on lots of different personality disorders and have realized had I discovered one of these first, I may not have ever even considered autism. There are some out there that are very close to AS like Schizoid/ Schizotypal Personality Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Personaltiy Disorder (not the same as OCD) and many more that I can't think of now. So there you go. Mental health itself, I personally believe, is all on a sort of spectrum. Since so many symptoms of so many things overlap, it makes it hard for me to believe that they are all completely seperate disorders. But that's a little off topic. I think I'll start a thread on that.

Some people come here, looking for answers. They start to see themselves, in those of us, who are DXed. That becomes their motivation.

Exactly, it's simply finding a name for something that's always been there. Before I ever heard of Asperger's I knew I was significantly challenged socially. I marveled at how people did things and wondered who told them and why nobody told me. Where was the instruction book? All of the things I assumed were just part of my deficient personality and hoped I could magically overcome them some day. I am just recently discovering how the cognitive problems that have always daunted me are associated with an ASD. Like Temple Grandin stated in Alex's documentary, people with Asperger's have always been around.

Maybe you will begin to laugh because of me. But I always believed that I was a normal guy. I mean, knew I was different, but different like all the people is different. Not different but equal to another different people.

Between the "instructions" that I recieved, just remember lots of critiques about my way of walking, my way of talking, my way of listening (if I'm really interested in a talk, I interrupt to ask for details in order to imagine that they are saying to me. I think is a wonderful way to see that I'm listening, but they bother)

In a couple of times tried to be a seller, and did read some books that said how to shake hands, how important is to break the ice, how one must to care about the body language... Well, I'm not a seller. But when I wondered why some guys was so good in that issues, really; I thought they was guys like me in skills, but more persistent.

When I saw that I was an aspie (in the wikipedia description), I felt like an astronomer which all the time knew the earth like the center of the universe, in the day when knew Galileo.

I eventually got (albiet somewhat informally) assessed by a specialist who said she believed I had Asperger's..when I woulda been happy with a PDD-NOS...or anything really...

My childhood was a nightmare of struggle and sensory overload and developmental delays during a time when there was no label recognized for the kinds of issues I had...I had self-care issues...in regards to dressing myself and hygiene, and my social skills in comparison to my peers were deplorable, as I had no sense of boundaries.
I was extremely sensitive and gullible and vulnerable, and was bullied constantly by students and teachers..I have no idea how I learned to read..or anything, but it seems like I learned everything outside of school...and nothing in school made any sense....it was like wading through a sea of confusion and stress where I was on the outside and was constantly singled out for reasons I could never quite understand...
I was lucky enough to end up with really high standardized test scores..the highest in my whole school, even though my grades were dismal...and among the highest in the district...top 1% or some such...In those days, I did seem like a "little professor" I was obsessed with the library, and scored 100% on a Dewey Decimal system test that most kids in the class failed. I carried a Thesaurus around with me..Kids would ask me questions about stuff because I was an information sponge....there was all kinds of stuff that I wanted to learn that i could only learn on my own...I was extremely clumsy and slow and overweight, and had very bad social skills...I alienated one friend, for example, who I had sorta bonded with at the library for some time, when I asked them if they were a boy or a girl...I wanted friendships, but sought them out from unusual places...like new immigrants who could not speak English, or kids who were extremely awkward for various reasons.
I tried my best to evolve into a "normal" teenager...I was given special accommodations and lots of leeway...I spent a lot of time going to academic tournaments and whatnot...where I would constantly speak out of turn and disrupt the whole thing...I was one of a very few students that was taken to these things...and I was also in gifted classes...where my grades were not very good because I could not do homework, and was extremely disorganized..despite efforts for the school to accommodate me for these difficulties.

All of this stuff was done without labels.

When I was a girls scout, all the other girl scouts hated me...I was a complete outcast....meanwhile, I was obsessed with the history of scouting and had a small collection of vintage girl scout uniforms....and old manuals and such...whenever we went to camp, my "buddy" would always ditch me...I was a plague among the girlscouts...
When I got older, I joined a band because singing had been one of my major obsessions since I was a small child..I had been heavily obsessed with memorizing musicals from an early age, and I was always a strong singer and I had basically become "verbal" from having my grandmother drill the same songs into me over and over and over again in the first place...so it seems I basically learned to speak through singing....My social skills were deplorable...and I learned a lot of social skills in a very "tough love" fashion, because I was ALWAYS doing and saying the wrong things, and everyone else in the band was older than me...most of the time, I had no idea I was doing anything wrong until all the guy would start yelling at me....I was/am hypergraphic, which is like hyperlexia, but involves writing...and that meant I would write a bunch of stuff that would not make sense because I would make up words just so they would flow with the meter of what I was writing...and it had to be brought to my attention that there was no excuse for making up imaginary words...that had no meaning....(sigh)...anyway...blah blah blah...I was a senior in High school and in doing research on my self, I found out about ADD....and that was like sirens going off for me, but I was somewhat different from the other ADDers I met and communicated with on message boards....
Years down the line, someone suggested that my "face blindness" and auditory processing difficulties and the fact that I had walked on my tip-toes my whole life...suggested that perhaps I was on the autistic spectrum....so I looked into it and viola!! I got hooked...but I never said I had Asperger's ...or tried not to...until I had gotten some form of assessment....and since my assessment was rather informal, I was quite a bit in limbo about it for a long while until I decided not to hyper-analyze, and finally become at peace with the notion that I must be someplace on the spectrum, otherwise, I would not have thousands of posts on an autism message board....for one thing....

I am 34....I act like a kid most of the time...I can't drive a car...I have difficulty with "normal" jobs...severe executive dysfunction....mild echolalia..stuff like that....
I have obsessions that involve singing and ukulele playing, and also making and collecting vintage and ooak homemade toys...There are very few people who I am able to talk to, and there is a marked difference between me and the average 22 year-old for example....as in they usually seem older and more functional than me....I have voice regulation issues as is I am usually speaking too softly or too loudly...I have only on an extreme few occasions been able to make eye contact, and that has been "just for fun"...among other spectrumy friends, of which I am lucky to have a few....

My motivation for being here has had a lot to do with my desire to relate my issues to others who have similar issues...but when I started, I had no formal diagnosis...

Currently my diagnosis is ADD...but this is a board for ADD also, and it is my belief that many ADDers are actually more on the AS side...

hah..i killed the thread...ha ha ! !

2 very different reasons imho.

1. A person has AS and they want it confirmed.

2. Someone is odd and wants to feel special but doesn't want to take responsibilty for themselves so relates to AS and uses it as a cop out from then on.

I diagnosed myself with AS three years ago, then undiagnosed myself, and finally re-diagnosed myself a couple of months ago. The original diagnosis came from stumbling across a description of AS on the internet and finding myself understood on a profound level on which I'd never been understood before. So many things about my weird self could actually be explained and understood by looking at it through AS. Gradually, I realized that having AS would mean admitting that I was fundamentally challenged by things I'd always hoped I would overcome. Then I undiagnosed myself and thought that somehow that meant I could still change. Finally, I've accepted that I cannot change, which has been an extremely difficult realization, but also a good one, and probably one from which I can make meaningful progress. I don't really want to have an AS type personality, it makes my life so frustrating and lonely, but saying that I have AS is the only thing that makes my life make any sense.

For me, the main motivation to self-diagnose was that, since considering myself an Aspie helped explain every single thing I've ever had trouble with, it's a good foundation to work from when I'm trying to get better at things I need to improve at (i.e., if I know I tend to get anxious around people, I can consider that in my plans, or even just in my emotional reaction to something that happens to/around me; if I know that having everything neat and orderly and planned helps me calm down, I can use that to keep from overreacting when that routine is broken).

In other words, it helps me develop a coherent, realistic picture of myself and how I fit into the world around me. And that does wonders, considering that one of my biggest problems seems to be synthesizing all the little bits of information/input I get coming into my brain. I mean, it just makes things that much worse to think that I'm crazy because the world I live in is so different from the one other people seem to be in.

Frankly, I don't care whether it's considered "valid" or not - it helps me, and that's that. The only reason I'm going to be seeking an official diagnosis is to get some help that will actually help, rather than just leave me more confused than I was to begin with - which is what happened when I "got help" for social anxiety and depression. It didn't help much, because it was meant to help the "me" I use when I have to deal with people - the one that's patchwork plagarism from the personalities of people I decided were socially successful enough to imitate - not the "me" that's actually having the problem.