Why I'm not sure that AS Identification was a good thing

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I was going to reply to the quote below from another thread, but instead of hijacking the existing thread, I decided to create a new one:

Ditto, my friend. I couldn't have said it better myself. A lot of young people are grabbing onto the diagnosis in a negative manner. These people are often not finding creative solutions to the problems after they get diagnosed. I, for example, pretty much had to learn social functioning by using books, studying people, and spending countless amounts of time trying to figure out the complexities of life that seemed to come so easy to others. I didn't know anything was really wrong with me, either so I expected it to work out in the end. Same thing with work ethic. I put a lot of pressure on myself to say that I could do things like studying and just forcing myself to do it.

If I had gotten a diagnosis that said "I couldn't" do these things, I don't know that I would have spent years trying. As it is, I have a masters degree and have a job that most people would love to have.

Food for thought. I think we should quit calling AS a syndrome, disability, or whatever and refer to Aspies as different in some distinct way. Wouldn't it be better if we were thought of as spatial thinkers capable of great advancements in society rather than people with disabilities?

There is little way of knowing for sure, but I would venture to say that Aspies are behind many (if not most) of the breakthrough achievements in mankind. Almost everyone who has come up with such breakthroughs has been described as odd or eccentric. This generation of Aspies may have been done a great disservice. Indeed, the human race itself may have been done a great disservice.

God forbid that they start testing for this prenatally. Very quickly: what was the first great advancement of the 20th century?


Thinks about it: Two obsessed brothers who didn't complete high school kept pursuing their crazy idea until one day...

Ah just call it a new species of human and be done with it I say

To do otherwise is to compare apples and oranges no matter what you call it.

Nothing about an AS dx says a person cannot do something. It is simply an organized listing of the possible behaviors and symptoms a person with this disorder may experience, primarily due a difference in brain wiring/chemistry.

When my son was dx'd with AS a year and a half ago, it was in many ways a relief to us. I couldn't imagine what was going on with our child, he seemed to have 7 different issues at once. To know that it was all one thing, and that there was something I could do to help him cope, was a great relief.

He's now in 6th grade, and no longer "pinwheels" when he walks, doesn't drool, can be clearly understood when he speaks, and his handwriting is improving. He is still, however, clearly an aspie. He thinks differently. He likes and loves differently. But he's happy.

Without that dx, that label, we'd still not know why he acted as he did, and wouldn't know he had sid issues, nor how to handle them. So it can often be a very positive thing.

Yeah, I used to feel really put down because I thought (thanks to many comments by several people) that I was just a rotten person who didn't care about other people at all.
Still, a different term might be better, but there are some AS things I consider bad (sensory issues).

I think there's more of a continuum between NTs and aspies (one of the reasons it isn't a "disorder" for me and many others), whereas there is no continuum at all between fruit species.

Well it was a figure of speech.. I suppose it would be more acurate to say cats and dogs.. both are four legged mammals with vaguely the same shape, they generally like the same foods and live the same way but their brains work so much differently it would be impossible for them to really understand each other.

Much like auspies and NTs.

Gosh, wouldn't it be nice! I would love it if the world really worked that way. Unfortuantely, our schools try to "cookie-cutter" our kids to act and think like little girls. Boys are not allowed to be boys any more. And forget about being different, even if only to be "spatial thinkers capable of great advancements in society."

dawg.
you make a very very good point.
i have noticed a fragmentation between aspei kids to day and when i was groing up.
if i had know i was an aspie, i would have just said......oh f this, its too hard, i AM disabled.
as it was like you, i went onto uni and got a degree in veterinary science and i too have now a well paid job.
but i think we may be an exce[tipn, yes i also agree with you that a lot of aspies did change the world..to suit us and the nt's just were adavnatged by these changes...but anyway.
most aspies are moderately to severly affected by aspergers, a lot fo the kids in here cant or dont want to get jobs.
i think very there is a small but increasing pool of aspies who are coming through as professionals .....and out of them, you have the savants and gifted aspies who do change the world.
but most aspies take a hard fall.
it isnt easy to live with, you seem to be an exception

I'm not saying that society doesn't have its issues...they do. "Cookie cuttering" is just part of it, too. All I'm saying is we need Aspies to rise up in society rather than "sink down." Most Aspies are intelligent enough to figure out how to do that in their own unique way. I know of a few people in my locale that I suspect to be Aspies that are sucessful in what they do. IMO, the opinion of some is that they're disabled and there is no hope for them. I took my finding as a sense of pride in all that I have accomplished despite what I've been faced. I also realized that I've been right all along...I do think differently from others. I look at the Aspies as world changers and paradigm-breakers and I think it is a gift to be one of them. It just going to take some extra work.

One who is born poor, unathletic, and with a below-average IQ has a whole lot less possibility than an Aspie and there are literally tens of millions of people like that in the U.S. alone. Just saying it's not even close to the worst deal you can get.

Last edited by JDawg on 30 Aug 2006, 4:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

With any child, their self esteem and their perception of their place in the world is as much a part of who they are as it is what their parents and the people around them expected of them.

Plenty of NT kids with the ability to excel do not because they have parents who accept average or just passing as okay. And there are kids who come from backgrounds you can't imagine they could rise above, yet they do.

Our son understands that we understand that his AS will make things harder for him, but will not give him a free pass. He's 11, and about to take his second class at our local university. The first was in forensics, this one is in chemistry, biology and phsyics - a high speed curriculum with a hands on approach.

My son is neither gifted nor a savant. He gets decent grades but has to work for them. And he has already learned that working hard can be its own reward.

AS already lends itself to enough bad connotations. Why would you want to add more?

I agree. I was diagnosed with AS in college and as a result of my diagnosis, it was recommended that I seek academic accommodations. In elementary/middle/high schools those academic accommodations would have been sped. I can almost guarantee that being a sped student would have damaged my self esteem so much that I wouldn't have ended up at the college I did. I would have doubted my ability to succeed in honors/AP classes and might very well have had to deal with others doubting my ability, too. In fact, I worry that being diagnosed in college might not have been such a good thing, either, because now I feel like there is a reason that it might be very difficult for me to get into grad school or get a job. Before I would just have decided that I wasn't trying hard enough and didn't have a good excuse so I needed to try harder.

That's what I did with anything...I tried harder because I thought I was being lazy. I decided that I had to do squelch every problem one by one...social, academic, you name it. I was blessed to have a 141 IQ, but I had a great deal of trouble learning to actually focus on the work at hand. I remember throwing a college textbook at the wall as a junior and I believed that I was too smart to fail out of college. That was an extremely frustrating moment but I decided I couldn't fail. I had a 3.7 after that and went on to graduate school and got a degree there. I admit that I was extremely fortunate growing up to be blessed with the right friends at the right times, amongst other things.

My quick answer is it does not help or hurt much whenever a person finds out they
have AS.

Is there any science showing a person getting a dx for a personality type (or any
disorder under the sun) being less productive with that knowledge?

Myself I knew I had major social skills problems at a young age so getting any
dx would be no surprise. I self dx myself for the last 15 years as having social
phobia (so long ago that they changed the name to social anxiety disorder).

Unless a person is very dumb they will know they have a major social skills problems
regardless if they have a fancy dx.

I think people are confusing AS with comorbid learning problems (ADHD, Dyslexia,etc). AS with no comorbid problems and normal or above average
IQ leads to great progress in college.

I know exactly what your saying, I was getting psychological testing actually today for a job placement agency and the neuropsych I was talking to ended up talking about the fact that in the 90's they really messed things up in terms of smacking people with labels. One of my own sort of behavioral and emotional scars that resulted from it was the driving need to do things in a way that was superior in terms of performance to other people because I still feel broken, damaged, like people can see it, and like I have this huge inherent deficit that I can only reverse out with real high performance on things.

I of course got diagnosed with PDD-NOS and AS back when I was 11 which was in 1991. Back then the problem was, doctors were insane with how they broke the news to me. I was pretty much told that AS just meant I was inherently a *really* big dork/loser, that I'd never be able to break out of it, it was implied that everyone else would always be better than me, and on top of that they indicated that I needed to trust other peoples judgements on things over my own because I had no idea what was really going on and never would. 8 years of doing what you just said in many ways (although I tried real hard to break my social problems) of course which was also spent with me getting worse, losing my mind on antipsychotics and antidepressants and such, had me suicidal through highschool and severly depressed through the latter years of school and barely functional when I graduated somehow. Luckily I had a period where I hit rock bottom, vowed to fix thing, vowed that I'd do whatever it took to make my life better since I evidently still had at least 60 years on this earth to live no matter what, and I took all those beatings from people who also told me that I was just lazy and didn't try hard and went all out with my effort on things - way past the threshold of what was even comfortable and even to the point where I really was maxing myself out on a regular basis.

I lucked out at 19 at least in the sense that I had some friends who talked me into getting off the medications, I started to wonder if it was all just a big lie I was told so the pharmaceutical world could make money off of me, and as things came together when I was 20 I was the happiest I'd ever been because I really sincerely believed it was all a lie, that I didn't have AS, and that I could do anything I really wanted to but still just needed more time to mend and more time for my willpower to take control of my mind and craft me into being exactly who I wanted to be. In the years after that 22, 23, 24, I had more and more anxiety and depression catching back up with me when I realized it really was true and some of the things I had hated the most about myself or had been shown pretty much made me diserve disrespect (at least in more petty senses) were things I couldn't really fix. I think that wave of depression cut its deepest last year but right now I think I'm really starting to reconsile it all, I still stuck to that vow through this whole time to never let myself slip backward or get weaker inwardly, and for the most part I'm also getting some peace out of knowing that I've tried my best - something that absolves me of a lot of that guilt I had tearing me up in the past from all the lectures about how I was just a weak person and underutilizing my potential. It still really sucks sometimes that there's a pretty good-sized rift between who I really am inwardly and who I look like or am able to project on the outside but I have to realize thinking about it like that doesn't do a damn thing to change it, what's here to say is here to stay.

So yeah, if doctors just throw it at a kid that they're inferior and that kid spends years at the bottom of the bucket and feeling like while the kids at school are constantly ripping on em that the adult world has come up with the ultimate personal slur to throw at them - Asperger's, its flat out not healthy. Its one thing if a doctor tells them they have it but does what they can to explain what it should mean to them, actually tries to bolster their sense of dignity about it, and just tries to give them strategies - that I think could be helpful. So much of the complete immaturity I had back then too was not even just from me but the weight of the opinions around me being stuck to my sense of self and me being that broken down that I just took their take on me over my take on myself.

It's true that I was diagnosed with Academic Fluency Disorder at the same time and some of the recommendations relate to that. (BTW Do you or does anyone else know what Academic Fluency Disorder is? Is it a learning disability?) However, some of the recommendations for academic accommodations were due to the AS. For example, an AS brain focuses on details to such an extreme that it can be difficult to see the big picture. Therefore the neuropsychologist recommended that I meet with staff at the academic services center once each week to get help organizing and prioritizing my schoolwork so as not to become overwhelmed by details. As another example, difficulty with fine motor skills is common in AS. Therefore it was recommended that I have a notetaker in each of my classes so that I can get more complete and useful notes.

Man I sure could have used one of those in school.. I couldnt read my own handwriting so taking notes was pointless I had to do without them