"fake aspies" and self diagnosis. DISLIKE, sorry.

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QFT!
If me or my siblings behaved that way (i.e., threatened them), we'd be lucky we lived to tell the tale. My dad was especially reactionary to any sign of disrespect, to him or my mother, who is everything to him, no if, ands or buts.

Same here, if I disrespected my mother, my father was in my face before my mother had a chance to gasp.

I personally dislike the idea that only those who are diagnosable with an autistic disorder are on the spectrum. Like, because I'm no longer social impaired (that, at age 40, only in the past few years), then I automatically don't have the differences in thinking, in how I look at the world, that I did before? Sorry, it doesn't work that way.

It's like, if autism is really considered a difference, not a disorder, then calling oneself autistic (or aspie) shouldn't be limited by those who are diagnosable, since diagnosis requires significant impairment.

Whats QFT ?

Man! I didn't even have to watch more than 20 seconds of that video. None of my own kids are that old yet, but they are quickly approaching the age. Before any (or at least much) knowledge of AS, during learning about AS, and now that I feel I've come to a much deeper understanding of it, I have NEVER tolerated that kind of behavior from my kids. EVER!

Just listening to his mother's "mousy" responses to him makes my stomach turn.

I don't care whether it's self diagnosis, medically diagnosed, or what, that kind of disrespect is NOT tolerated in my family.

AS my explain a lot of things, but it is NEVER an excuse for anything. Period! And my kids have never been allowed to use it as an excuse, nor do they.

That kind of filth mouth has been attempted by at least one of my kids, and punishment for it was not only severe, it was swift. He's hasn't done it since. One other son, who is the most classic AS of the three, often angrily digs his heels in, insisting sometimes that we are wrong and even hypocritical. Maybe we are sometimes. WE aren't perfect! But we WON'T allow him to use either the fact that he might be right, or AS, or any other excuse for outright disrespect, even though we know sometimes it isn't intentional, and IS because of his Autism! They have all always been told it is NEVER an excuse for bad behavior.

We also tell them that we understand sometimes they may not realize what they're doing is unacceptable or why, but that sometimes they simply HAVE to accept that when we say it is, IT IS. "Figure out later why it is. Calm down and talk it over with us, but don't yell, or make smart remarks. If we tell you a remark is smart-ass, you need to accept that it is first, then work on understanding why."

By the time they're the age of the kid in the video, it's too late to start teaching them that. In his case, his mother has been letting him get away with it for too long. I can hear it in her voice!

Sometimes I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to bring back switches behind the wood shed.

My mother never allowed me to be disrespectful. She tell me when I was 12 "If the students in my class can show me respect, so can you." She worked as an aid in the special ed room and all these kids were low functioning so she was telling me if they can do it, so can I.

We were discussing that video in another thread. I also strongly dislike that video being spread around as what AS people are like. I could never talk to my Mom that way and it has nothing to do with her being strict because she wasnt!
I just love her and could never verbally abuse her like that. Of course I got mad at my Mom and argued with her and had meltdowns when I was little but that is different than being a teenager/young adult and threatening to break your Mothers jaw.
I think the Mom was scared of him to tell the truth. She should have let him have a taste of the real world instead of putting up with that.
My oldest is Bi Polar (probably lots of people are getting tired of this story) and became a drug addict in his teens. When he was using he was not himself and he was verbally abusive and physically abusive to my daughters and to my husband (his step dad). We had him put in Juvy many times and I was glad when he turned 18 because It was so much for me to be responsible for. He did have an abusive Father and he has Bi Polar disorder but this does not excuse his drug use or his behavior.
I dont know if I should feel sorry for the mother in the video or angry with her.

There is a HUGE difference in kids having a sensory meltdown and the horrible verbal and emotional abuse that this guy leveled at his own Mother.

"quoted for truth" i.e. "vehemently agree"

* * *

i won't be popular for admitting this, but Unhappy Aspie Jack treats his mother very much like i did as a teenager (although i wasn't quite that terrible, and didn't swear at her). i take the blame entirely and am sure i had issues on top of undiagnosed (at the time, undiagnosable) AS but am certain it had something to do with it, as i could not understand that she wasn't doing things deliberately to upset me. i thought she must know what would bother me (even though nearly everything bothered me - i would get overloaded easily and could hardly tolerate being out in public), and i could not read any emotion in her. i have done my best to explain and to make up for my behavior, and we get along well now, but i can't undo it.

it's not a happy realization, any of this, especially taking responsibility for all the damage that has been done. this is why i am so disturbed by this and similar topics, which (as the video capriwim posted explains well) invalidate the difficulties faced by someone who self-diagnoses as an adult and potentially has to deal with such fallout in addition to having been previously misdiagnosed and dealing with AS without any explanation or help all our lives .. and now, because of having learned (completely exhausting) compensation skills and recognizing where we have gone wrong, we have to deal with being criticized and disbelieved. it just makes me feel like a punching bag.

i'm not condoning the video or Jack's behavior (or my own). i agree Jack shouldn't be the poster child for Asperger's - this is a terrible video and i hope no one is watching it to understand Asperger's. but as an extreme example it does illustrate how being mind blind can have dramatic ill effects on someone who has never been taught to reflect on and regulate his / her behavior. on a much smaller scale, this "fake aspie" witch hunting is equally childish and quite similar.

EDIT: ^ that last statement is not meant to be inflammatory; i just think it's important on a forum like this that we make an effort not to judge each other, and i cannot resist saying so.

Last edited by katzefrau on 13 Jun 2010, 10:25 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Quoted for truth.

This is an example of why I am so hesitant to waste resources on seeing a therapist for diagnosis. The majority of them seem incapable of understanding my experience, so how can I trust them to make an accurate analysis?
I've had to deal with myself for 27 years, I'm honest enough to asses where I stand, and I know that Asperger's explains about 90% of all the challenges I've faced in that respect. It has nothing to do with wanting a scapegoat for social ineptness.
Now that I have a clear understanding of why I'm me, Im so much more confident and have let go of so much anxiety and emotional baggage I have made peace with my brain and Im finally moving forward.

and I dont need some doctor to tell me who I am or am not. yippee!

There are a lot of stupid excuses in this thread for not seeking a diagnosis - and to be sure, some good reasons do exist, but strangely nobody has posted them.

There are some straight self-contradictory excuses, especially the ones about the cost of diagnosis. The best silly excuses have to be the ones that say "I am the expert about me, so no professional knows any better", which ignores the breadth of spectrum that professionals see, or the obvious outcome if a professional disagreed with that kind of self-diagnosis. Maybe cancer should only be diagnosed and treated by people whose expertise came from having cancer? (Or not, maybe, if they are applying their self-diagnostic skills).

And I really, truly love the idea that "it is not only diagnosable people who are on the spectrum". Ha ha. Everything is a bit blue, even when it's pink! There was a Rosa Park joke like that.

This thread has changed my opinion on diagnosis. Specifically B9s posts and the arguments from people that followed. B9 (male or female?) very eloquently explained a feeling I have had for months but that I couldn't put into words. I always thought self-diagnosis was beneficial to the older AS community, but there was always a nagging feeling that it was a double edged sword. B9s post put into words exactly what that second edge is.

if you live with simple minded parents in a simple minded society who can not see why you are very displaced from normalcy, then they none the less will see that you are displaced from normalcy, and they will have made some effort to reposition you whether or not they correctly identify why you are not able to function correctly in the main stream.

i do not judge people for not having a diagnosis. i do think it is strange that they do not have a wealth of stories they can tell about how they were not allowed to participate in the main stream when they were young.

i was not allowed to participate in the main stream because i was like a "spanner in the works", and i caused all sorts of problems in the lives of people who were in the main stream that i was therefore removed from.

i am saying that if you lived and operated in the main stream without other people wishing to re-place you, then maybe you are not affected to any serious degree with anything. and that includes autism.

autism is very obvious to anyone as a dysfunction whether or not they know how to define the dysfunction as autism.

if someone is mentally ret*d, then they will not be allowed to continue in the main stream of education because they obviously do not benefit, and they also cause problems for others because they impede the progress of the normal children and cause the teacher to spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with their aberrations.

i am not saying i am mentally ret*d, but i am very ret*d with respect to social integration and with respect to my relationships with teachers and other children in the class. i was dealt with because i was disruptive due to my essential being, and it is the case that anywhere, even in the backwaters of poverty and ignorance, that some efforts are invariably made to remove someone from an otherwise lubricated process if they are like spanners that get wedged sideways in the machinery of operations.

i did not say it.


i was not aware of that. i never coughed much as far as i can remember.





no.
i was diagnosed as simply "autistic" when i was young, and they felt i was HFA because i was not mentally ret*d, but they also felt that i was lower functioning in other ways because i was almost impossible to reach on a communicative level.

back then, there was no validly defined outcrop of autism that was named "asperger syndrome", but none the less it did not mask the fact that i was autistic.
my childhood doctor was studying asperger syndrome from 1980, and she felt that she was correct in telling my parents that i had asperger syndrome although she could not diagnose me officially with it.
i started seeing her in 1984, and she used me as a specimen to study with respect to the potential validation someday of the diagnosis of asperger syndrome.

i guess i was lucky to have had her as my psychiatrist when i was a child, but what i am trying to say is that whether or not the refinement of the label of "asperger" was available, i was still clearly identifiable as autistic.
the grade of my autism and the refinement of the description of my autism was not clear, but it was clear that i was autistic.





i can not think in a fictitious way. but i am a male and you said that it is common for females to retreat to a fictitious world.
i retreated to being conscious of only microscopic details of the world around me. i was conscious only of objects. i never thought in an abstract way that related isolated objects with each other (and i still do not).

things to me are completely static and concrete, and they have no bearing on anything else. i can craft metaphors for myself so that i can draw simple abstractions to derive some associations between, and processional evolution from the separate things i see, but they are merely "mechanisms" and they are not inherently and automatically borne from my natural consciousness.

i never played in a world that was not to scale or that had any aspect that was not possible in reality.



if someone sees me driving by in a car, and they do not know the make or model of the car, then they can not say which type of car i was in, but they still know i was in a car.



i know. what you say is true.

i am not the whole world. the entirety of my consciousness does not encompass the entirety of reality. i just have a problem recognizing that there are things in reality which are outside what i am conscious of.

Well, not everyone's parent's are doting worry-warts.

I had "failure to thrive" as an infant. Wouldn't nurse, apparently. I switched onto fruit juice, and that was considered the end of it. It was assumed to be due to allergies, though there apparently weren't any symptoms of that. (I'm guessing it was the skin contact.)

I hand flapped constantly a kid, bit my hands, had laughing fits, and a bunch of other things that I'm told other parents would see and say, "normal kids don't do that." My parents ignored those comments. They also had an intense hatred of psych* people and never consented for me to be questioned by one. In 1st or 2nd grade I was to be held back for some non-academic reason, but my mother would not allow it (she argues relentlessly, and people always give in to her). And my behavior was to shut down much more often than melt down. I was very quiet and got good grades, which I think was key to evading undue attention (the teachers were busy with the troublemakers).

I've always had trouble sitting up straight for more than 5 minutes at a time, so I'd imagine I was fairly floppy as an infant, but how does a mother know if it's her first baby? I can't recall in my entire life ever making eye contact without deliberately forcing it, so I'd imagine I didn't do it as an infant either, but again, how does a first time mother know that is unusual?

It just doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility that people slip notice. If anything it sounds to me like your case was very obvious, or your parents were unusually vigilant and knowledgeable.

I'm in the same boat and in my 40's (and female). I was tested as a child for autism but wasn't "autistic enough" (too verbal, too little professor-ish, etc.) and no one was diagnosing AS then.

I've told no one about my AS except for my husband and here on WP where I'm basically anonymous.

It is my hope that a childhood AS diagnosis might have led some people to have been a tad more tolerant of my "quirks" and drives instead of trying to constantly pound me into a hole where this triangle could never fit.

However, konwing the family I had, I'm afraid that this is mere wishful thinking. I wasn't born at a convenient time for them, and had I been officially diagnosed, it is more likely that they would have stigmatized and taunted me further (or perhaps worse).