Why are many people happy to be diagnosed with AS?

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For me it proved I was not insane like I thought I was. One bad thing that came from a diagnosis was that I found out that I do not have a learning disabilty and I spent 1st to 10th grade in special education being beaten and ridiculed because of it. I can also now get help with job interviews that I seem to fail everytime I go for one. I have stayed with jobs that were hostile work places for over 9 years because I could not find another job.

I was happy to be diagnosed with Dyspraxia at 20 because I suspected it for years and it had been suspected but never confirmed. I could not do anything properly in EP and the teachers always treated me as though I were just a lazy girl who did not make any efforts. This disorder makes sense now, it will not change anything I have lived but it confirmed that I was not pretending.

As for AS, I may look for a diagnosis later if I truly fit all the critiria (as I currently think but may be wrong) and when I will go back to my country. If I happen to have AS, I'll probably not jump with happiness but be relieved to know that it's "because of that" and I will search for books or any kind of thing which could help me (probably won't tell a lot of people though).
It would have been hard to be diagnosed with autism before I suspected it, I know that because I suspected dyslexia before and took the Aspie Quizz because of that (it was the only quizz I found at the time), I was totally disappointed to see that I fitted more the dyspraxia and AS categories than the dyslexia category. It had a hard time coping with the results and asked my friends to take the quizz too in order to see whether I was normal or not.

It's not an official diagnosis but hearing "hey you have autistic traits" is hard to cope with when you don't know a lot about autism.

For now, it would prove that I am not insane, that I am not schizophrenic or totally dumb or anything that would require me to take medication and become accustomed to it (my uncle has depression and his medications are like a drug he cannot live without it it's aweful).

It would also explain the meaning of "ret*d nerd" and why I have been beaten, etc.

I do understand why people who suspected it would be happy to know that they are not delusional.

He ASSumed that everyone only get negative effects from Autism Spectrum Disorders. While i'm extremely a-social and dont like to hang around with people, i have special interests that allows me to work with things that normal people cannot since even a box with more than one button on it confuse the hell out of them, and that more than compensates for my lack of interests in sheep.... people.

I think Bethie was trying to say that recieving a diagnosis doesn't make you autistic because you were autistic before the diagnosis. The diagnosis makes you aware of it and surely that's a good thing because you can understand yourself better and you take a massive step in helping yourself.

i trolls

Might trick me once, kiddo.

idk im not happy about it... it explains a little but its still a stigma

Ichinin, my "assumption" that he wasn't making assumptions was based only on his original post wording. Nothing more. I intentionally chose to assume the best of intentions.

@ FAss: After posting the above, I'm beginning to doubt my assumption. I would prefer to think you are trying to learn more, but I'm not so sure now. Some of your statements seem to indicate that you've already made up your mind. This makes me wonder, why ask the question in the first place if you believe you already have the answer?

Yes, disease and disorder are used interchangeably by professionals. That is true. The word disease though, comes with some pretty negative connotations I'm certain you can understand. Autism is not contagious. Autism's causes are unknown. Autism doesn't present as clearly and definably as most diseases. Autism affects the personality and thinking more than it does physical appearance and function. It also presents in many ways that appear quite functional, and often people who have it appear quite normal to others.

That's the opinion of the medical and psychiatric professions. If you disagree with that, perhaps your arguments that what most of us here have is just low self esteem, or personality quirks, should be taken up with the profession that defined it, rather than those of us who have either been diagnosed with it, or have come to recognize on our own that we fit the description the APA defined. All we say here is that the profession has told us we fit, or we have found ourselves that we fit. We didn't come up with the definitions. They did. Take it up with them if you don't agree with them.

It's never lupus.

FAss, you are starting to show an agenda there, and it isn't going to sit well with the community or me, as a moderator. Much of the earlier part of this thread involves honest sharing, and I'm not going to fault a question that allows some truths to be posted, even if there are suspicions it was meant to troll. But you will not be allowed to post here to further an agenda that differs from the goals of this forum.

You are starting to imply that AS isn't a real diagnosis. That is &*(#&()!@. Conditions (non-disease) can be diagnosed. That little label SAVED my child. It gave the world keys to understand him, and him keys to understand why and how he was a little different from those around him. Before we got that information, he was THIS CLOSE to tuning out and escaping into his own fantasy; just giving up. Knowledge is POWER, and if you are here to imply anything different, well .... you don't have an audience. That is about as polite as I can put it.

I'll be checking back on the progress of this thread.

Last edited by DW_a_mom on 22 Aug 2010, 12:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Because I don't see it as a mental illness or disability, I see it as a set of characteristics, different from most peoples', which have both good sides and bad sides but, in my mind, the good outweighs the bad.

Folks, I would like to sincerely apologize. If I came across as someone trying to hurt people it was due to my unfortunate choice of words. Please don't assume that I don't understand what you or your kids are going through. In fact, I went through many of those things myself. My goal here is self-esteem propagation. I am going to stop posting here for now and see how it goes. Again, please believe me - I am completely on your side.

Well, you might think it was them if it was only one or two people who did it, but when virtually every authority figure and SO in your entire life tells you its YOU, after a while you just kind of have to take their word for it. When one person says you're screwed up, maybe they're just an @ssh*le. When the whole damn world tells you you're screwed up, its hard to argue with that consensus.




WTF!? a diagnosis is not equivalent to DISEASE. I don't know where you got that whacky idea, but Asperger Syndrome is classified as a DISORDER, not a DISEASE.

Disorders you can live with. Disease can kill you. There's a huge difference.



No, they are not. You find me an instance in the DSM in which Asperger's Disorder is referred to as Asperger's DISEASE.

Before you disappear and lay low, here's a little food for thought:

Tell you what. For the time being consider your apology accepted, at least by me, because I think I have an idea where you're coming from, and if I'm right, you may have a valid idea. I can't speak for anyone but myself though.

One thing that may help you understand what happened here is that your profile states you are neurotypical. Now, I'm about to make a broad generalization here that some regular users here might take exception to, and I understand that, but I hope those of you who do will consider it a little. It's a generalization I believe to be mostly true, however I do strongly believe there are exceptions, so if you feel it doesn't apply to you, you're right, it doesn't. It's only meant to apply to those for whom it IS true.

Aspies can have a strong tendency to dislike being told what to do, how to think, how to behave, etc, especially by neurotypicals who have never experience life as Aspies do. NT's who pop onto forums like this thinking they have "answers" to our problems are bound to get bitten. It's about like sticking your head into a hornets nest thinking you're going to tell the hornets a better way to live. You're going to get stung. I may get stung myself just for posting this, because though my profile doesn't say "Neurotypical," it does say, "Self-Diagnosed," which is frowned on by some here. I'm not bothered by that though, and am seeking a diagnosis right now, so that tag on my profile may soon be changing.

That said, there are some valid things to be said for promoting self-esteem.

I spent most of my life being a very negative person, with very low self esteem. Beginning ten years ago though, I was introduced to the concept of positive thinking by a friend. Since then, I've read Steven Covey, Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegy, and a host of similar authors. I applied the principles in all of the books I read on a daily basis, and my life began to change. My marriage went from being on the rocks and near divorce more than once, to a stable, loving, and great relationship over the next ten years. My personal outlook changed for the better. Work life improved beyond anything i could have imagined years before that. My pay even got better. Everything in my life improved.

But, some things did not change. Some patterns continued to rear their ugly heads. I eventually lost the best job I ever had, went back to school, and earned an associate degree, and now I have no clue what to do with it.

The bottom line is that while many things improved greatly, there were still some things that positive thinking and self esteem were not solving. I didn't know what they were. Though I was already investigating Autism and Asperger's because of one son's behaviors, it took a long time for me to begin suspecting that might be what has been going on with me all of my life. So, I started looking at it with not just my son in mind, but myself as well. Once I began doing that, it took two years to finally realize it was the only thing I had ever looked into that explained virtually EVERYTHING. It explained everything that had gone on in my life up until then, excluding the affects of negative thinking and self esteem.

So, yes, positive thinking and self esteem were definitely part of the problem, but they didn't account for everything. Asperger's accounted for everything the other two did not.

I do think that looking into PT (positive thinking) and learning to improve self esteem will help ANYONE, whether or not they have Aspeger's, Autism, Depression, or anything else. In fact, I recommend it for everybody. I do believe it is possible that some who believe they are on the spectrum, if they tried the principles I've learned, might find they aren't on the spectrum at all, and just need to learn to think differently. I believe that if one does try these things, and they still feel like they are hitting invisible brick walls, and Spectrum disorders explain what is left that all of that did not change, then the likelihood of you being on the spectrum is probably pretty high.

This is why I recommend learning these things to everyone, no matter who they are.

Well, it offered an explanation for me. Before I was just, "the weird girl who cried a lot." I liked knowing WHY I was acting that way. My psychology teacher let me borrow a book "Thinking in Pictures" by fellow aspie Dr. Temple Grandin. Upon reading it, I was able to pinpoint what behaviors I had, which lead me to being able to mature a bit.