Please Help. Do i have aspergers?

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I always wear earphones when I go out... they are usually beaming me NPR... but they work very well even when the radio is turned of because everyone thinks I can't hear them. It's sorta like everyone these days are off into their own little world... it makes it easier for me.

But I too have had a very hard time falling asleep, and Id like to suggest Advil Pm. They really work for me.

knowing whether or not one has a given condition is circumstantially beneficial. for some, it might give them validation to know why they are as they are. for some, it might give them understanding as to why they react to stimuli as they do and aid them in relieving some of their effects. for some, medication IS in order to help lessen ocd and anxiety.
i had not believed in "labeling" as such before, but in recent years, i've realized how i and my loved ones could have benefited in knowing that which symptoms affect my life in serious ways are not simply a matter of personality or emotional disorder, but are an affectation of how my body and mind are configured. it would also have been beneficial to know if my son is an aspie when he was younger, for now he would not be having so many mixed diagnoses because doctors in this region are basically ignorant to some of the more obscure affectations of extreme stress in the aspergers in young adulthood.

perhaps you might start with looking at some of the links in this thread. http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt113459.html

I understand what you are saying. It is good to know what is going on here... inside our selves, and outside in the world. That is what culture, and education are all about... right? Putting words and definitions on our experiences, and making sense of our experiences IS our life stories.

How many people do you think, who walk into a psychiatrist's (psychologist's) office, get turned away for treatment? Do patients that are prescribed meds ever get off of the drugs...EVER? Do people ever get cured of mental or emotional problems? I am an old man now... I've come to believe that the "helping professions" (including the religiously motivated) don't really help... they make a living off the ips (identified patinents). Drugs make you feel better. Do you think anyone, who has a proper dose of heroin, will say, "That was awful! Never again!?" Of course not. The same holds true for ALL of the drugs that psychiatrists and psychologists are DEALING. They work... they have always worked... and the ones in the future will work even better.

I'm sorry, but I have to correct you here.

Lots. It's called "lack of insurance coverage".

Yes. Many drugs only need to be taken short-term. Antidepressants for a single episode of depression aren't needed once you are in full remission, for example. Medications like benzodiazepines can only be taken short-term because of the tolerance issues. Some people--those with recurrent depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder--often need to take medication life-long to prevent a recurrence of their illness.

Again, yes. I used to be diagnosable with PTSD. I am not now. I used to have a rather overwhelming necrophobia. That is gone, too. I have had multiple episodes of depression, but I have always gone into remission afterward, and sooner the quicker I got into treatment. In fact, many mental disorders are episodic. For example, the acute, psychotic state of schizophrenia is usually temporary. Especially with medication, patients can go back to their normal lives.

Of course they make a living. That's what a job is for; it's to make a living doing something you're trained to do and something that other people need and will pay for. But they don't need to create new patients. There are plenty enough people with mental illnesses out there, from the grieving person who isn't recovering from a spouse's death, to the child who has such trouble reading that he's ten and can still only write his own name, to the dementia patient who is losing his ability to care for himself but not his desire to keep his autonomy and dignity, to the veteran who still hears gunfire in every Independence Day firecracker. Alcoholism; intellectual disability; traumatic brain injury; bipolar disorder--psychologists are needed for all of that. In fact, there are not enough psychologists to go around. You can wait years for an evaluation, if you need one that's specialized enough. You often end up with much less counseling time than you really need. There are plenty of patients.

Actually, I probably would. I've been on narcotic pain relievers after surgery--they have an effect much like heroin--and I hated being out of it, floaty, disconnected. I want to be alert and able to think. Not everyone is vulnerable to heroin addiction.

Your "heroin" analogy is flawed in another way. Psychiatric drugs almost never make the patient feel "high". They don't make you feel good; they make you feel normal. When I take antidepressants, I don't feel happy. What I get is just a little bit of an edge--a little more energy to fight my own tendency to want to see the world as hopeless; a little more motivation to use all those things I learn in therapy to understand when I am skewing my thoughts to the negative and to re-direct them toward more realistic statements. It helps me recover.

Some psychiatric drugs make you feel downright horrible, and they are only useful because they make you feel less horrible than the illness they're treating. If you get schizophrenia, for example, you may be put on an antipsychotic like Abilify. The drug may make the voices quiet down and help you understand that your fears about poisoned food and snipers are not realistic, but it will probably also make you feel sleepy, make you lose interest in sex, give you stomach troubles, and cause you to feel weak and shaky. If you're unlucky, you may end up with tremors or tardive dyskinesia. But you put up with it, because those side effects are better than constantly hearing inane, vengeful, or confusing commentary from disembodied voices, and constantly fearing that the nurse has put arsenic in your coffee.

Now, that's the extreme, granted. Most psychiatric drugs don't have side effects that severe--which is why we don't give out antipsychotics to people whose conditions aren't severe enough to warrant it. But just about every psychiatric drug has some drawbacks. Right now, I'm taking Concerta, which helps me concentrate, switch from one task to another, and not get stuck in mental loops as often; it also increases my tendency to get headaches and reduces my appetite. I'm also taking Prozac, which helps keep me from having depression but also makes me somewhat more tired (so I take it at night, which helps because by the time I'm awake the tiredness has worn off).

If you're getting a "high" from a psychiatric drug, it's either a tranquilizer and you like the effects of tranquilizers (Valium can be quite addictive for example), or else you are getting the wrong medication or the wrong dose. That feel-good high that makes illegal drugs attractive is also going to hamper your daily functioning if you get it routinely from meds that are supposed to help you function; so it's counterproductive.

Psychology is still a new science, comparatively--barely a hundred years old. Doctors make mistakes. Some doctors are incompetent. We haven't learned everything. But it is still a science, and still part of the medical field, and still aimed at making the lives of those with mental, neurological, and developmental disorders easier.

At this point, all you know is that your friends think that you have social issues. That probably means that you do have social issues. If you're too cheap for a diagnosis, you might as well not bother with one. The main point of a diagnosis is to qualify you (in the US) for work accommodations.

As far as I can understand it (and judging from DSM V - many researchers agree) - there are several sets of autistic traits, which exist on a continuum. (so, if the scale goes from 1-10, the distribution of scores is reasonably even.) They are tricky to measure, because many mildly autistic people develop effective coping strategies - and, in practice, clinicians settle for measure degrees of dysfunction without correcting for coping strategies because the main point is to help people who can't function.

You could try obtaining extra information (read books, take some of the tests on this site). You'll end up with information along the line of...probably an Aspie, might be an Aspie, probably not an Aspie. It you end up with 'probably an Aspie', you might try checking out coping strategies intended for Aspies. If you end up with 'might be an Aspie', those coping strategies might be useful too. If you end up with 'probably not an Aspie', NT coping strategies might work better - and you might also try some personality profiles and see whether or not your social issues could be something else. Anyways, looking into personal issues at an early age is usually better than looking into them when you're old.

--Argyle

You sound very similar to me. I've been accused of arrogance more times than I care to think of, also immaturity and lack of empathy. One teacher said I was a sociopath, another said I was a free spirit. I liked the second one more.

I'm due to get a diagnosis on Friday so we'll see what they say. I'm certainly borderline, but one thing I found out about recently was something called twice exceptional*. Basically it refers to gifted children who also have a mental disorder of some sort. I was well ahead of the curve at primary school, reading age of twelve aged six for instance, and in my SATs aged 11 I got 100% on 12 out of 16 tests. The thinking seems to be that children in the position of having a mental disorder who are lucky enough to be very good intellectually, turn that brain power towards compensating for their deficiency. Of course this makes it much harder for the deficiency to be obvious. In that Wikipedia article, the table of strengths and weaknesses resonated more with me than anything I've read, it describes me very well indeed.

It's interesting that people talk about meds, that's one thing I haven't even considered. The only aspie-style obsession I have other than Supreme Commander is drugs, and I don't like being given psychoactive drugs on prescription. I don't see reliance on legal drugs being any different to reliance on illegal drugs (I've had one real drug addiction and I'm also currently on Mirtazapine after I made clear that the doctor would not get me on SSRIs). On the subject of weed, I've always found it makes me paranoid. Where I am now mentally, the weed paranoia seems to be caused by not knowing the right things to say and weed making it painfully obvious to me.

I've taken a lot of different drugs over the years, in retrospect to help me compensate for my difficulties. MDMA and related drugs completely remove the bar to starting conversations so I've tended to gravitate to them, but hallucinogens have for me at least given me some valuable insights. They've also increased my propensity for paranoia, and I want to make it clear that I don't recommend anyone takes any psychoactive drugs at all unless they are properly educated in the risks associated with a given drug.

I've digressed a bit from what I was going to say, and that is that ketamine is the only drug I've ever taken that makes me feel "normal". In me at least, it suppresses all the anxieties that can stop me from dealing with life, and for a couple of days I can do what needs to be done and enjoy it. Unlike drugs such as MDMA it's not a false high that results in a crash. There's been plenty of proper research** validating ketamine's therapeutic potential, but I must spell out the risks so that nobody thinks I'm encouraging illegal behaviour: Ketamine can cause bladder and kidney damage to the point that some users have had to have their bladders removed. This is not a good way to live. Also ketamine causes in rats something called Olney's Lesions. There's been no research into whether it happens in humans, but I believe very strongly that it does. Also don't go and ask your doctor to prescribe it, he'll send you to the addiction unit.


* I'm new so I can't post URLs, Google "twice exceptional" and look at the Wikipedia link.

** Google "ketamine antidepressant".

do the Wired AQ test on line

i did not mention drugs.

It is a rant of mine. A person shows up at a "doctors" office with a problem. The doctor says, "Try this drug and come back in a week." The person with problems comes back and talks about how he is feeling. The "doctor" gets to think about whether or not this drug "worked." And gets to give different drugs if the hurting person wasn't impressed with the first shot.

the first thing on drugs is stop taking the socialy accepted ones esp. caffeine and alcohol

caffeineevaluation.blogspot.co.uk