Giftedness and Misdiagnosis

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Yes, I've been misdiagnosed in the past as depressed, bipolar and even borderline personalty disorder. I have recently discovered that BPD and ASD has a lot of overlapping traits.

It was exactly the opposite for me. I was diagnosed as gifted as a child, but nobody ever suspected that what I had Asperger's. Every quirk was regarded to as a "symptom" of giftedness and nobody seemed to worry. The point is, I am not gifted. I know I have an above average IQ, but I don't think that qualifies me as a potential Mensa member.

I have both AS and am gifted. Also am twice-exceptional, since I have NVLD. I went undiagnosed for so long because my "giftedness" allowed for me to compensate for my deficits. I was able to get all "A"s and "B"s in math courses, even though my visual-spatial abilities are very poor. I just memorized how to do problems for tests and did well. Teachers knew I struggled with math, but they had no idea just HOW much I struggle. I fell through the cracks, and it still angers me.

I am going to write the differences the site says about and give my opinion:

-May collect information and categorize it but not connect it to anything else they are learning - I don't about this because the aspies in here make tons of connections even the craziest associations.
-Have excellent skills in many areas but are hindered by deficits in executive function skills so that their ability to show what they know is compromised. - agreed
-Can hyperfocus on an endeavor but have more trouble being creative. - not sure about this one either, lots of aspies are creative
-May show advanced reading skills but somewhat lower reading comprehension - true for many but not others. some have awesome reading comprehension and love reading books.
-Show more difficulty with output of work, especially written work. - true for many, but not others. some are really better at writing
-They cannot make up stories about things they don?t know. Unless something happened to them, they find it impossible to imagine - same as creativity
-They have trouble understanding the meaning of common sayings - agreed
-Are better than most other gifted children at memorizing, list and fact learning, reciting verbatim whole conversations, poems, and pieces of dialogue. - better than most other gifted children means some gifted children are even better at memorization. so we cannot differenciate using that
-Have difficulty applying the rules in a flexible manner - true
-Fairness can mean, ?What I want.? - definitely not true for passive aspies
-Given another gifted child with similar interests, they will not be able to interact at an appropriate level. Other gifted children may lack friends because they cannot find others who share their interests, or play at the level of sophistication they need. - well, I read everywhere about aspies that to help them socialize you should provide one-to-one conversations with other children that share their interests, so...
-Objectify human interactions. - true

Then, the only characteristics that could be used to differentiate are executive dysfunction, inflexible application of rules, analyzing humans in objective terms and trouble understanding sayings. I still think it is very tricky, depending on the case.



can you give some examples?

The social deficits of AS should differentiate from gifted, as gifted social deficits are still really mild.

well, my sister is gifted and she always tried really hard to make friends. She has trouble with chitchat and social niceties, and trouble understanding people intentions. She mimics people just like me, trying to make some friends. She does many social mistakes too.
It is funny because she also has sensory sensitivities. She even refused to be touched when younger and would hit anyone that tried even our parents
maybe she has some aspie traits as we share genetics or even subclinical aspergers. But anyway, she is gifted, not aspie.

My story is intermediate between some of the extremes listed here. I am above-averagely intelligent and have some unusual cognitive capabilities but am not in the same league as Einstein or anything like that. My year 5 teacher (which in those days meant 9-10yo) said he thought he wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't a "little genius" in there (meaning my head!). I never understood football but was watching TV shows about particle physics at age 10.

I failed arithmetic and thus maths because the way it was taught can only be described as "NT friendly at the expense of being autism hostile". Maths is an exact science, but they taught it as if it were football or creative writing. It was only at University that the subject was taught the way it is structured: axioms to principles to derivation.

I also failed to get into grammar school, despite my child age IQ being 122, because the 11-plus test was by then a written, rather than multiple choice test, and I have dysgraphia which was undiagnosed at the time. Plus I seem to remember the usual autism-hostile questions such as "what did you do on holiday", expecting prose instead of bare facts and I always hated having to be poetic about things that I considered matter of fact. Prose was for me, about interesting things (such as particle physics!) rather than mundane activities such as going to the beach.

I was in a local society for gifted children though it didn't work out as I didn't have the social skills to fit in. I also found some of it very boring; for example there was a visit to a local university's computer science laboratory and I found myself thinking "This is all very well, but since we can't do anything with the computers ourselves and because we're children they can't teach us how computers work, what's the point?"

In displayed some definite AS traits to the extent that the child psychologist said "I don't know what's wrong with this child, but I expect he'll grow out of it." LOL, famous last words

Gifted children don't have the cat ears curled up inside their hoooman ears.

In some ASD's (overly) high empathy and compassion is part of the disorder (such as dyspraxia) but Asperger's (and for the most part HFA) doesn't show this trait, simply because we find it difficult if not nearly impossible to put ourselves in others people's places and to recognise people's motives, facial expressions and the quirks of people's social makeup. This, along with the fact that we can't understand the unwritten laws of social interaction, and we find it difficult to be compassionate and emphatic.

I was in the gifted program in school but I don't think they considered all those traits you listed. I think they just put kids in the gifted program based on IQ and academic performance.

From the time I was 7 I was convinced I had something wrong with my brain, but I never told anyone. They all just assumed because I was smart that everything at school was easy for me.

Over the years I struggled more and more with school, and then family and teachers and counselors began to speculate on what might be wrong with me. I was counseled a lot but I was never properly evaluated for anything.

No one EVER considered the possibility that I might have any kind of learning disability, or developmental disorder or neurological disorder.

I finally figured out I have ADHD when I was 17. And then got formally evaluated and diagnosed about 6 months later.

But ADHD never fully explained things for me, which is why I think I might have an ASD or PDD, or some other neurological problem.

what?

With that description, I would suggest she may be both. Your "subclinical Asperger's" idea is probably spot on. It is very common for family members of autistic people to have AS traits but not enough to cause impairment. Being gifted is probably unconnected (or as unconnected as it can be when both are traits of the same person's brain); after all, those same subclinical traits could be present in someone who wasn't gifted.

I do think that giftedness and AS traits affect each other, though. Someone who has AS and giftedness could use their talent for learning to learn things by rote, for example to learn about psychology, behavior, facial expressions, and communication, and so "cover up" or compensate for their AS traits. It could make the difference, for a mild case, between being diagnosable and not. But that also implies that autism in gifted children is probably more severe than it appears to be, because these gifted children are probably compensating using their other talents. That matters because their traits can be quite strong, and they might have a lot in common with severe autistics, and be helped by a lot of the same things--while at the same time, their giftedness has made them more independent and skilled than one would predict given their age and the strength of their autistic traits. I think this, because it was the case for me--I compensated, covered up, learned by rote. And a lot of the things they only try for "low-functioning" autistics help me, too--things meant to smooth transitions, calm sensory overload, enhance communication, help concentration, etc. If we assume that a gifted kid who appears only mildly autistic can't have those strong traits and be compensating, we could miss some very useful therapies.

I wasn't able to use giftedness to compensate for autistic social/communication deficits when I was a child.
I was only able to use it for learning and non-social functioning which is like learning to do things.

What a depressing thread. If this is anything like representative, I'm more of an outlier than I'd thought.

I wish so badly that I'd been taught math this way! But I don't think that it's a matter of NT-friendly style vs. spectrum-friendly style. The more concrete-thinking spectrumites might have trouble with the über-abstract "axioms to principles to derivation" structure. As I like to say, autism is a reflection of extremes ? extremely concrete thinkers and extremely abstract thinkers, in this case.

My experience is that it's all very, very complicated; as such, I have no idea what I am. Gifted and AS traits can combine and interact in very complex and unpredictable ways. It's like a rat's nest, and that's putting it lightly.

Yes, my experience is that gifted NTs are very different from gifted aspies. Personally, I seem to share qualities of both, and I find neither group to be easier or more difficult to relate to than the other. The majority of my time spent on WP has been with the goal of uncovering what scraps of information I can find on the subject, and it's something that still baffles me.

On one hand, I have no problem thinking abstractly and seeing the big picture. I usually overlook details, if anything. I don't have the same sort of executive dysfunction that most aspies have. But at the same time, my style of communication is much more eccentric than most NTs, even gifted ones. Sometimes I don't have problems with empathy, but sometimes I do.

There's a huge gray area here, between neurotypicality, giftedness, and autism. It's not so simple. For what it's worth, it seems like I fall dead center on all the confusion, out there somewhere in no man's land.