such thing as idiopathic (complete) lack of social skills?!?

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My world just doesn't make any sense anymore. I think I'm just being driven crazy by countless doctors and therapists of which everyone says something else in an attempt to drive me (even more) nuts (that I already am)!

I opened a thread today and asked for videos on social skills. Thanks for the replies. they were very helpful. Particularly the video by Alex on how to approach a group. That one let me know that I DO NOT know a flying s**t about social cues and skills.

Anyways. Either I'm just massively autistic and there is a huge conspiracy or something going on among these docs (OK not literally, I'm just venting my frustration) trying to torture me by 1. giving me purely random diagnoses (narcissistic, schizoid, schizophrenia, asperger's,bipolar , ("typical middle eastern guy who doesnt wanna work"), Borderline, "extremely neurotic" 2. getting really really nasty and personal at me ("you simulate in order to not to go to work", "you are extremely neurotic", "your problem is that you think we don't understand your problem", "you are SOOOOO narcissistic!! !!" etc.)

OR: I lack social skills for a completely different reason. I mean I do some stimming. My interests are narrow. no eye contact, I used to have special interests before I got totally f**ed up by life and turned into a complete wreck. but maybe? Are there other conditions which cause complete lack of social skills? seriously?

It's worse than a conspiracy. If it were a conspiracy, at least they'd all be on the same page, all with the same general goal, and all basically know what is going on. No, it's so much worse. Each doctor has his own agenda, they have their own focuses and they don't ever communicate with each other.
Find someone who can help you get better, don't worry so much about the diagnosis.
Good luck and stay safe.

Your childhood history may help with distinguishing your lack from social skills from lack of social skills in autism vs. schizophrenia vs. narcissistic vs. xyz).

The problem is that NO ONE is doing / has ever done HIS/HER F**ING JOB. NOT my PARENTS, NOT the DOCTORS. NOT the THERAPISTS, the staff at SCHOOL, NOONE. (be it while I was so sick I couldn't talk as a teen and my parents didn't take me to docs or I was mobbed by as many as 20 people and the school didn't react, just a few examples. Oh wait. did I mention that a teacher hated me because He was a racist German, he dedicated a whole hour to talk about refugees being parasites?!)

EVERYONE is expecting me, a person of middlish-LOW intelligence, CHAOTIC, oftentimes mildly DELUDED and LOW LOGIC, to do ALL THE JOB HIMSELF, and get healthy, manage everything, choose the right doctors, make appointments, go to special whatever clinics hundreds of miles away that I found myself by googling, etc.
Basically I have to do everything by myself, decide what's wrong with me, MAKE SENSE OF THE DELUDED STUFF EVERYONE IS TELLING ME (while I'm at the very least as deluded as they are), fix myself completely on my own, AND MAGICALLY GET COMPLETELY HEALTHY AND SMART IN A WAY THAT EVERYONE CAN BE PROUD AND HAPPY (ideally I must go to medical school and become an MD. they are that deluded).
I do not know a single person in my life, be it a doc or a family member, who is smarter than myself, and I'M PRETTY DUMB I ASSURE YOU.

Idiopathic does not mean the same as complete.

The only way anyone will have completely no social skills is if they suffered privation for a long long time like Genie

Childhood history doesn't mean much, unless it was properly documented. If it relies on eye witness testimony, its reliability is close to zero.

My mom, for example, doesn't know what's normal and what isn't in a child (or maybe she simply doesn't want to see it). So she didn't tell about anything ever being abnormal during the evaluations. Only through observation and testing could the doctors determine that I was indeed autistic.

I'm not a doctor, but based on the information so far provided, I would say that the OP is actively psychotic, and that their psychosis causes them distress, and they should seek help and treatment. The lack of social skills could be due to a number of causes in their case. More could be said about it after a proper neuropsychological evaluation.

are you verbal?

Childhood history is often included as a part of adulthood assessments for autism.
It is useful to know something about the developmental trajectory of a person to see if they had autistic traits in early childhood or developed them later in childhood or teenage years.
In the second case, they probably don't have autism.
Parents don't have to know what is autistic behavior and what is normal, they only have to answer specific concrete questions about their child's development and patterns of behavior in childhood.
For me, the answers were clear, and there was no difficulty identifying autistic traits in early childhood and continuing through development, but usually moderating in severity as I learned more.

idiopathic means "no known cause"

I am sorry that your life is so frustrating. I've had some similar problems... and some were physical health (my father refusing to believe doctors that I had asthma & pneumonia, forcing me to keep going... leading to fractured ribs & permanent nerve damage!). sometimes parents can't handle the truth. they see what they want to see.

if you would like to provide more information, we can try to help, but ultimately you need to find a good medical professional to diagnose you. I'm sorry if it feels like you're being tossed around, each doctor dumber, lazier, and crueler than the one before. do you go to these appointments alone, or always with family? is your family impacting their judgment? would it be possible for you to find a free clinic somewhere, walk in, and start from scratch?

Please be safe. come here to vent & feel like you belong. the world can be scary and confusing, but you can get through this period. as someone who has seen more than her fair share of darkness... it doesn't seem like it, but there is always hope. it comes in unexpected ways and at unexpected times, but it does come eventually.

Yes. But I many times I totally not react to questions in a way that p**ses people completely off (mutism?). e.g. if someone tells me go get me a glas of water I would get a glas of water but wont say "ok" or anything. and then they are wondering that I actually did that. And at times I would loose my consciousness for a brief moment and do not realize that I exist at all. like for a second every few seconds and I would be non responsive. It's not epileptic absence. I've done EEG many times. And MRI and all that. I will not fall to the ground or anything. I just go blank. And then I come back again. At the time I mentioned where I now expect my mother to have done something I would be mute often and would loose my consciousness in the way I described every two seconds. I'm not sure how obvious it was from the outside but it was PRETTY obvious from the inside. I was also pretty agitated and basically wrecked to the max.

I hate to throw another diagnositic possibility when you've had so many ascribed to you, but the blank periods could be dissociative episodes.

Micro dissociative amnesias. I used to have these.

That said, this would not mean you couldn't also have ASD.

how often do these episodes happen? do you notice any patterns? when I was struggling with PTSD stuff (school shootings), it's like it kicked my autism into high gear (and that's when i finally got a diagnosis). My roommate noticed that my episodes like the ones you describe seemed to happen when there was too much input for me to handle--dr said it was probably sensory overload. it's like i just shut down, can't respond, and i don't always remember the time. as if my brain gets so fired up that it has to reset. does that sound like what you are describing?

lots of us on the spectrum have co-morbidities (multiple diagnoses). the folks doing my evaluation said that, like a lot of women, I'd developed sufficient coping mechanisms that it may never have been caught (just seen as quirks, eccentricities, anti-social behavior, introversion, etc.) if I hadn't developed PTSD as well. So you may have more than one thing going on.