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Bombe
Tufted Titmouse
Tufted Titmouse

Joined: 1 May 2016
Age: 35
Gender: Male
Posts: 39

03 May 2016, 9:27 pm

Noca wrote:
A professional diagnosis is only needed if you need accommodations or acknowledgment from others in your life, like an employer, family, friends etc. I believe if you are reasonably intelligent, given enough time and reading from various resources on Asperger's, formal and informal, you should be able to tell if the diagnosis fits you. This notion that an ordinary person cannot possibly arrive at the conclusion on their own whether or not Asperger's Syndrome fits them, and that you can only have Asperger's if Dr. God, in his divine authority, gives you his divine blessing that you are on the spectrum, is just baloney.


No the issue is that there are symptoms of Asperger's that are shared with other disorders. Diagnosing yourself and looking at strategies for Asperger's could be leading you in the wrong direction to help make your life better and more comfortable. These 'tests' are designed to tell you whether or not you should potentially look at finding out whether or not you have Asperger's, not to allow you to self-diagnose. That is a dangerous path to go down, and it is just generally much safer to get officially diagnosed if you are suspicious about it.


_________________
Your neurodiverse (Aspie) score: 177 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 26 of 200
You are very likely neurodiverse (Aspie)


josh338
Raven
Raven

User avatar

Joined: 23 Apr 2016
Gender: Male
Posts: 112
Location: Connecticut

04 May 2016, 6:54 am

Yigeren wrote:
I was told by the psychologist that even with the tools today, a diagnosis isn't 100%. That really bothered me. I like things to be certain.

With people who are more severely autistic, the diagnosis may be closer to 100% accurate, but there is still no test to determine for sure who is and isn't autistic. They can do fMRIs and EEGs to see differences, but even those aren't 100% accurate. I'm guessing that the reason is because ASD seems to have multiple causes, resulting in people with different symptoms and different brains. But I don't really know.

So they do tests like the ADOS, and they do interviews with the patient and the parents if possible. They try to get as much information as possible because the diagnosis is based on behaviors and reported symptoms.

I had to take the ADOS, along with an IQ test, tests for attention, and psychological tests. I was interviewed, and my behavior was also being observed during most of my tests. My mother was questioned as well.

Although I had figured out before I got evaluated that I likely had ASD, I didn't know for sure. I think that getting evaluated is important even without needing services. The reason I feel this way is because an outside observer is needed to give a good idea of how the person is coming across. There were quite a few things observed about my behavior that I didn't notice, even though I tend to be very observant. We can't really see how we appear to others.

A person with social anxiety and some mild sensory issues could mistakenly believe that he/she has ASD based upon symptoms. People with social anxiety may feel that they are socializing poorly when they are actually doing well.

So I think that having a professional spend a lot of time with the person, talking with him/her, and observing the behavior is really important. In my case the evaluator spent a lot of time with me, and didn't make a snap decision. A person cannot objectively observe one's own behavior nor administrator the ADOS to oneself, and so those things are missing in a self-diagnosis.

I think you hit the nail on the head. Several nails, really.

From what I've seen, the diagnostic criteria are themselves in flux, with criteria evolving and different authorities using different definitions. It also seems that autism varies widely both in magnitude and specifics.

The impression I've gotten from reading the literature on BAP is that rougjly half of the first degree relatives of people diagnosed with ASD have subclinical autistic symptoms, e.g., mild social difficulties. This says to me that the official autism diagnosis includes as an important element whether the autistic characteristics cause significant distress, and this in turn means that the criteria are to some extent subjective and will remain so.

I've had a great deal of difficulty myself answering some of the questions on tests like the RAADS-R. It is, as you say, very easy to overlook one's own characteristics and to know how one is perceived by others. So when I answer a question along the lines of do you think you are perceived as a sympathetic person, I find it hard to answer. I also keep noticing things about myself that I hadn't noticed before, e.g., when I first answered the question about whether I imitate what others say in order to fit in I said no, but then I realized with a start that I had done just that as a boy in a new social situation.

I do think that someone can probably make a reasonably accurate self-diagnosis if they have very clear-cut scores on these tests and spend some time reading the literature and on this group to see if they identify. And I also tend to be skeptical of professional diagnosis -- there are plenty of stories here and elsewhere of careless diagnosis, diagnoses that were missed or changed. I gather that practitioners range widely in their knowledge of and experience with autism and a PhD or an MD after the name doesn't mean that they have the knowledge or experience to diagnose ASD. I mean, I've seen several psychologists over the years and none of them even mentioned it as a possibility. And yet when I discussed the test scores and other things with her my current psychologist had to agree that it's likely. I could hear the catch in her voice -- she was almost as broken up about it as I was.