"You can't be autistic, you can speak/write/have a job"

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I identify with most of the above sentiments. I had a variation of this statement from a psychiatrist over 10 years ago.

I matched 47 out of the 50 criteria but my eye contact was better than they expected, apparently, and I was verbally capable on a better than average level. Never mind that I have an unerring ability to get peoples backs up with my better than average communication skills.

Oh, if they could only see how annoyed we are when they vomit(metaphorically ) up these canards of theirs.

I am curious -- what signals occur in an individual's postings (writing style, choice of words, sentence structure, grammar) that would be an indicator of seeming to be autistic (based only upon those posts)?

Do you think it's possible for a computer (well, a computer program) to scan an individual's online words and make such a prediction? Is anyone doing this in research? Just curious, because there is easily enough data out their (in online forums). And, more importantly, people already do "self-classify" - by posting on WP (for autism), or say on Social Anxiety forum (for those with social anxiety) or ...

ZombieBrideXD: Some people might be disabled, it just might not seem like it. And no, you don't have to have every symptom. You have to have social difficulties and repetitive behaviours, but those can manifest in a lot of different ways. Sensory sensitivities are not technically required.

For me (a human)...

My husband will post to there forums, and he will have me read them. Wow...

For a comment on a YouTube vid, you do not need 10 paragraphs of intricate detail. It's an Aspie monolog written form.

With him, he doesn't take to account the type of form or the unwritten rules. So everything gets a 2,000 word article response.

I don't see it too much here, (or the sub forms I visit), because they are not about a single special interest subject. Like politics or something people feel very intensely about, and have the need to cover ALL their points.

We're not talking about special interests here though, we're talking about feelings and experience, so going into essay mode doesn't feel necessary here, at least for me. Also CAPTCHA tends to block me if I get too verbose

Frequent use of idioms and frequent emotional communications are two things that make people's online postings seem more NT than autistic. It doesn't mean that they are NT, just they seem that so in online postings to me. To me, you always seemed autistic due to your online postings.

There are additional signals that are harder to describe in words, but the overall impression in my mind seems more NT than autistic when processing posts with the memory of a body of posts from an individual.

Some LFA who are supposedly communicating through FC or some other strange method always seemed NT to me, even before I knew what was FC. I wondered at the time, why do LFA seem NT, and HFA seem autistic in writings? Now I know it is the NT communicating for LFA, that is why they seem NT.

People at work oftentimes complain about the documents I write (typically software specifications or design documents). My documentation is typically extremely detailed and all-compassing. I am a perfectionist. What can I say. I like to leave no stone unturned. I suppose it's a good thing I work in a technical field, as at least (I think) they appreciate the time I put to think through the systems I am attempting to describe.

I still wonder if you can use AI to predict if someone is on the spectrum. I have to imagine that someone (in this big wonderful world of ours) is attempting to do this.

I doubt that any program could determine if any written content is "autistic."

I think it is possible, but I don't know if anyone is working on this.
The CIA has linguistic specialists to classify communication patterns of certain types of people.
Individuals do have distinct communication styles and it is plausible that there could be autistic cluster.
Sometimes, people on wp make fun of the idea of an "autistic writing style guide", but I think there is something to the idea of online postings appearing autistic or not.
I think autism diagnosis is based on both matching criteria explicitly and the psychologist's overall non-verbalizable impression of the person as autistic or not, not too different from what I or others might get from someone's online postings.

I think a determination of "autistic" content is more related to how one responds to previous posts than, perhaps, even to the actual nature of the content

I used to write very long in some assignments in school which I felt like writing, for the rest I was not writing.
I would write for an assigment like 17 DIN A4 pages like a question such like "describe your animal"and when I got it back a lot of it was crossed out in red inkt by the teacher and comments on the side which said: "convulted sentencs", "too much detail", "you don't divide the necessary from the unnecessary" and more of this, but I did not understand whet was meant, what is necessary and what is unnecessary.
Getting diagnosed and learning about "attention to detail" and "difficulties in prioriting the necessary from the unnecessary" made me think about all the red inkt and I started to understand.
But the reason I write short now is due to, I guess, additional thinking disorder which showed up later in life, and it makes me more disorientated in my mind than it used to be, so I have all the details in my mind but fail to communicate, by what I mean the mental strenghts to communicate it (like in human communication).
But a difference might also be that an assignment is no communication.

While I have not been officially diagnosed I have talked to my psychologist about it & he agrees with me that I'm autistic. Yes I have a regular job & yes I talk,but I also have a number of functional limitations. I'm clumsy, have eye/hand coordination issues, strabismus, amblyopia, executive function problems, poor short-term memory, poor working memory, wet the bed until I was 15, have bowel control issues that are stress related & the list goes on and on.

I have never been good at dealing with social things unless it involved one of my few special interests & even then I still have issues if I have to move on to a different topic due to other person wanting to change topic or leave, I still try to keep with the topic.

I didn't have a regular job that had any future really until I was 40 years, that is when I started driving truck. This was after spending 10 years on SSI which is a form of social security disability insurance for my severe major depression,disthymic disorder & generalized anxiety disorder. I have been working as a truck driver for almost 19 years now.

Yes I'm almost 59 years old. It's only recently that I realized that I'm autistic. Abut 8 or 9 years ago a former employer pointed out that he thought I have aspergers syndrome but I shrugged it off back then & only recently started looking more heavily into that. When I looked up different characteristics that I have or had & Googled whether they were common in autistics I found that everything I looked up was in fact common in autistics.

Yes there were a few things that are very common in autistics that I don't have so much such as exteme sensitivities with the exception of being touched which causes an extreme reflex action if not expecting it or even if I am expecting it fingertip touching feels almost as bad as being out right poked. I can handle whole hand touches as long as I know they are coming.

I believe if I were to be diagnosed under the DSM 4 I would have been diagnosed with PDD-NOS which is a mild form of autism that don't need all the full fledged characteristics autism but usually has more intellectual disabilities. My IQ tests bore that out with a score of 89 but with exceptional strength & weaknesses. Strengths included mechanical comprehension & spacial perception & weaknesses were in the typical weak areas that all autistics share I.E.social IQ.

I revealed the fact that I am autistic to my work place but they like my work so much they want to keep me on in spite of the difficulties I have & yes I discussed my difficulties with them but in spite of them I'm a very good truck driver with extremely low break down & absentee record. I treat my truck well & it don't break down on me except once the dash computer went haywire but that is not due to anything I can do to the truck & they know that. Otherwise I have had ZERO break downs in the last 5 years. Many poeple who work for us have very regular break downs like once a month or so.

Last edited by traven on 02 Feb 2016, 6:35 am, edited 1 time in total.

Want to address a couple of things. People with autism do not lack self awareness in a self analysis way. But do lack it as how they are being perceived by others. Especially in the moment. Later on they might realize they behaved in a certain way.

That hfa was diagnosed as a bunch of stuff other than autism before the 90's is no surprise. But at least there was a clinical history of being diagnosed with something significant along those lines.

Then there are people who had difficulties growing up, but not to the point where it raised any red flags requiring any clinical intervention. I just have trouble seeing someone with such a background as genuinely autistic. Where basically the whole thing began well into adulthood when they read about aspergers on the internet and took a couple of online tests.

There are such people as hypochondriacs and posers. The world is full of them. And there are a bunch of them who claim to be autistic. The question is which does one more closely resemble? Do they more resemble someone with autism who has a documented clinical history from childhood of significant behavior and learning problems? Or do they only have how they feel and how they scored on an online aspie quiz?

You can only go so far with glossing over established symptoms of autism as "stereotypes".

Some people's stories I read I see solid historical clinical background material. With others all I read is anecdotal fluff.

Germanium brings up an interesting point: People with autism, at times, can be fastidious when it comes to such things as trucks. It's almost like they adopt them as their so-called baby This is related, perhaps, to the well-known phenomenon of autistic people humanizing objects, and even having affection for objects, as opposed to having affection for people.

The fact that his employer sees him taking care of his truck, and the fact that he doesn't get into accidents, puts him in good stead with his boss; therefore, even when he told his employers about his autism, they just sloughed it off, and looked at his resplendent driving record. All the trucking company cares about is the bottom line, and he takes care of his truck and makes the deliveries, so they don't give a hoot about his autism.

Obviously, this also occurs amongst NT's--especially men in relation to their cars. Except, in this case, they might adopt a car as a she (yes, chauvinistic, but definitely true in my experience).

I used to want to be a trucker, for various reasons. One: the feeling of being in a self-contained, isolated environment on the road; and two: wanting to talk to people on a CB radio, rather than talking to them in person.

But, because of perceptual difficulties, I cannot be a trucker. I would probably destroy the truck in the city; I would have difficulties with the tight turns. I'd do okay in rural and suburban areas, though.

I'm glad Germanium has found his niche as a trucker. There is at least one other trucker on this Site, who goes by the Screen Name 886.