MrXxx wrote:
PDD-NOS (officially) here too.
In my case, which may be similar to others here, from reading the full diagnostic report, which included childhood history from interviews with my father, it was pretty clear that as a child if AS had been more widely known about at the time, that would definitely have been my DX probably from early childhood until somewhere around my late twenties to early thirties (early Nineties). Since it's widely accepted that AS doesn't just "go away," it's pretty clear to me I've been an Aspie all of my life.
Diagnostic criteria for AS though, specifically requires that "symptoms" be present and clearly apparent during the DX process. By the time of my evaluation, I had learned to overcome some symptoms that used to be obvious. The two most obvious I had overcome were body posturing, gesturing and eye contact. Technically, since I no longer display lacking in these areas, she could not DX AS. I've always found it to be something of a contradiction that most professionals agree that AS never really goes away, yet a patients historical symptoms can't be considered. Seems pretty stupid to me.
The assumption seems to be that if you've learned to hide certain aspects of AS, they must not be a problem anymore, but the assumption ignores another well known fact. Hiding them is extremely stressful, and poses other problems that can be as severe as not having learned to hide them.
As far as I know they diagnose AS in adults, too. But, my story is pretty much the same as yours. The psychs told me that the ADI-R scores were more indicative than the ADOS scores...
Sigh.
They also told something about my relatively low verbal performance (which is average in itself), my uneven IQ score (high in areas usually high for autistics), and my general slowness. And that this is not characteristic of AS. They didn't mean severity. They meant that I can't have Autism either as my symptoms NOW are mild...
18 Dec 2011, 2:07 pm
