Oh, there is nothing wrong with you.

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There's a whole lot less ignorance about AS in the medical community than there is elsewhere. A mental hospital won't take you without a good reason.

Whoa! Run that by me again? I should hide it from *doctors*? Is that family docs or shrinks or both? They might have us locked up, really? I'm not diagnosed yet but I will be, if I show up. AS explains my whole life - are you saying the diagnosis makes things worse with even the docs?

I am currently in process of DX...that in mind....

My GP..9who I have seen a total of 1 hour over 2 years..."you dont have AS...you can communicate"


My boyfriend of 4 years..."AS is not a real DX...you are just excentric,individualist"Inspite of my obsession with learning about it....he is not interested in learning about it at all(2 possible reasons?
It means he picked someone "deffective" and not someone unique?.....He has alot(alot) of aspie traits and doesnt want to think there is anything "wrong" with him(so sad)...

EXboyfriend(friend of 12 years)...."you are just weird,shy,depressed,obsessive,insecure and anti-social"

My Parents...?????I have only told them I am going for a DX to try and figure out if it is AS or something else(truth)and that I hope the answer will give me some insights to help me make some improvements in my functioning in regarurds to work.(truth)They are Christian Scientist,so they believe "anything" can be cured by prayer...they dont even want to "hear" a DX because it makes it more "real" and harder to pray out of existence.....If they did manage to get past this way of thinking...
I could see it going two ways based on which is more "comfortable" for their reality...

1.That means it is not our fault that she is messed up....she was "defective when we adopted her"..."now where did I put that receipt and how long is the return policy good for"

2.She doesnt have it...because that would mean it was wrong of us to kick her out at 16 and not get her help....She is obviously just looking for an excuse to be lazy,weird and insinsitive...

No, no-one is going to lock you up for having AS. People with AS CAN get locked up, but not because they have AS. AS might make you do things that will get you locked up (trying to kill yourself) but no one is going to say "Oh, you've got AS? Off you go." You're safe there.

I am not diagnosed but I am fairly sure I have aspergers... it would explain so, so much. I have been reading up on it to try to get some insight in how to better get through life. I told my mother that I thought I had it and she immediately rejected the idea... saying I was just "unique" and I was having the same sorts of problems she and my father had (only much more so), and I just needed to work on my social skills and not analyze every situation so much or act so sensitive. She says I act like I don't care about people when I meet them and so they think I don't like them, and I demand too much intensity and honesty from them. I talked to her about many specific examples but she brushed them all off. There's no point in talking to my father (although she did tell him I thought this) becuase he believes any claim of an ailment of any kind (asthma, heart disease, etc) is merely a crutch and excuse. Ironically, he has many of the same difficulties I do and is the only person I know in real life who semi-understands the challenges I face, but he doesn't think (or won't admit to me, anyway), that it is indicative of anything wrong except me not trying hard enough. I mentioned it to my sister and she kind of brushed it off. I decided there wasn't any point in trying to convince anybody of it... the main advantage to me in knowing I have it is to learn more about it and learn how other people have overcome the various difficulties that arise in day to day life, because trying to talk about them with an NT has always resulted in confusion and occasionally suspicion on their part... they just don't think about things the same way. It just additionally confirms to them how "weird" I am.

This drives right at the "why" of DX. I don't have one yet. I have 2 reasons for wanting a DX:

1. Getting me off the hook socially
2. Getting occupational therapy

If I wear a T-shirt that says, "I'm not ignoring you, I have Asperger's", will people leave me alone or will they get worse? I've been hiding in my apartment since 2 summers ago, when a little girl rolled up a magazine and yelled me at me "How can you walk by people you know and not say hello?" and after that the grandmothers and the mothers ostracized me and stared at me etc. And I had to go out with my dog, so I hired somebody to walk the dog. So, now that I know why I do that (oh, yes and I'm faceblind too) - anyway ... will *anything* get people off my back?

Also, occupational therapy - is anybody getting that and what is it? Is it about weighted blankets, sensory diet, food diet?

Great idea about the T-shirt!
My dad had a similar idea for a tee saying "That's just the way my face looks", since people keep asking him if he's tired or depressed (he's probably an aspie but doesn't know it).

That's a very good point. I'm trying to get a DX one way or the other soon and I'm wondering how I will react if I get the DX. Who will I tell? Will I be better or worse off from telling? More and more, I'm beginning to feel that this will just be a dark secret for me. I don't know that it will help to tell anyone more than a few close people I can trust. Oh wait. That's nobody.

What if you go and the doctor says "No, you don't have AS"? I think that's one of the reasons I'm not going. I'm not even sure myself, but I prefer to ignore that and believe I am an aspie.

Let me ask you something. You know at the dentist's, when they take an x-ray, they put over you this heavy aprong thing? Do you like how that feels? I love it. And in reading about AS, I discovered weighted blankets, and I'm saving up for one.

*That's* the kind of thing that an occupational therapist would tell me if I got a dx.

At bedtime, i put my air conditioner down to 60F and sleep under 4 or 5 heavy blankets. I've been doing that since i bought my first air conditiioner in 1968 (with my 2nd paycheque). And lo & behold, the exact same thing turns up in a book as something an aspie would do.

There are helps and I want to find out what they are.

Rain Man didn't seem "way out there in la la land" to me. Although he was obviously a fictional character, the way I read his character involved a whole lot of perception of his environment that other people weren't giving him credit for. He didn't always say what he knew, but when he did say what he knew, people were shocked.

He also didn't seem all that unable to function (he used routines to do various things that I certainly can't do), but I couldn't help wondering, were some of the areas in which he was unable to function, results of being institutionalized (if he was a real life person), rather than something else. That is a known result of institutions, and many of the autistic people portrayed in the literature as "hopeless" and so forth have really been deprived of stimulation and education in institutions so long (even Kanner noted this). Same reason that people with Down's syndrome now score higher on IQ tests, not because there's a suddenly new kind of Down's syndrome, but because institutions stunt intellectual development.

I'm curious what everyone's take is on the apparent discrepancy between what seems to be considered a pretty rare disorder (far less than 1%) and a lot of people who identify as aspie.

They're wrong.

The trouble i have with disbelieving NTs is they be convinced your making excuses or being generally negative and defeatist - and the more they try to misguidedly and innapropriately offer advice or encouragement, the more you try to explain it rationally, the more defeatist you appear to them.

I think there are many more people out there who are aspie than the current stats show. At my school in my class of about 70, I'd say there were three, and another in the class above me. So at a school - about 5 out of every hundred - that's quite a lot when you have maybe a thousand students - that's 50 aspies. Some Yankee high schools have a lot more kids than that. And even in a group of 1000 a block of 50 solidly united (can aspies do that?) people do actually have some power.

When I first found out that I was aspie - I treated it pretty much the same as knowing I've got small feet - nothing changes, no big deal, not something that comes up in conversation. And then I found out a whole lot more about it - more about the social incompetence, and the depression you get when you stuff it up and you know it's all your fault but you've got no idea how to stop yourself from stuffing up again - albeit in a completely different way (cos you learnt the lesson before but you'll find a new way to get it wrong). And the anxiety. Being anxious about everything even something you've done hundreds of times before. And why I've picked such a different path to my fellow school students.

When I found this out - I wanted to tell EVERYBODY like a broken record "I've got Aspergers", but the very very few that I did tell - said stuff like "What's Aspergers?" and "No WAY". One said "that figures", but only because she'd been working with an Asperger's kid and his parent. My sister who is a shrink said "No Way". It's going to be interesting to see if she does some research because she really didn't know the difference between Aspergers and rocking-in-the-corner Autism. And chances are she has it to some degree too and her partner and her kid will.

I'm sure that most of my family have it, especially on my Dad's side but also on my mum's side and the things that make an Aspie - an Aspie - we think are really good things, and the stuff that makes us socially incompetent - we usually attribute to shallowness of other people. We like being eccentric, and unique, and forging our own way not thoughtlessly following others and um, we're not afraid to say so. I can understand a Dad denying there is something "wrong" with his child who is just perfect to him.

Personally I prefer my family's attitude - there is something wrong with people who insist on conformity and have no tolerance for diversity. But I still get a bit depressed when I unintentially upset people. I get anxious about anything I perceive as risky or potentially dangerous - like driving on our roads with other idiots, or new things that I haven't tried - I could do without that but it's part of who I am. I wouldn't lose the individualness or the desire to learn everything about everything, or the ability to concentrate on something interesting for days on end and then tell everybody about it or the weird ability to remember obscure facts from years ago when I can't remember someone's name from five minutes ago. They feel better when I can tell them what we worked on together five years ago.

You're suggesting it may be 5%? I think that would call for a pretty loose interpretation of the symptoms.