I think I have HFA not Aspergers

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I believe my daughter is more HFA than AS, despite the fact she is diagnosed with AS.

I have always considered the difference to be not only late talking, but language difficulties in general and more of a spatial, pattern type mind than a verbal mind. This is exactly how my daughter is: late talker, mixed receptive and expressive language difficulties, and a mind that sees patterns, great at math, can't comprehend reading a book, horrible at creative writing. In my experience you find Aspies that are voracious readers and very creative writers, and very adept verbally but that is less likely with HFA or classic autism. That's just my non-professional opinion, though.

In conversations my words often com´s out wrong and my sentence structure are often wrong.
I know in my head what I mean about something and what I like to say, but I often can´t find the word....
It´s stressfully, and usually it ends up that I don´t say much. The conversation goes to fast....

High functioning autism is classic autism but not low functioning.

You had a speech delay as a child.
Flapped your hands, spun in circles for a long time as a child.
Meltdowns and/or long periods of crying.
You were not thought of as an absent minded professor as a child but instead "What in the world are we going to do with you?" That later changes if you are a secret absent minded professor into a very quiet professor.

You displayed most if not all classic autistic traits.
You are very sensitive to bright lights and certain sounds.
Your stims are more obvious.
It's harder to go out to an overly stimulated environment.
You are generally quieter unless you are very comfortable with someone.
You are less prone to engage in conversations with 2+ people.
You can just like with aspergers hide your autistic side but it doesn't last long.
You are more prone to freezing up in certain environments prompting others to treat you as though you are slow and pushing you along.


Please stop getting offended over the differences that are there. People who say they have severe aspergers and had delayed speech as a child are more than likely HFA if the above mentioned applies to them.

WrongPlanet has always been more geared towards aspies and self diagnosed aspies. Aspies who don't want to hear there are differences between the two HFA and aspergers think expressing the differences are minimizing their own struggles and that isn't it at all. Just telling the truth.

It is a spectrum. Some of our difficulties are the same but not all. Some have more difficulties than others but that doesn't mean you can't develop ways around it to do what you want to do with your life. It's always hard but you just keep fighting to get your foot in the door.

Sounds like HFA. I can't read books unless they are manual format and bigger text with pictures (very rare to find unless it's toddler books). I discovered why. Learned that other people can fantasize as they read fiction. I cannot. I can't put fantasy pictures in my brain. I can however take snapshots of things that I have seen before my eyes. Numerical data, people, events all fresh pictures. even if it happened a LONG time ago. Still fresh in my mind as a picture or video as if it happened yesterday.

Most books are wall of text format. No time for spacing.

If the fiction books I had read growing up had better spacing, much like how most people on this board type. 2-3 sentences, space. Then a picture or a decent sized icon explaining the event that had just happened. That would have been helpful.

Last edited by TheygoMew on 28 Dec 2011, 1:24 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Do you think that your self-diagnosis is more accurate than that of an appropriately-trained and licensed mental-health professional?

Interesting. My daughter can read the words of a book but cannot comprehend the storyline. I've wondered if this is due to language difficulty or memory issues but perhaps it is as you state: issues with putting things in fantasy pictures?

My daughter scored 99.9th percentile (a phenomenal score) in verbal memory by recalling a string of numbers but if they put a string of random words together she cannot remember them.

She will often point out obscure things that she visually remembers from long ago and can state exactly where she saw them (an incredible, eidetic type memory with certain items), yet when tested she was shown a page of "pictures" and then after a delay they show her a different page with the same "pictures" she cannot tell them which pictures were on the other page.

I don't know if these are truly memory issues or HFA related issues with words vs patterns.

yes because trained and licenced mental health professionals are always right, and what they say should always be accepted without question.

Unless you and Letta are sock-puppets of each other, I request that you do not answer this question on her behalf.

I was told that I have classic autism and would have been diagnosed as such in childhood. As an adult, I have developed many coping skills, so the official piece of paper says Asperger's Disorder, followed by a 99th percentile rating in severity. I don't know where this number came from, the numbers added up from the questionnaires perhaps. To me, the specific diagnosis doesn't matter. I am just me, autistic child to autistic adult following autistic course of development with autistic mentalizations, and I make a lot of sense to me. The specific diagnosis will not matter once ASD takes over in the DSM-V.

Speech delays are not required for a diagnosis of autism. It's one of 12 possible criteria (only six needed) and four in that particular category (only two needed). For that matter, stimming isn't required, nor are meltdowns.



I found an article that discussed the possible differences in diagnosing people with autism with minimal or no symptom overlap. I should find that again as it was fairly interesting and identified a fairly large variety of possible ways people can be diagnosed as autistic. Because there are 12 possible symptoms and only six are required, it's even possible to have two people with no identified symptom overlap, although overlap is possible outside of those 12 symptoms. And it's easy to diagnose anyone who has enough of those symptoms with AS because if you meet the criteria for autism but don't fit the "classic autism" mold that even Kanner's original patients didn't meet, then you get diagnosed with AS (if you had no speech delays) or PDD-NOS (for any reason whatsoever).

Another thing is that a large number of people diagnosed AS actually meet the autism criteria and probably should not be diagnosed with AS. Another thing beyond that is that what you are diagnosed with depends on things like where you were diagnosed and by whom - many clinics have diagnostic biases (more AS, more PDD-NOS, more autism) that cross the diagnostic categories as described in the DSM-IV.



I don't get offended over the differences, but I think they are frequently overstated and some things that are described as always excluded for AS as a diagnosis are often mistaken as always required for autism as a diagnosis, although I think to some extent some of that (like the erroneous belief that speech delays are required) has persisted for some time.

I like to link this post, as it includes descriptions of Kanner's original case studies, and some of them could be quite comfortably identified as AS or described as HFA today, due to how the criteria are interpreted. Kanner himself never said that speech delays are required, as he said only two things are required - "a preference for sameness" was one, and I forget the other, but it was not an inability to speak as a child. Today's stereotypical definition of "classical autism" was actually considered childhood schizophrenia after Kanner's research identified autism.

http://ballastexistenz.wordpress.com/20 ... torically/



One of the reasons for the collapsing of all diagnoses into ASD in the DSM-V is actually the relative lack of identifiable differences (as a population) and the number of people who are diagnosed with PDD-NOS and AS who meet the criteria for autism, but are excluded for often arbitrary and inaccurate reasons. This is explained in some depth on the DSM-V page for Asperger's Syndrome under the rationale (not the page for autism spectrum disorder - AS has a page simply to say it's being discontinued as a diagnosis).

What AS does as a diagnostic category is define a subset of autistic people as having a different kind of autism, and it is questionable whether a different kind of autism actually exists as defined by that category, as opposed to a matter of which symptoms each person has and how severe each person may be. It seems like there isn't simply one kind of autism, or two, or three, but many different kinds, and the current criteria don't really separate people according to these particular differences. It's also not difficult to find people who have been diagnosed with two or three different labels at various points in their lives, for various reasons ranging from "this is the reevaluated better diagnosis" to "you improved, so we're going to shift you into a new category."

The primary purpose AS as a diagnosis served was in insuring that a neglected group of autistic people could be more easily diagnosed because even though most may have fit the criteria, they were excluded for reasons that the criteria don't even stipulate.

Last edited by Verdandi on 28 Dec 2011, 5:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It's kind of hard to accept an appeal to authority like this, however. You don't know who diagnosed her, what procedures they used, what they missed, how they missed it. I can think of another poster who was diagnosed with AS because the clinician didn't interview her parents. She felt she had the wrong diagnosis, and went back for a second opinion. The second opinion was that she's now diagnosed with autism.

Research supports the theory that a lot of people who should be diagnosed with autism are diagnosed with AS. It is hardly controversial to have some show up here. I can think of three right offhand who were initially diagnosed with AS and should have been diagnosed with autism. Two were rediagnosed with autism with little difficulty.

There's nothing wrong with wanting a second opinion and getting it. There's nothing wrong with thinking that your first diagnosis is inaccurate. It may be accurate, and a second opinion may confirm that, but it may also be inaccurate for any number of reasons.

Me too! I had an actual speech delay and did not speak until I was around four or five. I also aparently was in my "own little world" and my mother remarks that it was as if I was in a jar. I had obvious developmental delays and didn't reach all the "milestones" on time. I sat up late, I rolled over, crawled and walked late. I also have low muscle tone and hated to walk or stand up. I also didn't know how to have a conversation until my late teens or maybe early twenties. I just perfered to lecture people about my obsessions and boss them around as opposed to any "give and take". Even as an adult, I do not have any desire to make friends and am an openly auromatic asexual and proud of it. Why the world is so obsessed with friendship and social interaction I will never know. People often tell me "oh but you must get loney sometimes". No, I don't. I have never actualy expirenced lonliness. Maybe that's becuase I always had a pet to turn too, but I've NEVER felt the need for the company of another human being. But anway, aside from the speech delay, there really is no diffrence between Asperger's Syndrome and HFA.

Speech delay is usually what separates autism from aspergers diagnosis unless they are changing that too.

Asperger's requires a lack of a speech delay, but autism does not require a speech delay:



Most people with AS meet criteria 2, which means that if they have enough other symptoms, they should be diagnosed with autism instead of AS, but speaking early or on time is interpreted somehow as excluding autism, when that has not been the case. Many clinicians do use that criteria, but they're applying it incorrectly.

I linked a post about Kanner's original case studies. Not all of them had speech delays.

Those are considered delays. A speech delay doesn't mean silence or always mean very limited amount of words used as it may appear. It means not hitting the speech milestones. This could mean

-echolalia
-using one words very few sentences
-using words out of context when asked questions
-not being able to hold a conversation

You can still have autism and have some speech as a toddler but for the most part if you are a babbler at a young age with autism, the only people who understand what you are saying are those who have been around you all day.





Quote:
(I) A total of six (or more) items from (A), (B), and (C), with at least two from (A), and one each from (B) and (C)

...

(B) qualitative impairments in communication as manifested by at least one of the following:

1. delay in, or total lack of, the development of spoken language (not accompanied by an attempt to compensate through alternative modes of communication such as gesture or mime)
2. in individuals with adequate speech, marked impairment in the ability to initiate or sustain a conversation with others
3. stereotyped and repetitive use of language or idiosyncratic language
4. lack of varied, spontaneous make-believe play or social imitative play appropriate to developmental level

All of what was listed are considered qualitative impairments in communication as it stated. In other words, delay.


Someone would ask a question. What do you want to eat? "Bacon".
The person knew the child did not like bacon so asked the question again. Child responds "bacon".

Person makes bacon. Child throws fit and cries when the bacon is plated in front of child's face.

The person then makes the child what the child will usually eat.

It then hits the person that they had bacon earlier. The child was repeating what was said earlier. The conversation earlier.

Someone else asked the person "What do you want to eat?" person said bacon.

Child was repeating the same answer as the conversation heard.

Even though the child spoke, the child was considered delayed in speech as their speech was limited and often repeated words others had said not giving an answer back of what the child really wanted. The child spoke but limited, didn't hold a conversation, spoke limited sentences if heard earlier but not able to hold a conversation. Speech delay doesn't mean no speaking at all.

The only delay referred to in reference to Asperger's Syndrome is:

Per the rationale for Asperger's removal in the DSM-V:



I meet that criteria. I may have met the one about repetitive use of language, as I tended to repeat what others said, what I heard from the television, etc. but I was also apparently capable of communicative phrases at 11 months, so it's debatable - I can't swear to the possibility that I knew what I was saying. I also met the fourth criteria which isn't about language at all, but about interaction.