Anyone else feel like the diagnosis ruined their hapiness?

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To SelfLoathingAutist: Just so you know you're not alone in your feelings here, please be sure to see the posts by NeilM and Joe90 at the bottom of page 1 of this thread. However, I have a different perspective:

There may well be things that most people see that you don't see -- but, on the other hand, there are other things you see that most people don't see. As you yourself wrote in a previous message:


Do you really want to give up the joys of pursuing your interests? And do you dismiss your ability to "see details many do not in things" as worthless? If so, why?

Many (though not all) of us feel that we experience purer kinds of joy than NTs apparently do. Many (though not all) of us feel that, while autism does entail disability and does cause us problems, it isn't all just doom and gloom.

To put this into a larger perspective: No one in the world can see everything. No one sees more than a tiny fraction of what exists. No one is God. No one is omniscient or omnipresent.

That being the case, which of the following is better?

1) A world where everyone sees exactly the same things.

2) A world where some people see different things, and hence have insights that others can't.


Do you feel that there's anything wrong with that?


Have you been tested for co-occurring ADHD?

(Back in the DSM IV era, ADHD and ASDs were considered mutually exclusive categories, but now it's recognized that they overlap quite a bit. These days, about a third of people diagnosed with ASD also have ADHD, if I'm not mistaken.)

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 03 Sep 2019, 1:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Thanks for your response.

Yes. I have ADHD. Although, I prefer the older label of ADD, because hyperactivity was never really an issue for me, but yeah I have that, and I can tolerate that.

There are a few reasons I hate myself for having this condition. For one thing, the different things about me can't just be different now. It used to be that I had a great sense of humor because it was so odd or I had a great interest in things, but now those are not positive, they're symptomatic of the problem.

But there is one thing that I learned after the diagnosis that killed me more than anything else. It's something I think about every day. If you do not know what it is, then I urge you to remain ignorant, because it's the single worst thing I know, and it has occupied tens of thousands of hours of my mental capacity.

I went out to try to find out what autism is. What is this thing? What is its defining quality?

What I found was called the "Sally Anne Test." It's the most profound and disturbing thing I have ever seen in my life. The implication is this: Autistics do not have an innate ability to understand that their mind is not alone in the universe. They cannot fathom the existence of beings. They do not understand that others feel, exist, see, have points of view.

It's the most horrible and bleak reality I can imagine. I always question this: Do I really understand that others exist? That my mind is not alone in a vacuum? Or have I just cognitively learned that as a fact, but in a way much less deep and self-integrated than normal people? Have I only learned the fact that others exist outside of myself but somehow I am unaware of it in the dimension that normal non-autistics are?

The Sally-Anne test made me almost suicidal. I have been thinking about it continuously for years.

Others may have an empathetic sense of the existence of others in a way I do not. That's the most profoundly disturbing thing I can imagine.

I also remember some of the terrible words of Temple Grandin where she described that the autistic mind operates like that of an animal. Stop and think about that. What is an animal mind? An animal mind has no real theory of mind nor any theory of self. It is not aware of itself and it is not aware of its own mortality or the linear nature of time. An animal mind is not a fully self-aware being and most animals cannot project to others nor can they even recognize themselves.

Now, there are some exceptions to that, great apes and marine mammals and perhaps some birds, but overall, animals do not have the kind of conscious awareness of self that human beings do. I think of that and what she's said about the autistic brain lacking a human mind. I don't *think* that is how I am. I feel like I do have an internal dialog. But her words echo my deepest fears.

Think about how profoundly horrible this is: Others have a dimension of self-awareness and awareness of others which I may have only superficially learned to mimic, and which is beyond my brain's ability to comprehend. I'm missing out. In fact, I almost don't exist as a thinking, feeling entity in the same way a human being with a mind does.

I honestly believe there is a solid argument that people like me should probably be euthanized. And also, that it is not immoral for someone to harm or kill me.

Think about it: why is it wrong to kill a human? Because a human has feelings, a mind, a subjective reality and an existence.

I don't know that I have that.

Can I talk? Process my environment. Sure, but a computer can do that. But disassembling a computer is not murder, because I computer has only what superficially appears to be a sense of reality. It does not have a mind. It is not a feeling being. The same could be said for animals. Note that it is generally not illegal to kill an animal, unless it belongs to someone else or is protected or you kill it in an especially cruel manner. But killing an animal is never the equivalent of human murder.

Hence, what am I?

I have occupied myself with this terrible thought for well over a decade.

Why so negative? You can try to develop a feeling of empathy. At your age it's not really impossible. Also NTs are quite different once it comes to this.

As the test is done on children below 4, it only indicates autistic children aquire ability to understand that others are different individuals later.
Or are you telling me that you fail the test as an adult?

No, it's not like that at all. My parents were forced by the school to attend these appointments to get me diagnosed. My behaviour became obvious at school when I was 4, which nobody expected, being so I never showed any peculiar behaviours before then. My parents were blamed at first, but after several tests to prove that I wasn't being abused or neglected, the school decided to go through hell and high waters to get me assessed and diagnosed, resulting in me being video'd in the classroom as aid for a diagnosis.



Thanks for noticing.
I must say, I am one of the biggest haters of AS/autism on this forum I think. (I don't hate autistic people though, I just hate having the condition).

I've heard that a therapist or counseling may help you deal with your diagnosis.

Seems to me that is a mental health issue like being involved in a school shooting. In many places you aren't expect to deal with the issues on your own.

I see. You weren't trapped in a family nexus, you were trapped in a school nexus.
That must have been hell.

I was worse than unhappy before I was diagnosed with Asperger's. I was a proverbial train wreck. I thank my lucky stars I was diagnosed because I don't like to think what could have happened if I wasn't.

Of course, my unhappiness didn't automatically end there. I could no longer stay in the hospital so I was put in a shelter for severely mentally disabled people. It was awful. Even when my mom went there to see me it made it uncomfortable because everyone was trying to grab and touch her. The staff yelled and said nasty things to me over things like wanting to be alone and not socializing with other people. One time when I was crying one of the staff said "I am going to tell your mother how you're acting when she gets here, and she will not be impressed!"

Mom wasn't impressed all right, but not because of my behavior. She said if I'd stayed there for much longer I'd have a nervous breakdown, so she and my father took me back in.

Of course, I can understand why many people are upset about their own diagnoses, thanks to all the negativity and ignorance the general public has about it.

I'm familiar with it. The results may not mean what you think they mean.


No, the Sally Ann test would seem to indicate that autistic children are slower than NT children to develop this awareness. However, most autistic children are eventually able to pass the Sally Ann test, just at a later age than NT children can.

There have been some critiques of the Sally Ann test. One problem is that what it might be measuring is language ability, not "theory of mind" per se. There are various other problems with it, too. See:

- Two reasons to abandon the false belief task as a test of theory of mind (academic journal article)
- Debunking the Theory of Mind: Bring up the word autism and you'll hear a great many theories. Simon Baron-Cohen is doing damage with a theory that was based on just 20 autistic participants.
- A Critique of the Theory of Mind (ToM) Test


Even if we are slower to learn this than other kids, I would say that, if anything, our differences from the norm make us more aware than most people are of the basic fact that other people have minds very different from our own. Basic "theory of mind" is not our problem.

To the extent that we still have so-called "theory of mind" problems, what many of us have is difficulty understanding what other people are thinking and feeling in real time -- due to underlying neurological differences.

IMO, the main advantage NTs have over autistic people is the simple fact that NTs are so much more alike on a neurological level, and hence easily relate to each other for that reason. (Autistic people, on the other hand, differ from each other as much as we differ from NTs.) But even NTs tend to lack empathy even for other NTs who are sufficiently different from themselves, e.g. from different cultures or economic class backgrounds.

Another problem many autistic people have is trouble grasping, in the moment, the totality of what is going on in a complex social situation. For many of us, this is due, at least in part, to attention issues. You have ADD, whereas many other autistic people have a very different kind of attention problem: greater-than-normal difficulty multi-tasking and shifting our attention from one thing to another.

Also, many of us tend to experience emotions differently from the way most people experience them. Some of us experience emotions more intensely, some of us experience them less intensely.

We also differ in our awareness of other people's emotions. Some of us tend to be oblivious to other people's emotions unless they're very obvious. Other autistic people are hyper-aware of other people's emotions, to the point of being overwhelmed. In either case, we tend to have difficulty figuring out an appropriate response.


I'm very sorry to hear that!

What you've just now said about yourself -- about how the Sally Ann test made you almost suicidal -- is an example of the damage done by Simon Baron Cohen's theory (or at least the way the theory was expressed to the general public).

I'll reply to other parts of your post later.

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 03 Sep 2019, 5:42 pm, edited 2 times in total.

No, but I'm not sure it's the same. From some of what I have read, it's theorized that autistics remain "mind blind" but cognitively learn to mimic perceiving others or just learn that others exist as a raw factual thing, without ever having the capacity or dimension to understand what that really means in the way that others do. That's what I am deeply afraid of.

I think it might be like a blind person can never be taught to see, but if they know an area well enough, they might be able to fake it. But do I actually understand the existence of other minds as normal humans do? Or is that like color to a blind person? I worry that it is.

The odd thing is I remember being 4 quite well and I *think* I understood deception and that others needed to be told of something to know it.

There's also the assertion by Grandin and others that the autistic mind works more like an animal than a human, which may be even more disturbing, since, as I explain, animals have neither full theory of mind not self-awareness within the context of reality and time. Animals do not have the same kind of depth of self-awareness of humans and fundamentally lack an explicit understanding of such things.

I worry about this for many hours every day and have for many years.

I feel I'm an abomination, a kind of cold calculating bio-robot without human worth. That, to me, is what autism is. It's a human without humanity. I'm not religious but it's what you would call a "soul" or a metaphoric spirit. An ego, a mind, an essence of feeling. I don't have that. I'm an autistic computer and unworthy of consideration in the way a thinking, feeling, self-aware, spirited, full-fledged human being is.

I know that sounds insulting to other autistics, but in all honesty, this is how I think of myself all the time every day.

Holistic impression. No time for an analysis. I'm learning to trust it! Because it works.

Good for you. For many of us it doesn't work, except perhaps with people we already know very well.

You should stop that sh*t. It's not only wrong but doesn't help you. Many mammals beside humans do feel empathy. Highly abstract logical thinking is something that only humans are able to do. You just don't get the emotions of other people as well but you could improve with this if you want and if learn to generate more emotions yourself. You wrote about your 'above average intelligence' but your whiny postings show nothing of this ...

It didn't ruin my happiness at all. I'm in the group of people who finally felt "understood". I could make sense of my life even if some of the memories were upsetting. I could also find a community of people who relate to me, by reading books about autism and by joining Wrong Planet. Without my assessment label I had no idea why I was so different, and I thought I was the only person in the world with a personality like mine.

Continuing my response on page 2 of this thread:

It doesn't have a single defining quality. It's a fuzzy, arbitrary categorization of oddball people (including many different kinds of oddballs, in fact) based on certain very general kinds of behavioral traits. See the DSM 5 diagnostic criteria for ASD.

We differ from the norm in many different, even opposite ways. For example, some of us have sensory sensitivities, some of us have sensory under-sensitivities, some of us have a mix of over-sensitivities in some senses and under-sensitivities in other senses, and some of us have neither. Also, as noted in my previous post in this thread, we vary a lot in both the sensitivity of our own emotions and our sensitivity to other people's emotions, and we vary in what kinds of difficulties we may have with attention focus.

All these quirks, and more, add up to difficulties relating to people who are neurologically different from ourselves.

So there is no single underlying essence of autism. It's just a cumulative effect of having a sufficient quantity of relevant innate neurological differences from the norm.


See my remarks about the Sally-Anne test, and links to relevant web pages, in my post on page 2 of this thread.


You seem to be preoccupied with this on an abstract philosophical level, rather than in terms of any actual, real problems you might have had with getting along with other people.

If you don't feel too uncomfortable sharing this, what kinds of actual, real problems have you had with getting along with other people? Or are those problems even relevant, at all, to what's bothering you?


Back in Temple Grandin's early days as an autistic spokesperson, she said a lot of things about "the autistic mind," some of which turned out to be vast overgeneralizations, and some of which were also not very clearly worded in the first place.

Some (not all) autistic people find non-human animals easier to empathize with that humans. At least partly, this is because many non-human animals (or at least most non-human mammals) express their emotions in simpler, more obvious ways, without the fakery that is common among humans.

Temple Grandin "thinks like an animal" in the sense of having profound empathy for farm animals. Note that she made it her life's work to develop technology that enabled more humane treatment of farm animals.

She also "thinks like an animal" in the sense of being primarily a visual thinker rather than a verbal thinker. Many (not all) autistic people have lopsided intelligence profiles, with some of us (like Temple Grandin) being very strong nonverbal thinkers but relatively weak verbal thinkers, whereas many others (especially many of those diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome) have the reverse: high verbal intelligence, relatively weak nonverbal intelligence.


That was certainly not true of Temple Grandin, who, as noted above, has profound empathy for farm animals.


Your worries seem to be based on a misunderstanding of what Temple Grandin meant. Again, consider her accomplishments.

It is true that your understanding of other people is probably different from most people's understanding of other people, because you are neurologically different. But that doesn't make you subhuman.

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 03 Sep 2019, 10:53 pm, edited 9 times in total.