Over-intelligent = Aspergers?

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It puts me in a strange situation. Either im an aspie(Which means i can get help) or in over-intelligent(Cant get help), or its the same diagnosis.

I would love to think im over-intelligent, but it doesnt justify the fact i have problems.

Anyone else who had this same dilemma?

I'm telling you this because I'm in a similar situation. My family thinks I'm just very intelligent. But they don't know all that goes on in my mind, and since I learned about Asperger syndrome I'm not so sure that the "very smart theory" explains everything.

Some gifted youths have talked about that they seemed to have found similarities between giftedness and AS. So it's definitely there somehow. They appear similar to the outside/at a first glance.

However, the cause for these similar symptoms and behaviour is different.

Like for example, social issues in AS derive from not being able to read non-verbal cues for one. That's a symptoms of autism. Gifted people can read body language just fine. They don't have that symptom - then they don't have Asperger's.

Just as AS might be confused with giftedness, ADHD often can be confused with giftedness too at a first glance.

Why hide one's higher intellect? It's humiliating, such trying to to hide one's light under a bushel as if it was a shameful thing like syphilis or bedwetting Anyway, if people surrounding you are much dumber than you you simply don't have too much common ground with them, even if you make every effort to sound like they. You can be nice to them but you won't have too much common points.

There is also the classic article The Outsiders (but it should be noted that William James Sidis was actually better adjusted than the media knew about).

My mom said that gifted kids are easy to spot because they're the ones that are socially ret*d.

I am not sure why some people do, but i can say that when I was in the "gifted and talented" class, some of the most intelligent kids in the class were the ones who were the most "stoic" about it....one would never have suspected...I am not saying that is a good thing...just an observation....

No offence, dude, but your mom's full of it.
All of the smartest people I know personally, are just the opposite.
Take last year's valadictorian at my high school:
Extremely gifted girl, could read at about 600-800 words per minute (wpm) at age six, took 5 AP classes and exams her Jun year and got four 5's and one 4 (on the AP Chem one). Extremely skilled socially and my best friend too. She throw a party for her graduation and several dozen people showed up (myself included). ^.^ The functional/social things (having friends, driving, etc) that I've often struggled with, she takes with complete ease...just...wow.

And from what I've read in my Psychology text, research has shown that usually the people with the highest IQ's typically have the best social skills as well.

i don't realy believe that one should have to hide one's higher intellect, but I was thinking of scenarios (possibly far-fetched) when it might be useful to do so for the sake of self-preservation

I think you were getting at something else, but I think that I was one of those stoic individuals. The gifted and talented programs seemed like an excellent fit for most of the kids in them. Although I didn't realize what was going on at the time, they didn't seem to be challenging or interesting enough for me. The programs were just an extension of the same boring education in the regular classroom, I would figure the stuff out without difficulty then spend the rest of my time daydreaming. The worse problem was that I was pretty much given automatic A's for just being in the program even though I wasn't forced to do work.

Since then I've surprised people with my indifference towards education, dropping out of college, and putting myself in the position of living at home trying to get a start in some working class career that my abilities grossly over-qualify me for.

Paths of thinking of someone blessed with superior intellect are often so utterly different than in the normal that even if such a person decides to make heroic attempts to behave in the most normal way among others, I guess it would be a pretty difficult task because some untypical remark or a subtle choice of some unusual words (and they tend to escape one's mouth with ease even if you control yourself) indicates you're not "one of them". I remember that I heard a contemptuous remark about "big words" used by me when I was in kindergarten.

My mom said that gifted kids are easy to spot because they're the ones that are socially ret*d.

This tendency to become isolated is one of the most important factors to be considered in guiding the development of personality in highly intelligent children, but it does not become a serious problem except at the very extreme degrees of intelligence. The majority of children between 130 and 150 find fairly easy adjustment, because neighborhoods and schools are selective, so that like-minded children tend to be located in the same schools and districts. Furthermore, the gifted child, being large and strong for his age, is acceptable to playmates a year or two older. Great difficulty arises only when a young child is above 160 IQ.

These articles trouble me a bit as, supposedly, I'm on the optimun iq range for socialization (126-131) yet I keep getting the qualitative feel that social communication with others is a hopeless pursuit. For example, the whole watching sports thing. . .

I have an issue with this and "committed strategy" - especially when put together:

. . . Hollingworth wrote:

This tendency to become isolated is one of the most important factors to be considered in guiding the development of personality in highly intelligent children, but it does not become a serious problem except at the very extreme degrees of intelligence. The majority of children between 130 and 150 find fairly easy adjustment, because neighborhoods and schools are selective, so that like-minded children tend to be located in the same schools and districts. Furthermore, the gifted child, being large and strong for his age, is acceptable to playmates a year or two older. Great difficulty arises only when a young child is above 160 IQ.

Maybe that only applies to first world countries but I've gone to high middle-class and high class schools all my life and they didn't seem anything close to a haven for the gifted.
I remember having every single student turn against me in class when I basically said - in a related discussion - that human free will was nought as humans are composed of elements which have been obeying physical laws since the Big Bang (which we were indeed discussing i.e. not out of pedantry) and so, in theory, all human behaviour could have been predicted to the last detail since the very beginning. I was eager to discuss/find an hypothetical bond between religion and science at that level and was accussed instead of "not being cathotic".
Similar things have happened to me numerous times - especially when it came to people having a group/mass reaction to a certain thing and me just being appalled by the unfairness and stupidity of it all.

A guy at a forum once told me that - at any uni - the average iq is over 120; while it doesn't sound too unlikely, I don't recall perceiving that either. I do recall noticing bright people but nothing like almost everyone being noticeably smarter. In fact, one thing I can't stand of my grad school classmates is their sheer lack of imagination so as to try and take the yuppie stereotype to such a naive and grating identity-prothesis - as though they couldn't figure out anything better for themselves.

Will all due respect to all those smarter than I; I often ponder just how do they get themselves to socially intermingle so well with average people and, even then, what could they possibly get out of it?. I'm not even saying it doesn't happen; I even saw it happen a few times.