Rant about people with "self-diagnosed" AS

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Let's see..... You are 16 and were diagnosed 10 years ago, right? 16-10=6! WOW! SIX YEARS! What a coincidence! When I was 6, my school asked that I be sent to a psychiatrist for social issues. I ended up being prescribed stuff for ADHD and my mother never even filled the prescription because I was hyper! NOTHING else came of it. I DID go to the school psychologist(who yelled at my father for not being there), and a psychiatrist that figured I was already interested in girls. He HAPPENED to be right, but his reasoning was WRONG(I would have given him the same answers if I was homosexual). I say that only to show how they assume a given answer means a given thing when it might be TOTALLY wrong. AS wasn't an option at the time. It was LONG before AS hit the books, and longer before it was considered a valid diagnosis.

Frankly, there are a lot of costs associated with a diagnosis. If I was 30 or younger I would maybe jump at the chance, although the costs would still be high. HECK, I would have loved to have gone down to australia even just to be diagnosed by Attwood. BTW Attwood isn't that much younger than I am. When I went to that psychiatrist, Attwood probably wasn't even really thinking about what college he would go to.

BTW I meant to state it earlier, but YOU didn't have to pay for the diagnosis. EVEN when I went to the psychiatrist, my mother said she had to pay. Interestingly, he ran me through the wringer. Apparently gave me most of the tests they give AS people. It has been SO long, that my mother doesn't remember the name of the place, or have records. If she did, I would try to get the records, notes, and possibly try to get them to diagnose me on the basis of that. He had me, look at inkblots, build stories from cells, take an IQ test, speak with him for quite a while, etc....

Anyway, I would have to pay to have myself tested. If something happened, or s/he REALLY knew her/his stuff and was honest, I MIGHT get away with paying a few hundred. It is more likely that I could pay THOUSANDS though. The average income here is about $40,000 or so, in case you are curious, and they only see about 1/2-2/3 that as real income.

Last edited by 2ukenkerl on 04 May 2008, 6:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Anyone with any understanding of this syndrome should realise you don't magically turn Aspergic the moment the shrink signs on the dotted line - you're born with it, you live with it, you'll die with it. It doesn't change a thing except give other people a label to slap on you and more ammo for them to have against you should they ever need it. You're either AS or you're not. Simple.

Zancur, I admire you for apologising for your assumptions. That's mature for a 16 year old.

Anyone who wanders in to the ex dino cafe and share the pain of older aspies who took years to understand what made them tick will understand how self diagnosis works.

The thing about self-diagnosis is the same with an automobile. You can take your broken car to a licensed professional, who may be right, or may very well be wrong and charge you way more money than necessary. Or you can educate yourself on mechanics and make an informed self diagnostic of your vehicle that is of the same quality. If you are capable and have the know-how, you can get the tools you need (borrow them, maybe) and fix the problem yourself. Or if its not a serious problem and the car runs otherwise, you might decide that just identifying the problem is just fine and carry on. Either way you go about it is, depending on your point of view, the right way.

Its your choice. Many grown adults are living undiagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome and are not disabled. They don't particularly need the label. Sure, it may be of interest of them to know why they behave the way they do, but what else can be done with a diagnosis?

I also think that anyone who takes on the label too easily will be recognised by the community or will wander off eventually to find another label.

I use the term aspie to describe myself, because I would never meet the DSM-iv diagnostic criteria. And aspie covers both those who meet the formal criteria and those who have the genetic characteristics but for one reason or another do not exhibit the co morbid behaviors which are needed for the formal diagnosis. Does anyone really think that the DSM-iv standard is, with the advancement in spectrum knowledge in the last 12 years, anything more than a Stone Age tool? Back then most clinicians did not even think it was genetically based.

I am still amazed that so many within the community still consider themselves disabled. Yes we certainly have disabilities in certain areas compared to NTs but they have just as many disabilities when you consider our additional spectrum capabilities, which they do not have. Yes the disabilities label does make it easier to get services but it is really about discrimination.

bookwormde

My uderstanding of 2 undiagnosed people is that they may not be disable, but they suffer from anxiety and other things. If one would acknowledge a label he could deal with it better.

I'm 30 years old and up until last week, I thought I was normal. The only reason I realize now that I have AS is because I suspected it in my son for years and he finally got a dx last August when he was 7. I started looking into it for myself just a couple of weeks ago because I started realizing a lot more about myself than I did before.

I have 30 years of figuring out how to FAKE IT so I could try to fit in, 30 years of feeling like an outcast and a loser and being confused and wondering what was wrong with me. Still thinking I was normal.

Now that I know, I can relax. I feel more comfortable in my head.

And I know without a doubt that my self-diagnosis is correct.

As for getting an "official" diagnosis, that will be done when I have the money and when I'm good and ready and it will not be sent to any insurance companies or weirdo docs that want to take babies away from their families. I'm not insured so it would only be me and my husband that know my dx. And I trust my doctor with my LIFE. He is the only one that I have ever trusted and not been screwed over by or criticized.

There are a lot of aspies that are obviously aspies and still don't get diagnosed, or get misdiagnosed, because of ignorance and stereotypes on the part of psychiatrists ("you can't have Asperger's, you are too imaginative," if you let the different foods on your plate touch you aren't an aspie," etc.). So the OP is F.O.S.

That would be the fourth revision, DSM-IV, in 1994. Dr. Lorna Wing was still an undergraduate, beginning to dig out Dr. Asperger's original work (which had fallen into disfavor during the Behaviorism fad of the Fifties and Sixties) a decade after the date you thought. (I think the version in '72 might have been the one where they stopped describing homosexuality as a mental illness, however - not certain of that date...) The first diagnostic criteria were published in the ICD-10 in 1991, two years after I was discharged from the Air Force for "psychological condition incompatible with military service" - they DXed me as "schizoid" at the time (the psych thought my flatness of affect was due to being "cold" and unemotional).

A little historical perspective, Zac - remember that the first diagnostic criteria for AS were published the year before you were born, and it still took six years for you to get your diagnosis. When you were born, I was 29 years old, and three years into my first marriage (which ended rather unpleasantly, in part because neither one of us had a freaking clue what was wrong with me). Since then, I learned of AS when my sister read an article about it in 2002, and recognized me immediately. I looked it up in the DSM after that, and everyone who's read the criteria agree that that's me (my second wife says they should have my 8x10 glossy on the facing page).

However, a) psychologists want money for diagnoses, and I don't have enough to spare for them, and b) an official diagnosis would do me little good at this point. I'm 44 years old - I've had to figure all the coping strategies out on my own. What help would the little piece of paper do? It's not like I could collect disability money from the Feds or anything...

Dante, you say you swore you were always "normal"? Are you sure your diagnosis is correct? Even pros can make mistakes, and I for one can testify that no one has ever taken me for "normal". Weird, eccentric, stupid, ret*d, goofball, "intelligent but doesn't make effort" - all those have been used to describe me, but never "normal".

Last edited by DeaconBlues on 04 May 2008, 6:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

We are united in the fact we'd rather have humans among us who think they have Asperger's than turn away any undiagnosed Aspies.

Why would anyone want to be this way? I was 3 times your age before I even heard of the symptoms. Imagine going decade after decade knowing you were 'wierd', failing at jobs, relationships, having few friends, falling all over everything, etc. Now who would want that?

Thinking you have a disease, syndrome, or medical condition when you don't is called 'medical student syndrome'. But when you have spent your whole life being different, and then stumble across a description of the syndrome, you start digging. When suddenly you find that everything listed is something you've experienced or lived with all your life, you start connecting the dots. I'm sorry if I'm not a 'diagnosed' person, but Occam's razor states that the simplest explanation that fits the facts is likely the answer you're looking for.

I live in a state with what are called 'right to work' laws. Written to keep unions out, they state that you can be fired for any reason, or no reason at all. I'm not making this up. As a contractor, I have about all the job security of a flat soda; I'm too old, and 'make too much money'. So I may be excused for not wanting something in my medical files that's going to make it even harder to find a new job if I need to. I actually have been to psychiatrists in the past, and not one has said anything as to what my 'problem' might have been. With current benefits in this state and company, I get 28 lifetime visits (like the next 20 years), period. So I'm going to be a bit reluctant to go to one, anyways.

Now I know you have apologized, and we accept that. No real harm done, but I just felt I had to say something.

lol. I checked the wiki article because you wrote that.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayhem_(band)

How does anyone really know who's formally diagnosed and who's self-diagnosed anyway? A diagnosis is confidential - between you, your doctor, and anyone you choose to share it with. Some people submit proof of diagnosis to their insurance company, school, or employer, but that's their choice.

Unless someone chooses to scan and upload an official letter from their doctor or a copy of their medical records, we don't know if they really have been diagnosed. Anyone can say anything they want - online or in real life.

This is not meant to imply that people commonly lie here, or that anyone in particular is lying. Just pointing out a basic reality that may have been overlooked so far in this thread.

So now that you were oficially diagnosed with AS can you tell me why do I have this syndrome?

Because nobody knows exactly what's going on with my brain.


There's no real "giving a bad name" issue.

That's your syndrome working on absolutes.

Just to let you know, I figured I had to be:

Normal BUT was....
Gifted,
Obsessed with some interests(This and the gifted idea fed off of one another)
Uncoordinated physically(I explained this away because I had NO help from ANYONE, and most people DO)
shy(Possibly because I moved so much, etc...)
My senses were skewed(Nobody even understood this terminology when I explained or demonstrated it, but HERE it would be known as SPD)
without many friends
etc...

I never had enough show clearly enough at once to suspect anything could be THAT far off. As for the psychiatrist, I remember going to him once and feeling he was a nice guy, but I don't think I remember the psychologist or WHY I was there. We ALL want to believe we have similar basic potential with no real effort, so I guess I was too willing to dismiss what is really obvious to others when I am outside of my comfort zone.