Critical of self diagnosis - you shouldn't be

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If I could request one new feature, it would be the ability to highlight certain sentences or paragraphs, click on the quote tag and have just the highlighted bit quoted instead of the whole post. Another site I go to has that feature and it really does make it much quicker to multi-quote people.

That would be really helpful.

When you go to the reply page, you can do this by scrolling down to the bottom where the previous posts are. Highlight whatever you want to quote and then click the quote button. I'm not sure if this will work for quoting multiple posts. I agree multi-quote would be a nice tool to have here.

I have just one more thing to say on this topic.

When we the self-diagnosed didn't know we were on the spectrum our understanding of ourselves was incomplete and we suffered because of that. We had no perspective for the sometimes puzzling reactions of others and sometimes this lack of perception caused despair. Then, one way or another, we made the Discovery. We were no longer trapped by the misunderstanding and ignorance. We came to see ourselves, our histories, our challenges, our possibilities in a new way. We were no longer misfits on a planet of one and found our way to this place that seemed to know us and understand us, and where we felt we belonged. After these discoveries, this sense of belonging, many of us began to use the newly possible self-understanding and acceptance as the start of an expanding journey of possibility and/or recovery.

We know who we are and what our journey has been. Dismiss it if you must, if you are compelled to argue against our presence on the spectrum or our sense of belonging here You will have your own reasons for doing so. At the end of the day, it takes nothing away from us. We would prefer that you cease trying to rain on our parade, though you probably will find that change hard to make. Some of you will make it though. Good for you..
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That is so well put B19.

Exactly what I have been trying to communicate but much more clearly worded

Thank you

One of my goals is to make autism diagnosis more objective in future, such that objective tests of behavior and brain function can supplement clinical observation, self-report, and childhood history.

This is a really good goal. Do you have any ideas how we can go about this?

I favor cheap behavioral tests of implicit social cognition that can fit individual datasets to well-defined models of social cognition in NT vs. ASD groups. Implicit means fast, automatic, subconscious reactions that are difficult or impossible to control. Models means computational models in which all parameters are specified by numbers, which is the form of the datasets also, and the data are not ratings from behavioral observation, but responses in computerized tasks.

More eggspensive testing would be eye-tracking, EEG, and fMRI, but may be prohibitively eggspensive for common diagnostic use, esp. fMRI.

Non-social tests are a farther possibility, as less is know about non-social traits in autism, but if models of non-social traits can be developed, they would supplement social tests and add confidence to diagnosis.

Exactly.

And speaking of failures:

My mother's psychologists utterly and completely failed her. She struggled all her life with depression and thoughts of suicide, she thought she was "defective". I wish I had known then what I know now, because it is very obvious to me that she too had Aspergers, she had so many of the traits/symptoms (but I didn't know this at the time because I didn't know anything about autism), and none of these professional realised this (because most psychologists don't know s**t about autism, unless they are specialised in ASD).

Also my ex-husband (not autistic), who had become violent, was able to easily fool his psychologist, and led him to believe that he was "sweet and innocent". And after this psychologist told him he should let his anger out (which he already did anyway), his first reaction was to hit me.

I have personally encountered hundreds of people who were failed as your mother was failed, and it is heartbreaking.

I can`t say I know much about the tests you recommend but I think it would be great to have cheap accessible tests and assessments, especially those which could take the guess work out of diagnosis for non experts. Is this realistic?

I think there would need to be concensus by the top experts (and users surely too?) about the behaviours that should be essential for diagnosis, and collections of traits that need to be exhibited.

Are models of NT Vs ASD groups clearly`well defined ` yet?
(I am not as up to speed on research here as you appear to be btnnyr)

At the moment as far as I know at least 3 or 4 different diagnostic schools of thought disagree about behaviours to be included and the relative degree they must exhibit themselves.

There seems to be no singular set of agreed definitions for the range of ASDs and to complicate this issue further many (so-called)`disorders` overlap. This is not too mention the gradations implied by the word `spectrum`.

Perhaps for the near future diagnosis will remain an inexact science and a best guess by professional or self diagnostics?

It would be great if there was a simple `marker` like the baby/child eye contact reaction that I have read about or even a genetic test
(Has anyone agreed if ASDs are fully genetic or triggered by environmental factors?)

What I mean by behavioral tests is tasks that you do on a computer in which people don't know what eggsacly is being tested for or measured, they just respond usually with binary choices in many trials under differing conditions of the eggsperiment. These are completely different from any kind of self- or parent-report questionnaires or clinical observation checklists/ratings.

I think this question is not supported by current understanding of gene-environment interaction.

There is no way to present this as an either/or choice. Environment never acts on an organism outside of a genetic context and proteins are never built following genetic instructions outside of some kind of environmental context.

I think the tests btbnnyr is talking about are like the ones discussed here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit-association_test

An example of which is here:
http://www.understandingprejudice.org/iat/

Thanks for that Adamantium.
I am only superficially aware of current arguments in this area gene environment interaction it was oly a parting shot to my last post really; nevertheless I will try to get up to speed with the current concensus as it is a fascinating area.

I will have a look at these tests too btnnyr; as you say this kind of thing could be really useful.
They would need a huge sample from which to extract any `norms` or `abnorms` (have I just invented a word?)

Gene-Environment interaction is fascinating, isn't it?

About the IATs--I think the key thing is the concept of implicit cognition and ways to measure it, not the specific form and content of the test.

I wasn't talking about the implicit association test, but newer developed types of testing for implicit social cognition in which joint attention, gaze, motor movements, theory of mind are measured.

Contrary to popular belief, it doesn't take a big sample to get clear distinctions between groups, if the difference is real. You could run 20 or 200 of each group and get the same results with same clarity, so there is no point in running 200, it is waste of time and resources. Genetics studies take much bigger sample sizes into thousands, because that is what it takes to get any distinction between groups. For behavioral/brain, the goal is to study some concept or difference with different tests and see if it holds up across different tests and types of tests using small sample sizes, and if it does, there is more confidence that it is a real phenomenon.