Do you think Asperger's Syndrome is over diagnosed?

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lol can u get away by things by being on spectrum???? i thought law is same for all

No I think it's underdiagnosed many doctors fail to notice it.

It's not logically impossible for someone with Asperger's syndrome to go to bars, but it would be uncommon because the bar environment is kind of the heart of NT-style socializing. As you wrote yourself, you have trouble hearing everyone because of the noisy environment. I would not think most aspies would thrive in such an environment; I know I've tried it out of strong desire to meet women, and it wasn't for me.

I think he misread "savant-like" as "savant" -- two very different things. Most people were most likely likely interpreting "savant-like" as high levels of skill in one area compared to another, rather than extreme levels of skill, and many people who responded made very clear they didn't mean actual savant skills.

Additionally, there's the overlooked fact that when people respond to polls on these things, they're biased by definition: People having the traits in question are more likely to answer the polls. (FWIW, I didn't answer the poll, the language was too ambiguous for me to feel comfortable saying either way.)

i did not say anything about your post.
what are you talking about?

the comment "this poll's results prove your point:", was not by me (if that was what you are talking about.)

i am not sure why people are imputing i am trying to attack anyone.
i know no one here and i am not trying to say bad things about anyone here.

i am just answering the question of the topic title.

"i am not sure why people are imputing i am trying to attack anyone."

I've enjoyed reading everyone's comments in this thread. I think everyone whose taken part has made really good posts (including you).

Last edited by pandd on 20 Aug 2008, 7:23 am, edited 1 time in total.

I hope overdiagnosed. At least this way there's a chance a few people that sorely need assistance, just one person who gets who they are, will not suffer needlessly throughout their lives, in a society that holds many remidiation techniques that could otherwise have benefited their livelyhood.

Last edited by Jenk on 21 Aug 2008, 6:24 am, edited 5 times in total.

I don't think it's overdiagnosed. I can't really understand why many people would want to say they have it when they don't.

It partially depends on how Aspie is Aspie if that makes any sense. There are many people who obviously had AS and quite a lot of difficulty when they were younger, but grow out of a lot of it and become nearly normal when they're older. Therefore, there are many people diagnosed with AS who have it only very mildly.

I'm like this , but no one diagnosed me when I was younger. I now want to get a diagnosis because even though it's very mild now, I still have trouble with things, and I want to be able to tell people that. Unfortunately, many people ignore the idea that someone might struggle with something unless it's 'diagnosed' (eg. they say I'm being rude but really I don't understand, they say someone is stupid or lazy because they can't spell but really they are dyslexic)

As for the whole debate about 'Can people who go out to pubs and have friends and girlfriends be Aspies?' - I have been told that while we might be able to talk to people and make friends, we can't do it normally or as easily as others.

I don't know about the USA and other countries, but in the UK I would personally say it is underdiagnosed, especially if you're older.

I was self-dx'd sometime before 94, so I certainly wasn't trying to jump on the band-wagon. In fact, until I'd read a number of books on psychiatry, I'd never even heard of the condition, nor had I even suspected that I could fall into an autistic category (in fact I thought had schizoid traits at the time).

My very off-putting attempt at trying to get a doctor to listen to me was met with a sound rebuttal, with them telling me that it wasn't possible for someone of my mature years to have such a condition, because "it would have been picked up when I was a child". If UK doctors only started using AS as a diagnosis after 94, then it would have been a touch difficult for me to be diagnosed as a child.

Gee, even if it had been around as a DX when I was little, my traditional "Victorian" father would have probably had me lynched for being a wimp, as real men didn't give into such "wet" conditions.

The UK National Autistic Society gives advice to help adults talk to doctors, because it is really hard to get GPs to listen to you. It seems to me to be fairly well accepted in the UK that it isn't easy to get a DX, unless perhaps you are a child.

more like 50% of "aspies" are wrongly diagnosed
aspergers occurs as a diagnosed level of one in one thousand of which many are obviously not aspies

No.

Echolalia Dx topic

AS diagnoses are not cheap. I was fortunate funds were available to assist me, but the diagnoses was not to fine AS, it ws to find some sort of learning disability, as I was having trouble with practical matters. I find theory easy, and practice difficult. I KNOW what I am supposed to do, but I simply cannot do it.

There was no evidence of a learning disorder, but it was discovered that I do learn differently. I took ten different tests, and the diagnosis by a professional who had extensive experience in Spectrum conditions (including Learning Disabilities and Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity traits), concluded that I have Asperger's Syndrome.

Discovering that I have AS clears up much of the fogginess in my life, but it in itself does not help me to get and stay with employment. This is going to be difficult without assistance/intervention. I wish I was a computer whiz. As it now stands, my options are limited. I am waiting for a job coach, and am looking on my own for employment that I can do where social intrusion and prejudice will not interfere with my getting the job done. If this cannot be arranged, I will have to consider a government pension (which I have fortunately earned, through years of multiple jobs).

I just have to keep trying.

I agree with Anbuend about the poll.

I really wish alot of the self-diagnoses people would go away. There's so many people who just use it to attention seek that it's ruining the honest one's chance at being taken seriously!

I think that blaming a group of people who "make it worse for us" by convincing people we're "all like them," is unnecessary and irrational scapegoating, although I expect it isn't intended as such.

Basically.. the problem lies in standard disability stereotypes. Even if there are people who meet them, that in itself is not enough to explain why we are stereotyped in this manner. For instance, if you see an irrational man, most people do not see "All men are irrational," or "This person makes men look bad." But if you see an irrational woman, there are people who will say "See, women are irrational," and some women might decide that woman makes women in general "look bad".

The thing is, that unfairly blames the victims of stereotyping, when they are not the causes of the stereotype. Misconceptions are the causes of the stereotype. Addressing the people who either fit the stereotype, or are said to fit the stereotype, doesn't work, because they are not the causes of the stereotype. They are not the thing that makes us "look bad" to some people -- what makes us "look bad" is something in their own heads, that is perpetuating a cultural meme of sorts that happens to be a negative one, a false one, and one that is thought to pertain to us.

I have no desire to jettison an entire group of people from the autistic community just because some of them may not be autistic. Especially when that group of people is often a set of people who never had the money, age, or other forms of privilege to ensure an autism diagnosis. To blame them for negative disability stereotyping is destructive to their lives, and profoundly unfair. I know too many self-diagnosed people with severe problems in daily living skills, who desperately need help with them, and can't get it because they don't have access to a professional diagnosis, or are in a position where a professional diagnosis would be dangerous to them. (For instance, several autistic people I know, lost their jobs after their employers found out.)

This has been gone over many times, but I always feel a need to challenge that viewpoint, because many self-dxed people have no other place to get help but from the autistic community, and when we make it hostile and unwelcoming to them, they can suffer greatly. I think those of us who have the ability (like I do, and apparently like you do) to wave our official diagnoses around when someone questions our reality, ought to stand up for those who don't have that ability, not treat them like they are the problem just because some people have rotten stereotypes about all of us.

Here is a quote from one of my favorite articles, Critic of the Dawn, edited (within brackets) to make the statement more general and more comprehensible than this originally is, and while taken out of context, etc:

In one sense I cannot bring myself to condemn people with sensory and mobility impairments who distance themselves from [a particular stereotype]. No more can I bring myself to condemn women, people of color, and other groups for doing precisely the same thing. People make this move in exchange for better conditions, better opportunities, better lives.

But I recall that the price of distancing oneself from a stereotype is to reinforce that stereotype, and the related injustice, for those who cannot likewise distance themselves.

And I think that some diagnosed autistic people feel they'll get better treatment if they distance themselves from undiagnosed autistic people. And some diagnosed autistic people fall into the trap of wrongly scapegoating undiagnosed autistic people for problems they don't even cause or contribute to. When, in fact, every person who furthers that stereotype (including the diagnosed autistic people who say that self-diagnosed autistic people "make the rest of us look bad") is being part of the problem, and those who are targeted by the stereotype, unless they decide to reinforce it themselves, are not the problem. So count me in as one diagnosed autistic person who utterly refuses to see myself as somehow plagued by this huge wave of false autistic people, and who views that imaginary wave of false autistic people as an incredibly destructive meme that needs to be counteracted by more constructive and accurate ones every chance possible.

Basically, the existence of people who appear to confirm a stereotype, is not the reason for the stereotype, and ought not to be blamed for the existence of the stereotype. I am certain, statistically, that there are a few autistic people, both diagnosed and undiagnosed, who are not really autistic, some believe they are, some just say they are. But I don't claim to be able to usually discern which is which, and I don't believe that they are the cause of all the grief the rest of us get about supposedly being like them -- the grief we get over that is an old disability stereotype in general, not based on the majority of people with any condition.

Amen. It's fairly ignorant to say someone does or does not have AS simply because your condition is worse or better on some level. It's bad enough that we have NT's saying that AS doesn't exist and we are all just lazy, spoiled, rude and selfish, let alone to turn on each other and start saying the exact same things based on our own narrow minded opinions! I think we all know whether we have AS or not and how severe it is and don't need anyone else to pass their allknowing judgement.

As for whether it's misdiagnosed or not....while there is always a fair chance of midsdiagnosis or overdisagnosis in any disease or mental disorder, I think there is much bigger problem with the fact that AS ecompases such a broad spectrum of behaviors. Even when comparing women to men.

Men often have more severe symptoms than women. Women sometimes adapt a lot easier, which further hides their AS traits and problems. Not in all cases of course but in a lot. Obviously there is a bit more depth to this subject, but does that mean that these people who learn to adapt better and appear to have less severe symptoms don't have AS and are misdiagnosed a lot? Not necessarily. In fact most people here say that women are UNDER-diagnosed! So what does that mean?

To me it just means we need some further study on AS. I think they need to not only focus on treatment but to also focus on coming up with some subclassifications. Heck AS is a subclassification for Autism and we don't necessarily act like the stereotypical rainman. So more study is needed. It's very frustrating to all of us to have someone point fingers and say what we are or what we are not simply because we aren't carbon copies of someone else diagnosed with it also. But it will help us personally, emotionally and intellectually to have a more narrow idea of where we stand when compared to others. It may also help professionals come up with treatments.

I also believe that having subclassifications will also make it more difficult for Doctor's to overdiagnose. I think that with our limited understanding of AS, it is often used as a default diagnosis when they don't know for sure what the problem is yet. Especially when parents demand an answer RIGHT NOW for why their child may be acting abnormal. They don't want to give it time to find out and study. They want to know NOW for one reason or another. I think there is a lot of pressure on doctors sometimes to give answers when they don't have any. AS is one of those disorders that is just coming into light and encompases a wide range of behaviors. So when parent after parent storms in and is frustrated, it's easy to get rid of them by saying their kid as AS than to give them the truth sometimes. No doctor likes to say, I don't know. (Or maybe tell them they are just a crappy parent). It is also dangerous to do this because a child can be labeled and may turn out to not have it but will carry that label throughout school with negative consequences. At least a further AS subclassification would make them think a lot harder what category to put the child in before labeling him/her. Same with an adult.

I think that it is just important to recognize that there are varying degrees of almost any condition.