Does anyone here actually not desire social contact?

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It fades in and out from short spurts of really loving the human race to not wanting any social contact outside of family. I like social contact sometimes, but too much and I really don't like it at all.

Mw99,

Thanks for the DSM list; note how it precludes a PDD. I guess the professionals I saw were projecting their ideals onto me, and assuming that I fit the same manifestation of AS* as others they see; many in this thread don't seem to be too keen on social interaction (I was betting that there'd be quite a few like there is).

*Verbal adult with normal IQ

Sure a lot of psychiatry is based on stereotype but there is a lot of validity involved as well. This counts as something valid.

Thank you, Synth and Zonder.

There is a lot of validity to psychiatry, and I think that validity is abused. A number of people here seem to be "under it." Don't make the mistake of thinking that a person who uses psychiatric terms or diagnoses against people is not also "under it." They can be just as terminally dependent as the people who they torture.

I really don't see it as rational to infer that a person who is a loner has a disease that is not a reasonable reaction to his environment. I have been through the mill. I don't see how rational people can be expected to tolerate it at all, let alone be sane after they've been through it. The only way to become sane is to work at it, maybe with help if the help knows that they're doing (fat chance), and understand what you are doing. This does mean finding hope in the midst of chaos and pain.

Psychiatrists make a living from the stigma that is associated with schizophrenia and autism. The stigma has parents lining up to fork over cash and force their children to go through any "treatment" that the professionals might cook up. What exactly is schizophrenia? Mostly it's geniuses who have been bullied beyond normal tolerances. I don't see how autism in most cases needs to be anything but a very similar response to bullying and abuse, expressed in different terms. Like any human being, a person's behavior depends a lot on how people treat him or her. A person with a diagnosis will act out the diagnosis if he buys into it and if other people know about it. Mistreating people for refusing to believe is one of the worst things that can be done.

Neurotypicals live in a fantasy world that is not particularly close to reality. I think that a lot of autistics and schizophrenics live closer to reality and those who are "under it" have not achieved the needed independence to keep their lives private from those who would take it to pieces. Lack of privacy is one of the techniques of brainwashing. Brainwashing, indoctrination, when applied with no plan, haphazardly, at the whim of the torturer, causes its victims to unable to associate with reality because it installs conditioned responses that constantly cause the victims to divert from any course of action that could result in success in life.

Neurotypicals are taught that social deviants are potentially dangerous. They aren't taught to carefully think what "potentially" or "dangerous" mean in that context, unfortunately. A class of people that kills other people less often can be characterized as more dangerous simply because someone, somewhere wants to do that. The potential for danger is an illusion. They don't want you to do comparison shopping on ideas like this.

This is true, however not only are there bullshitting psychiatrists, there are also too many ignorent ones. I can't tell you how many times I've heard so called professionals say things like: "what is that? a learning disability?" or "ashburgers" (>>), or they read up on "textbook cases" and assume it's the same for everyone (which is the worst!)

I think a big part of the psychiatry/psychology problem is that they usually evaluate people based on brief interviews and don't really take enough time to understand the subtleties of individual brain wiring and resulting behavior. So we get labels that fit some of the people some of the time, but the labels don't fully explain what is really happening with "me."

Z

Daniel, you do sound schizoid. Not only the lack of desire for social contact, but the combination of sensitivity and lack of empathy (which has confused me on other threads). Obviously you are too low functioning to have Schizoid PD, but perhaps some day they will talk about autism: schizoid sub-type, which is you, and autism: non-schizoid sub-type, which is me.

I just finished reading Sula Wolff's book: Loners: The life path of unusual children, which is about schizoids, and was going to post on it, so I may as well mention it here.

She followed a group of schizoid boys and girls referred to her clinic over many years. Most of them turned out fine, or at least as well as the non-schizoid controls also referred to her clinic. They generally did better once leaving school than in school, which tended to be too conformist for them.

She describes them as solitary, sensitive, lacking empathy, having an unusual fantasy life, and sometimes preoccupied with their own systems of ideas and interests. They weren't any more introverted than the general population, just asocial. Some of them liked animals more than people. I think in general they tended to like their families but weren't expressive about it. Many of them married. The girls tended not to have special interests, and were more antisocial than the boys (probably how they got to the clinic, since girls with problems are usually ignored more unless they act out), but were otherwise the same. Ratio about 1:4 girls:boys.

What I found interesting, is that Wolff says that Asperger's original description of autistic psychopathy sounds more like her schizoids than like autism, but that Lorna Wing and Digby Tantum et al's "Asperger Syndrome" is lower functioning, more autism than schizoid. I think this has helped me understand some of the confusion over "famous auties" diagnosed by people like Fitzgerald. Some of the people he claims were probably on the spectrum may have been schizoid rather than autistic spectrum.

So there are schizoids, who are higher functioning than autistic people, then autistic people, some of whom have schizoid personality patterns and some of whom don't. Now all they have to do is drop the term Aspergers and that should clear up some of the confusion as to how AS relates to all this.

I think my need for socializing would be best put to use in a somewhat social (:lol:) hermit village, with internet access. Only the occasional need to actually speak to someone, and a place away from noise of world.