Do you sometimes feel that AS is a made up disorder?

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Its weird to me that my behavior is so confusing to everyone else. In my opinion, its the way pedestrians should behave. But it causes such chaos and uncertanty because they expect me to leap out into the street at any minute.

I'm glad that's not that case for me. I'm glad there have been things I've been able to do for myself besides wait for a cure.

Such as?

If you wish to have your comments taken seriously by me, you need to cite the studies to which you refer.


Er, anthropologists were most certainly studying these things when I acquired my knowledge the bulk of my knowledge about hunter-gatherers and their life-ways.


3 of the 4 quoted items entail non-verbal communication.

While a very loose non-AS contextualized interpretation of the items might allow them to be applied without such an impairment, the criteria are not intended to be applied in that fashion. They are written for physicians who are expected to only use them if it is within the scope of their clinical expertise, in other words the criteria are written not as a cookbook recipe but as a guideline for those presumed to have requisite core knowledge that contextualizes the criteria and guides their application (that the every dx criteria list described in the DSM is not to be applied in a cookbook fashion but is intended to be guided by professional expertise is actually clearly stated in the DSM). Further the criteria are also contextualized by an expanded description that follows the criteria list and which are technically part of the criteria.

I have to wonder how you are defining non-verbal communication though. If you define it such that playing alongside other children rather than playing with them would not be an instance of a lack of non-verbal communication, then we are not discussing the same thing when we refer to 'non-verbal communication'. The same is the case if you define it such that a failure to point or show others things of interest would not be included if your definition is applied. In which case, what I am saying might be better communicated to you if 'non-verbal communication' were rephrased (in my earlier comments) as 'non-verbal, information conveying, social reciprocity'.

I don't necessarily intend to have my comment taken seriously by you or anybody else for that matter but I will provide specific links to papers from now on or post them on my site.

The conclusion I'm coming to is that the diagnostic criteria is irrelevant. There is so much variation in the lives of different aspies that you cannot use a specific set of traits to decide whether someone is AS or not.

What I think, is that AS is an actual physical mental difference. A brain that is hardwired differently to the common brain. And I am tempted to become a neurologist just to prove it.

Go for it, you're young enough to invest the time.

You're never too old to invest time in something you consider worthwhile.

I could have said all this. recently I have the impression I am not an aspie just because I have had confrontations with a new colleague who is so adamant to ignore mewhen i sya hi to him in the morning. And he won't do so. We are both teachers and I felt really hurt by not gettting a hello back.

So, obvioulsy he lacks social skills and I was always criticised in the past and present for lacking them. so I thought I f I am now pressing someon else to be social or wan tthis recognition that I exist, am I still an Asperger?? Or have I evolved and learned so much this last year as my friend told me...but yet, I still feel different and an oddball or like a different species, because I continue saying the wrong things to people...

I wouldn't call AS fake.

I would however say that they really don't know enough about AS to claim any kinds of facts. I'm tired of reading all these things about it. Sometimes it makes me feel as if I don't have it, other times it does.

It's getting old to read things like "resistant to change" (please see entire world) when they don't even clarify what that is supposed to mean. Sure, they can give an example, which is your classical "take a different route to the store" example, but that is it. How is that clarification? They don't really draw the boundaries.

Special interests? How am I supposed to interpret that when everyone has interests? Oh, you mean by unusual focus? Okay, well, how about all the people who play World of Warcraft (or games in general) to unreasonable levels? Am I supposed to assume they all have AS?

What they need to do is focus more on what are obvious differences, and not something that is commonly shared by the norm. If somebody shows some typical signs of AS, then focus should be to separate the differences between "common in people" and "not common in people, but common in people with AS".

I always do that too. I get yelled at by drivers and given dirty looks by other pedestrians, but I prefer to wait for cars to stop or there be a clearing, rather than me losing my legs or worse.

Um, good for you. So do I. I feel sorry for anyone who just sits around waiting for something all day. Oh wait, no one literally does this.

I guess no one with cancer, AIDS, asthma, schizophrenia, bipolar, or any impairment at all should just accept it no matter what, even if a real cure does come along. After all, every experience you have makes you who you are and nothing should get in the way of changing this. Even something that could improve your life immensely.

I do this too! I though you were supposed to, but everybody always gives me dirty looks and tries to make me cross and I'm like a deer in headlights. Silly Normals....

It is definitely not made up. I looked it up on Wikipedia and every single feature matches me perfectly, unlike the features that people just make up. There is also evidence that it is not make up due to brain scans.

It's not made up but don't take brain scans to seriously as it's kind of like reading tea leaves in that everybody has their own interpretation of the image. For along time neurologists thought that they had pinned down all the areas of the brain where certain functions were housed. It took them a while to figure out that there is wide varibility.

I've never heard of the funcitonal sections of the brain being varible. Where did you read this?

Curious how you don't quote your words that I was replying to. Let me remind you what you said:



Guess what. What I said is true for people with cancer, AIDS, Asthma, Schizophrenia, and bipolar. There are things they can do, even without a cure. What I said there is irrelevant to whether or not there should be a cure, and irrelevant to whether or not there can be a cure. Point is, it's not, as your words there portray it, a cure or nothing one can do. Except, I didn't generalize and only gave my own example. Like I said, I'm glad that "nothing I can do" hasn't been the case for me. I really don't want to go back to the life I had a few years ago. No way.

And if your "nothing I can do" didn't actually mean "nothing I can do", perhaps you should say what you mean.