Is self-diagnosis reliable?

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^ Sounds like fun! Not!

I think it varies with the professional. I know people who have had a good run with their diagnosis and people who have had a terrible time. I think it is down to luck, and who you get. I would have to trust my counsellor to find someone for me who is nice I guess...

I did not find the experience of a diagnosis unsettling. If anything, at my age, i found it to be a relief and an answer.
I would caution against anyone making sweeping judgments about what a diagnosis actually IS for people. Some some it is awful, for others an answer, for others a process of acceptance, for others it is a reason to rage against the world. the reactions are many and varied.

What has been saddening of late, is the reframing of 46 years of life from a new paradigm - a paradigm that - if available as a child to me and my family- may have prevented descent into many of the truly tragic experiences i encountered in the first 40 or so years on the planet.

I'm self diagnosed at present.

My mum noticed I was markedly ASDish long before I did, though. I didn't figure that my 'people blindness' as I dubbed it when I was younger, was due to ASD. I just assumed I was stupid.

I hated myself for years wondering why I had a terrible aversion to touch, got 'neural overload' as I called it, easily, failed to understand people, and got deep in focus on things to the point that I left the world behind.

I also had this thing where I got fixated on a subject and refused to discuss anything else. People would tell me I shouldn't but it would take me over. My special interests were the only thing that seemed truly real.

I eventually mentioned the subject to my mum, wondering why I was so cold and refused to let anyone touch me. She said it was one of my ASD traits.

I don't have that extreme aversion to touch any more, I actually like hugs now. I'm also more connective, I used to be profoundly asocial.

You are right of course, I should have thrown in a potentially caveat, but then that would undermine the seriousness of what I am talking about. Things are a lot different now, but I watched people I knew get institutionalized and abused by a system that did not understand them and had no desire to. This system is starting to correct these things, but even the ones who are now receiving more appropriate support for their needs, have been traumatized. As opposed to my own classical autism which is simply something I am, these are the ones who actually had something taken from them. Something they struggle to recover.

This is why I plain refuse to ask somebody to have an "official" diagnosis. It is none of my business to ask them whether they have one it is a personal affair. If they wish to volunteer information about themselves for purposes of discussion, that is fine. If they think that an official diagnosis is something that would be useful, I absolutely support them in getting one and will offer whatever I can to help them move through it smoothly and avoid the dangers that are absolutely still potentially present.

Yeah I agree it means different things to different people. To me I sort of feel angry about the idea of gettting a diagnosis.

I think the reason is that I have been going from professional to professional for the last year and the way that they have been treating me.. I just want my life to be normal and dont want to deal with any more professionals. I want a life where I can just go to work and pay my rent and not have to talk to someone with some sort of certificate on their wall who thinks they can look down their nose at me.

If I could get a diagnosis and be guaranteed that noone would find out about it but Income Support then that would be ok.. Im just sort of going through a hacked off phase with it. I dont really know why.

It is starting to look like I will have to go for one, especially after some things that have happened today.

Okay, I'm confused. Earlier in the thread, someone said that they didn't know if Asperger's is really scientific. I then said that whether something is scientific doesn't have to do with what it is but whether it's testable/falsifiable. Later on I pointed out that they discuss Asperger's in peer-review journals, make testable hypotheses, use p-values/empirical observations to test against their ideas. Whether something is scientific doesn't have to do with whether it has been proved, since Science often changes with future evidence, but whether it uses the Scientific Method.

I get the impression that you do not think Asperger's is scientific? Or are you're saying it's scientific, but not because it's falsifiable/testable? Or it's scientific, but not because it follows the scientific method? I just want to clear up any confusion I'm having.

I think I'm confused about this part. I just want to make sure I'm understanding, so I'm going to verify:

Albert Einstein and many scientists would think of experiments to test scientific ideas. Einstein would bring up experiments to his professors to test ideas. So, if I decide to do that every once in a while, by looking at current research and brain storming ways to make it further falsifiable, is that bad because falsification is pre high school? Yes, I know that Science is tentative, which is why I see it as part of the concept of falsification. I know you said "There is no such thing as that which is not falsifiable, only that which has not been established in a falsifiable context" and that you can't disprove for sure and Karl Popper had critics, which is why I say "You can't prove only disprove" only applies to deductive logic and it's easier to disprove than to prove. I know that there are peer-review journals and various fields use different methodology strategies, but does that mean testability/falsification aren't an essential part that separates Science from something not in the field of Science?

I just need to clear up any misunderstandings.

Is it bad if I say to myself, "If what I'm reading about in this Science book is true, it's a given such and such will happen (logical consequence). If the logical consequence comes true, that doesn't prove, affirming the consequent. However, although you can't disprove for sure, it's still easier to disprove than to prove, modus tollens. Some falsification is better than nothing at all, even if you can't prove something for sure. Although you can't prove, Science can say what is the best explanation at the current time, but that doesn't mean I can't brainstorm logical consequences, or brain storm alternative explanations."

I'll take this moment to say you are doing an incredible job integrating a lot of information that I'm throwing at you. I know I'm not what one would call a coddling teacher, and you ask the right questions. The paradigm shifting you are experiencing is something most people absorb over a decade or more of time of gradual integration via a pragmatic process. That process is slow and boring to me and in my experience the same is true for most in the spectrum. You just want the hard semantic concepts laid out as rules so you can run a logic process on them for consistency.

You are probably familiar with something along the lines of:
Gather data ( observations about something that is unknown, unexplained, or new )
Hypothesize an explanation for those observations.
Deduce a consequence of that explanation (a prediction). Formulate an experiment to see if the predicted consequence is observed.
Wait for corroboration. If there is corroboration, go to step 3. If not, the hypothesis is falsified. Go to step 2.

This is known as the Hypothetico-deductive method, and has been improperly taught for decades as "the Scientific Method". The scientific method is far simpler than that. The scientific method is any method by which data is systematically acquired which conforms to a self coherent reason.

Of course Asperger's Syndrome is science. The issue is not that a group is not doing science, it is that everybody is doing science and just because they are doing science does not mean they are correctly systemizing. You can entirely correctly apply logic rules to something, but if you don't have the correct or enough data, the result is meaningless. Asperger's Syndrome is a diagnosis based on an understanding of the human mind that was not necessarily incorrect, it was incomplete and caused wrong conclusions to be made.

The disorder that was observed by Asperger was observed, or I have no reason to question whether or not it was, and it was named. That was his intent and purpose. Identify common behavioral traits so that I can group them. These ones like to fidget, they all have that in common. This might have a common cause that I could go looking for, but I'm still just trying to find things in common before I go looking for causes, so I give people an idea of what to look for so we can get a larger group to collect more data about. Eventually if we collect enough data, somebody will make an inductive leap we can falsify, or maybe somebody will map out the brain and figure out everything that could possibly be causing a state and we will make a deductive reasoning as to which one it is. We just have to keep trying and keep searching.

The question is not "is some falsification better than none" it is "how do i figure out i need to falsify something if i didn't make up something ad hoc to falsify? not everything can be deductively, sometimes you just have to think bigger than the known and try and figure out a way this might make sense, and see what sticks.

Which professors of Einstein's do you refer to? The father of modern physics was an aspie boy who taught himself science and logic and resented the rote schooling he attended who then figured out the theory of relativity while working in the patent office and having a weekly discussion group with some friends. In 1905 he published 4 papers in peer review journals that were ignored or rejected by physicists of the time. They would later form the foundation of the Theory of Relativity as we understand it today.

Tell that to the person who asked the question, all I did was give my personal opinion. I personally don't trust somebody's self diagnosis over that of someone who's job it is to come up with diagnoses. Getting diagnosed was a long arduous process of extensive testing by a neuologist. Sure, some people with a self-diagnosis may be right, but the majority of self-diagnosers I've encountered came to their conclusion through a 15 question test on facebook, or by reading an article.

I self-diagnosed first., after discovering autism in our family. I then went on to receive a clear diagnosis from an ASD specialist who i now see fortnightly.
I believe there is a place for self dx. some people cannot afford a diagnosis and others do not want one.
For me, a formal dx from a specialist is what i wanted and needed. it was the missing link and pattern to a life of disparate links and patterns.

I refuse to pass judgment on others' processes or views around diagnosis. each to their own.
Sure, there are people who jump on bandwagons and parents who do the same. It can be damaging and irresponsible and just plain foolhardy.

Anyone who "wants" to have an ASD as part of some fad like the ADHD craze years ago, will come and go. The worry is the kids that get caught up in this kind of thing. they don;t have a choice in it and cannot "come and go" quite so easily.
One of the other members here alerted me to this some time ago in another thread. it was enlightening listening to her account and i learned to tweak my views on the matter in light of her experiences.

Given the fact that recent studies indicate a rate of 1 in 150 children being born autistic, what exactly makes you so certain they are more likely to be wrong than they are right? One 15 question survey does not a diagnosis make, self or otherwise. I trust the diagnosis of anybody who establishes to me they are a capable diagnostician. I trust anybody who says I have this condition, to be personally asserting that they trust in the diagnostic ability of an individual who has diagnosed them. The skills required to perform diagnosis as well as the criteria required to diagnose are both freely available to anybody who wishes to have them. They are free to be used or abused by anybody, regardless of trade, schooling or motive.

Also especially amusing to me is the tossing around of ADD or AD/HD. An autistic spectrum disorder it is an important thing to note.

I would rather see 5 people misdiagnosed (by self, or professional) as having an ASD, rather than see one person who actually does have ASD left out in the cold without help, or the supports they need just because people think they're following a fad. The consequences for that one person would be very damaging, when you compare it to the damage that the few people that actaully don't have ASD claiming they do would suffer, or the autistic population as a whole would suffer from the misdiagnosed being let in as authentic.

i did not say i was diagnosed as AS when i was 3 months old.
AS was not a diagnosis then but "autism" was. i was thought to be autistic from 3 months old. i was diagnosed at 3 years old as MFA autistic, and at 6 i was diagnosed as HFA autistic.
then when i was 12 i was told i have asperger syndrome although it is not an official syndrome as yet. i was in continuous psychiatric care from 12 to 15 so my therapists got to to know me well.
my primary doctor was interested in asperger syndrome and she was doing government funded research into it and she thought i was a good example of it.

i was officially diagnosed as AS at the age of 24 in 1996 after i was arrested for speeding and drink driving 3 times in a row.

my lawyer read my files and wanted a confirmation of my AS and it was obtained.

the doctor who diagnosed me was professional and it took about 2 months of assessments to confirm it (the previous files from my childhood psychiatrist were very helpful). he had a few meetings with my parents and a sister as well.
i did not use AS as a defense for my offenses and i lost my license for 2 years.

i am mainly saying that i was noticed as different from birth, and at 3 months i was thought (classified) to be autistic (not AS).

that is where their perception of me stayed until i was 3 years old when i was diagnosed with MFA.

i am saying that a smart 40 year old person can not suddenly suspect they have autism and be correct if they never thought of it before.

i agree that some countries leave you to rot in your misfortune, but in australia, strange baby behavior is of interest.

You're wrong. I'm sorry, you're just wrong.

I think I'm missing something here?

If I never heard about an undiscovered marine creatures before, how would I know about it?

I can only know about it after having heard about it.

I have known the word autism for years, but I never knew what it was besides that autistic children 'are in their own world'.

Which didn't ring a bell at all especially because I failed at metaphorical stuff before.

If I never happened to have read up on it (or only 10+ years later) out of pure curiosity I wouldn't know. Sure, once I knew about classical autism I was like, ah, if autistic people weren't ret*d and could say words you'd be autistic Sora. Maybe you got a defective brain and are a misfit that's not yet categorised ohmygosh.

Point is: you cannot expect another to know about something unfamiliar to them.

Being smart has nothing to do about it. Next to nobody knows what autism is (they all say 'autistic children are in their own world' and all the laypeople use it but nobody knows what it means). At least not where I live.

I'm assuming you were responding to my post, but if not, ignore this.

I don't mean that they're doing it out of malice. It's both incompetence and unwillingness.

I don't expect people, after a few minutes of interacting, to go, "Oh, are you autistic? Let me adjust my way of communicating so that you're more comfortable." That's simply unrealistic. To begin with, most people aren't able to identify autism, and even if they were able to, they wouldn't know how to interact with the individual. However, not knowing what autism is doesn't mean that people aren't able to identify that someone is different. Even if it means just stepping back and thinking, "Oh, well, he's just shy. How can I get around that?" it's more than what they were doing, and then they couldn't be faulted.

Look, Daniel's gorgeous; I doubt you'll ever hear any arguments on that. He's gorgeous physically and mentally. If someone doesn't ever see the mental beauty because they're too concrentraed on the physical to look beyond, that's both their fault and their loss.

I agree entirely with this. My life is a very good example of what can happen without a proper and much needed diagnosis.