Most annoying myth about your condition?

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"All autistics are human calculators", that annoys me no end because I am so terrible and mental arithmetic.

Today's great one that I read on the Tumblr autism tag was that a diagnosis of Asperger's requires "signs of schizoid personality disorder" and "malice".

The Tumblr autism tag is a cesspool that I find impossible to resist reading.

The blogger was mad because she was reading some book with a diagnosed autistic character who did not fit her personal criteria.

Therapist: You're not smart enough to have Asperger's.
- In this study of 22 Aspies, the average IQ was 103.3. I skipped five grades, got a 2390 on my SATs, and scored a 119 on his cursory IQ test that I took on three hours of sleep. Note: this guy claimed to specialize in autism spectrum disorders.

(Different) therapist: You don't have Asperger's because you care what other people think of you.
- I've had three close friends with Asperger's and at least two of them really cared about social rejection.

Me: I have a boyfriend with Asperger's.
Psychiatrist: Oh, you have enough emotion for the both of you.
Me: How many people with Asperger's have you treated?
Psychiatrist: Twelve.

I am an undergrad and this came from the head of my physics department at university

"You may have a diagnosis, but you don't actually have aspergers because you are communicating normally with me"

God love the old farts in higher education and there old fashion backwards thinking.

What a sucksace.

They seem to forget that the best cases of AS are the ones best hidden, but most of us with AS can probably compensate for their deficiencies when forced to do so by environments and situations.

Don't tell people that you have ASD if it's really, really unnecessary. They don't need to know about it. If they don't accept you who you are, let them leave you alone or leave them alone by yourself. They're not worth your attention. Moreover, telling people that you have ASD won't change anything. If you're already considered weirdo, you'll remain weirdo and they'll also have the proof of your weirdness.

I wanted to tell some people about my AS (and unfortunately told someone), but, thanks to my mother and this board, I understood how people work in this particular case. They will just:
a) treat you worse, or
b) empathize and annoy you with ridiculous uneducated sentences, so here we go: "for me, you're the most normal person in the world", "maybe you had AS earlier, but now you don't have it"

I'm the "best case" of AS, but sometimes I wish I was more severely affected by ASD, because I missed lots of educational opportunities, One of my teachers said (to my mother) that individual classes would be great for me, mainly because of my different special interests. Guess what, nothing happened.

But, after all, I mostly like who I am.

I'm guessing your special interest is computer-related, because of 65536 (16th power of 2, if I'm not mistaken).

Yes. And others are in my profile .

*Foot-in-mouth about the existence of user profiles*

What an a***ole. Ignorant, ignorant, ignorant.

I had the opposite experience--I am self-diagnosed, don't really discuss it much at school, and two of my professors (Criminal Justice) guessed it within a week of meeting me. It didn't make them look at me in a negative light (thankfully).



I agree completely. One person I told had this to say: "You have none of the symptoms--you just don't want to take responsibility for your life." I couldn't even dignify that one with a response.

From what I see, most of the people that don't think of AS negatively are the ones actually learning about it first-hand. Seeing what was stated about AS made me, "feel reassured," that I didn't have it because of the apparent severity of it. Now, I'm stuck wondering why it wasn't a more severe diagnosis because everyone else seems to be more, "high-functioning," than me. Perhaps, it's just an effect of the internet (in that the only communication available is verbal) and I'm just deficient in the verbal area, but the negative part of the internet is the rate of fake diagnosis and the extremely negative impression it leaves. I hope the merging of AS into ASD will reduce the amount of fake diagnoses, but even that is doubtful.

Other stereotypes / misperceptions / outright falsehoods that I loathe:

(1) ASD is a mental illness. No - schizophrenia is a mental illness. Depression is a mental illness. ASD is a developmental disorder.

(2) People who say that they can 'identify' those on the spectrum by the way they talk, walk, dress etc. Some of us are very good at imitating NT behaviour and do not stand out in any way. I will give £100 in cash, on the spot, to anyone who can identify me in person as being on the spectrum solely on the basis of my dress sense or tone of voice or eye contact.

1. ASD is caused by vaccines.

I have researched vaccines for the last 6 years, and I have not found evidence of this. There are plenty of scary things about vaccines, and they can cause many horrible reactions (including death). However, autism does not seem to be one of them. Signs of Austism often appear somewhat suddenly, at an age where a child is typically receiving numerous vaccines. However, this also occurs in non-vaccinated autistic children as well. I think this is one of those cases where "corelation =/= causation".

2. ASD is curable by changing the diet.

There is evidence that people with autism are MORE LIKELY to have gut issues, and that eliminating certain foods can help eliminate certain problems, either physical or behavioral, but this in no way makes the person "not autistic".

''Asperger's is a disease''.

This myth makes me sick!

*edit*
There's actually a little joke hidden in that .

But really, I do not agree with this myth at all. It annoys me so much when people call it a disease.

Autism at any severity level equals savant syndrome.