Not AS after all.

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Hi, everyone!

I haven't been here in ages. I had been hanging around here for over a year, reading a lot, and posting once in a while. I was fairly convinced that I was either mildly AS, had ADD, or both. Either way, I felt like I could relate to a lot of people on WP.

I still like coming here once in a while, but I have gone through a change. I no longer think I'm on the spectrum. I was thinking that I probably had AS or ADD because I had certain symptoms: feeling like I was in a bubble, especially around people; not being able to organize my thoughts, not being able to focus on anything except my special interests; depression; anxiety; mild stimming.

The one thing that didn't make sense was that I couldn't remember having any of those problems when I was a kid. So I chose "not sure if I have it or not", and planned on someday seeking a diagnosis.

But then, several months ago, I stopped taking birth control pills. My prescription ran out, and frankly, I was too depressed and disorganized to take care of getting a refill. Almost as soon as I had stopped, ALL of those symptoms disappeared. I am still very much an introvert, and would much rather work on my hobbies by myself than go to a party full of people I don't know. But that's just my personality, not any particular label. All the stuff that was affecting my life and making it hard to function went away.

So, I'm now officially going to change my status (or whatever it's called) to NT.

I just want people to know that I wasn't just pretending to be on the spectrum, and then got tired of it. I really felt like I was, and now I've changed. Some of my older posts have stuff about my "aspie traits" and that kind of thing, because that's how I was experiencing life at the time. I don't feel like that now, although I still find extroverts baffling.

I do hope I'm still welcome here, though. I no longer feel the obsessive desire to come here every day and read every post. That part of me is gone, for better or worse. But I do still like a lot of folks here, and enjoy being part of the WP community.

(Sorry this is so long. I know half of you won't read it.)

I'll just chime in and say the process of getting to "know yourself" can take a long time, and it is hard to be an objective observer of your own behavior.

You didn't do anything wrong, you were just mistaken. It could happen to anybody. I'm mistaken about at least five things before breakfast every morning.

Stick around.

Yep, birth controls really can throw you for a loop. This is why childhood history is important, and why you don't mess with the human endocrine system unless you've got a darn good reason.

I had high blood pressure on birth control pills I was taking for menstrual cramps. My doctor wouldn't believe that my high blood pressure was caused by the birth control pills until I took myself off them and came in with a 121/78 blood pressure measurement after my menstrual cycle reset itself.

I had no idea that birth control pills could have that kind of a side effect; but it's not completely implausible, given that you were probably already introverted and somewhat nerdy to begin with. And the difference between "broader autistic phenotype" and "autistic" really may only be a matter of a lot of stress and some physical illness before you start to get impairment... After all, the spectrum fades into the typical, and some are closer than others.

Last edited by Callista on 19 Aug 2010, 5:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Neat.

I hope the Mercury Moms don't see this thread...

I doubt they could get anything quacky out of it. I mean, kids don't take birth control; and when moms take it, they don't (usually) get pregnant. Then again, I may just be underestimating the quacks...

Of course you can get something quacky out of it.

Birth control just means you're giving someone a hormone cocktail, right?

AHA! Hormones cause autism! Let's give them Lupron!

That doesn't sound like a huge difference. Just that you're thinking a bit more clearly, and not as depressed. I have that much change when winter ends and I start getting more sunlight, but I'm no less askew from the norm in terms of experiential point-of-view.

I'm not counting you out just yet.

You're still welcome, to post here.

Of course you're still welcome here.

lol i've never seen this expression before. befriended a bunch on FB then argued with them, pissed a bunch off and they defriended me. i thought a dialogue would be a good idea. no, no, no NONONO! bad idea!

So how do you score on the AQ Test and the Aspie Quiz?

As Callista said, the autism spectrum fades into the normal population, just as "gifted intelligence" fades into normal intelligence. A person with an IQ of 120 is not as intelligent (at least, in the academic sense) as a person with an IQ of 140, but they are still significantly more intelligent than the average person (IQ=100).

A similar sort of thing seems to be the case with autism. Just as "gifted" is the top end of the bell curve for IQ, an ASD diagnosis is at the top end of the bell curve for autistic traits. There are plenty of people who have the broad or moderate autism phenotype (as Simon Baron-Cohen recently defined it): that is, they fall in between the average population and the ASD population. If we scored autism like IQ, with the average population at 100 and the majority of people with ASDs falling above 145, then you might be a 120, or a 130 ... or a 110. And these mean somewhat different things.

Simon Baron-Cohen recently published a paper where he discusses this very issue. He provides the standard deviations for the general population scores on the AQ Test, and defines "broad autism phenotype" (BAP - analogous to an IQ of 115-130), "moderate autism phenotype" (MAP - analogous to an IQ of 130-145), and the "narrow autism phenotype" (NAP - analogous to an IQ of 145 plus):

Source:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2913943/pdf/2040-2392-1-10.pdf, p 3. NB: the "AQ scores" he mentions are scores on the AQ Test from Cambridge University's Autism Research Centre - the AQ Test is readily available online at quite a few websites).

The point is: there will be more people in the "BAP" and "MAP" groups, as SBC defines them, than in the NAP group. Most diagnosed people will fall into the NAP or upper MAP range (SBC says that 80% of his diagnosed samples score 32 or more on the AQ Test, which is MAP or NAP in his latest terminology).

So .. you may be BAP or even MAP, and feel somewhat akin to other people here, even if you are not NAP and likely to have/get a diagnosis.

Last edited by one-A-N on 20 Aug 2010, 6:19 am, edited 2 times in total.

Elderwanda, thank you for posting. I am actually trying to find out more about people like you who were mistakenly diagnosed with AS by an inexperienced health-care professional. When that happens, it is very difficult to backtrack, like you did. I strongly suspect that there are many such people, but I would like to gather more evidence.

You've misread her post. She was never diagnosed by a health professional at all. SHE, herself, was wondering if she might have it.

I am curious, however, why you suspect there are many people who have been given the label when they should not have been, and I am curious as to why you are seeking evidence. This actually explains a bit of what I've noticed in your other posting. Maybe we can split into a new thread if you post something that might actually be of interest to our membership?

As someone who came to this board as a parent, I know that with kids, accurate diagnosis is highly important, because the label dictates the actions. We've seen a lot of missed AS, that is the most common; occasionally there is an AS diagnosis that is later reversed, but that doesn't seem to have had very many disastrous side effects, not liked missed AS does.

With adults, it is often more for self-knowledge than anything, which is why so many of our members don't have a professional diagnosis at all.

Still welcome here.

My aspie traits were present in childhood but do fluctuate in severity, though I do have diagnosed ADHD.

I was on birth control pills last year and they did this same kind thing to me. I would say that normally I'm "in a bubble" like you described but logically I know that I SHOULD try to interact with people and I do get a little pleasure from it so I do it, while still remaining in my bubble o.O

When I was on the birth control I lost all of that knowledge, I did NOT know that I should still try to interact with people and I pretty much cut off most of the people I knew and broke up with my boyfriend. I may have been feeling what a more severe aspie feels most of the time then. I just saw absolutely no benefit in speaking to anyone around me and was interested in absolutely nothing but my interests.

I've heard a lot of about BC causing depression and other psychiatric problems in women, I think the majority probably don't experience this but I think if we have any risk factors or existing diagnoses we need to be careful, doctors should really start thinking about this more.

Good for you, wanda, and please stay around. I think "was I like this as a child" is probably the most important question anyone can ask.