Is This AS Or Did I Just Have A Screwed Up Childhood? Both?

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I'm not sure. I know I have bad social skills, but I feel like I had a very sheltered life in my childhood. My relationship with my dad was especially bad, including physical abuse. If I was just sheltered then given time my social skills will catch up, but that's what I'm afraid of. If its AS then they won't completely catch up and I might be sad and lonely forever.

I've always longed for companionship but had trouble getting it. In fact I can imagine my ideal social life as being more involved than the average person but I must be respected and accepted as I am not being put in a lower position on the totem pole, being taken advantage of, or being pressured to sacrifice my individuality. Is it possible to be extroverted(high social need whether its being met or not) but AS?

I know that at the least I have Auditory Processing Disorder. When people are talking especially if its noisy I always screw up the words they say. I often stare at people's lips instead of in their eyes just so I can understand what they're saying.

There's always been things I've been very interested in ever since early childhood. One of my earliest obsessions was geography, particularly political maps over other types of maps, which over time morphed into an interest in political theories and governments and branched out into the social sciences in general. This also lead to a strong interest in philosophy.

I also became interested in drugs and this interest combines in some ways with my other one. I am a very passionate supporter of legalization. I remember the first time there was a presentation about drugs it already seemed "fishy" to me. Then because I was a member of the Sierra Club as a young child(my parents would write checks in my name) I received something in the mail from NORML about medical marijuana that contradicted a lot of the things I had learned about cannabis. I started going online and researching it. This interest seems to be leading me to a wider interest in "exploring different cognitive states" including hypnosis, and meditation. My friends have sometimes called me "an encyclopedia of drugs".

One thing I've noticed over time is how the general presentation is academics v. pleasure as if they were mutually exclusive. I don't see learning and partying as exclusive to each other. I was overcome with happiness when I took this philosophy class and heard about how Hegel was saying that you need to "go through the muck and mire to get to the absolute" as a response to religious aesthetics who tried to understand the universal/God/the cosmos by shutting themselves off from the world. That's exactly how I've thought most of my life. His dialectics also seems to reflect how I've thought about the world. I love thinking about paradoxes. From a very young age I thought "why are these things(partying, alcohol, obnoxiousness, euphoria) thought of as stupid or smart people expected to be against them?" I understood anything taken to an excess could be detrimental but didn't see these means of pleasure as being particularly bad if the right precautions were taken and they were indulged in sparingly with an open-mind about what could be learned from those experiences.

Morally I've never really thought of myself as a relativist, rather I think our society has the absolute screwed up. It did not arrive at it with logic and reason. A lot of things thought of as bad are good and a lot of things thought of as good are bad. Not everything, but a lot of things.

I've had strong political beliefs since I was only a young child. In middle school I was a libertarian for a while when most people didn't give politics any thought. I would switch beliefs several times, even devising entire Constitutions for what to base a better society on, often calling them "world constitutions" since I thought we should have a one-world government. I went from libertarian to being more liberal to being social democratic to becoming a socialist and as a socialist I've went between Marxism and anarchism several times. I'm on the fence now because when you really get involved in political theories you realize the definitions of things like "state" and "government" aren't that clear cut even when you define "state" as institution with a monopoly on the use of force some anarchist theories such as anarchosyndicalism seem to create a sort of monopoly on the use of force too even if its out of a very loose as association.

I'm also very interested in postmodern theories and theories of social construction. In fact I'm pretty sure Asperger's is a social construction. It may describe behavior observed in society that is influenced by very real chemical changes but I expect that there are chemical differences underlying all behavior and all ability whether society labels it a disease or not. So in a way my question is "Would you think of this as AS?" and "Would our society take this as AS after a careful consideration of the facts?" I know the only real sure way to tell would be to see a shrink, and then several more shrinks for a representative sample. But I have neither the money, time, or motivation to do that and personally think trying to get diagnosed with AS would feel uncomfortable, and my mother would probably say "I told you so". She brought it up as a possibility several years ago and I basically insisted that I didn't have it. The way she brought it up was completely inappropriate. She sounded almost excited and happy talking about it, and a little too enthusiastic in her insistence that I had it, not willing to slow down and carefully consider the possibility that maybe it is and maybe it isn't. But then maybe my mom has Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy. I've heard that this sort of neurological disorder misdiagnosis often happens that way, and in my teenage years my mom would often suggest I was suffering from something whether it was "bipolar" or "delusions of grandeur" or "schizophrenia" none of which I ever was diagnosed for.

It seems like the kind of art(including television, movies, music) that appeals to me has a very postmodern feel and my mind tends to relate everything I see in tv, movies or hear in music to society things or political things. I've started my own stories usually never finished and even used to write lots of song lyrics for a while back in middle school almost all day.

I've always had a strong desire to become a published political theorist and have at different times looked up to Thomas Jefferson, Ayn Rand, Karl Marx, and Mikhail Bakunin among others. I suppose if I have AS that's no roadblock. At least Jefferson and Rand are speculated to have it and I've heard someone speculate that Marx had it too.

I think I have empathy but it seems like it works in a strange way. If I'm thinking about people dying in wars or famines it can bring tears to my eyes. If I think about people cooperating and working together to stop these things I can also get teary eyed (out of joy). I also tend to be able to easily imagine how groups of people in society are going to feel about certain incidents like how the poor or minorities or other countries will generally "feel" about things that happen. I also seem to be good at putting myself in other people's shoes after the fact if I stop and make myself. But what makes me think I might have AS is it can be hard to figure things out in the moment as they actually happen. Sometimes I misinterpret or even overinterpret. Alternatively I might have ADHD, in fact I'm pretty sure I do whether I have AS or not. I've always relied on caffeine to get through my studies unless it was particularly engaging. I was diagnosed with Tourette's as a child and I've heard 60% of people with Tourette's also have ADHD but because I had all As in elementary school my parents didn't bother. It seems like organization and keeping up only started getting hard in middle school. In case its relevant my elementary school was a highly recommended magnet school that encouraged a hands-on approach(you can imagine how this would be a lot better learning environment for an ADHD child and might disguise the symptoms). In high school I tried cannabis and that almost completely stops Tourette's. Its not noticeable anymore. One other thing I notice is I tended to get higher than most people but it also did more for me. I socialize more, am calmer, no stress but say stranger things than usual(maybe because I let myself speak more). I also notice this seems to be what happens to two of my friends with AS. Someone I know has an autistic(not AS, classical autism) brother who I've heard smokes and says he gets higher a lot faster and is even stranger high than most people but that it also does him a lot of good.

One thing that doesn't seem like AS is when I misinterpret in social contexts I tend to be basing my judgement too much on things like tone and facial expressions(thinking not usually expressing that someone is looking at me the wrong way) than literal language and it tends to be slanted in a very negative direction(but I got plenty of bad life experiences to justify this interpretation). I'm noticing that if the tone sounds like the one my dad took when he was being verbally abusive I tend to get especially uncomfortable and sometimes irrate. Sometimes I search too hard for subtext but usually this is under stress and I'm thinking frantically about what might be hidden. All too often these fears aren't real. This fact is another reason I think I might just be dealing with problems that came from having a rough childhood instead of AS.

My parents seemed to have gone out of their way to encourage academics even before I went to school. I learned how to read young, there was lots of educational programs on the computer that tended to preoccupy my time including a world atlas program(this kick started my interest in geography, to this day I know the name of every country in the world and was surprised when I learned in middle school that most Americans were illiterate in geography. One person even thought Connecticut was a city in Rhode Island. *facepalm*). I would also get into reading encyclopedias at a young age but would tend to jump around in them from article to article sometimes reading just parts of one moving on to other paragraphs or even other articles especially between related articles. I especially loved reading about countries and this lead me to read about their governments, and then I started reading a lot about government topics and even history topics because I wondered about the different countries at different points in history. It seems like maps were especially stimulating. If there was a map I would usually stop and look at it. I remember I would also play with the World Atlas program on the computer. It came with this thing where you could put down little various "marks" all over the map. I made up my own borders and country names. Another interest of mine back then was dinosaurs. Dinosaurs and geography combined when I started playing this game throughout the whole house where each room was a country with all the toys as residents. I had a lot of dinosaur toys and I would have the carnivores and herbivores go to war with each other. My interests with politics eventually played into it as various groups got split into political parties such as "democrats" and "monarchists". It seems like everything I become interested in tends to weave together over time if it remains an interest. Is this common with AS or do special interests usually remain separate from each other?

I've often had this extreme phobia that people think I'm stupid or crazy even when all evidence points to them thinking the opposite and now I worry if people suspect Asperger's/Autism. I remember over the course of my life reading articles in magazines usually in doctor's offices while bored about "autism". At first it was about kids staring at walls and objects, reacting violently to any touching, and never speaking. At this point if someone told me I would be obsessed with worry over whether I was autistic when I became an adult I would've told them they were crazy. Over time articles came up about wider and wider definitions of "autism" and over time I started to worry and think to myself "couldn't they keep the definition of this word simple?" I mean people are going to have the old definition imprinted in their heads and act towards people based on that definition, because most people don't stop to use their brains.

But my general feelings on language are that it should flow free. Maybe its because of my focus on social sciences but I realized at a young age that "correct" language is ultimately arbitrary. Humans invent language. Dictionaries are reference books that report how people use language, not the makers of language. Whether language is "right" or not depends on its utility. It pisses me off when I hear people complaining about the way "ghetto" people speak. If you grow up in a place where people use that particular style of grammar and particular vocabulary it makes sense for you to use it. I'm not saying they shouldn't try to learn mainstream English to better communicate in the workplace and in schools, but I see antiebonics bias as an unfounded prejudice(and I'm just a middle class white boy and I get that). If I can't understand what someone says I politely ask them to clarify I don't belittle their choice of language. I also do understand and use slang, but I don't feel like I'm really aware of its context. Sometimes people will say "I haven't heard people use that word in years."

On a related note, I find myself often making words up(but in a way where people usually know what I'm saying) because ideas form in my head faster than I can put into words. I'm not sure if I'm primarily a verbal or visual thinker. It seems like my thoughts include a lot of pictures, a lot of words(the words are the most focused and sometimes obsessive part of my thoughts, I tend to think less in words in a state of abandon than in concentration), and a lot of music, sometimes the visual, verbal, and music will be together but often it is disjointed. Smells, tastes, and tactile sensation rarely enters my thoughts except when I'm thinking about something. Music even from movies from my childhood will sometimes play in my head.

I've often related myself to the experiences of countries throughout history. Right now I feel like Germany in the 19th century. For a long time I had been "behind" in competing with the other countries for prominence(for Germany resources and power for me social prowess and respect) and now I want a lot of not just socializing but also respect and recognition. Considering what happened to Germany this makes me a little worried. With what I've thought about human psychology and with sociology a lot of problems people have countries can have similar problems and vice versa. Right now the United States is suffering from the sociological equivalent of narcissism. Germany had an inferiority complex that intensified after WWI and culminated in WWII and Germany still has an inferiority complex it just chose a sneakier less blatant strategy to find greatness. It is the most powerful country in the EU, like other countries it has stopped looking for territorial or military hegemony and now wants economic hegemony.

I've tried taking tests to see if I have Asperger's online. The problem is I often don't know how to answer the questions. Some lump things together with AND when I'd like to say strongly agree to one and strongly disagree to another. Some I think "in what respect?" Others I easily notice some underlying assumptions. For example "rather be at a library than a party". There are many special interests someone with AS could have that would be better served at a party than a library. Music, "achieving altered states", dancing, studying human social behavior. Personally I love parties and would go to one over a library anytime. This might seem strange but a funny idea just popped into my head while typing this. I'd really enjoy it even better if the two(library and party) could be combined. Fascination with dates? Only if its your special interest and as interested as I am in history the actual happenings fascinate me more than dates and my interest in history is primarily focused on political and social events and wars. So because I notice these tests seem to assume only certain special interests over others it throws into question the validity of the results. But then I don't know. Are only certain special interests possibly part of AS or can it be any special interests?

Another thing that throws AS into doubt is I have a ton of for lack of a better term "peripheral interests" thing I feel interested in but never act on because I just don't find the time. It seems like when I'm interested in something I like to really get into it even if there are a lot of other things I feel I'd enjoy too, then as time passes I look back and think "oh no I missed my chance for X" or feel like I'm falling behind in the things I want to accomplish or to enjoy. I feel like life is too short for me to do everything I want and this has made me curious about cryonics(but I've only read enough to know its affoardable to middle class people as a life insurance policy and that vitrification rather than freezing is the method). Strange thing is in the car with some friends of mine we talked about cryonics. Some of my friends thought it was a waste of time and money but this one guy who I've noticed seems like he could have AS agreed that cryonics was a good idea and said he wanted to sign for a policy as soon as he gets out of college and lands a job. Another thing Timothy Leary until the later years of life had planned to be cryonically frozen, and we share an interest (drugs).

As much as I worry about it stepping back and thinking logically people wouldn't think "Asperger's" unless they were very familiar with it and then they wouldn't hold it against me anyways. People are more likely to think of me as some kind of hippy/punk who was born in the wrong decade. I have been called a "hippy" at times and find it flattering. I dream of living on a commune with like-minded people.

Not sure about routine. It almost seems like I lack an internal temporal clock to set up any time-specific routines. I just don't naturally keep track of time, and wonder sometimes that I might lack the circadian rhythm(I do have bad insomnia and a highly irregular sleep pattern). I even only remember the times my classes start and forget the specific times they end because when it ends it ends and I'll know it from being there when it ends. Can routines be non-time specific i.e. you just tend to feel like doing something often. For example, I can't remember the last day in my life where I didn't have any thoughts relating to politics or no thoughts relating to philosophy, and I almost always use the internet every day and there's certain websites I go to almost without thinking about it. This has become so time-consuming I have to tell myself "this is ridiculous, you've been checking this internet forum a dozen times nobody has responded, check it later. You're missing all those other things you have to do/have wanted to do" but I'm too excited about what someone might say in response to something in an internet argument(I tend to argue about politics a lot on the internet).

I've noticed that if there's a squirrel I almost immediately notice it. I even noticed a squirrel as I walked home once in middle school and that it wasn't moving as I came close to it. I took the opportunity to reach down and pet it. It had been fidgeting a little before I did this, and then it just froze in schock. It stood there frozen for about an hour before it moved. I enjoy chasing squirrels around trees sometimes when I'm bored. Is this related?

I know many people with AS are picky eaters. I don't like Doritos as popular as they are. I tend to be able to tell if I'm going to like the taste of spicy chips based on their smell and it's usually a "no" even though I love some very spicy things, even able to eat Fire sauce from Taco Bell out of its packet. Its hard to describe the difference but it seems like there's a "wet spicy" that I hate and a "dry spicy" that I like. Dry spicy can be very hot for me to the point where people wonder how I can stand it while I hate wet spicy even if its only a little spicy.

But on the otherhand I get curious over new foods and try them almost compulsively. I was disappointed when my family was on vacation and they suddenly decided to leave a restaurant because it was too expensive. There was "escargo" on the menu and I was dying to know what it was like. I insisted to my mom that I wanted to try cow tongue and eventually she got it for me to try. It was all right but I've had better. At this one mongolian restaurant they have calamari as a topping and when I heard that I immediately had to have it. I almost always get it as a topping now but I try to avoid the bigger stringy pieces because it gets caught down my throat and makes me gag. I prefer the little squid-bodies(its a miniature squid that's actually the entire body of it).

I want to travel the world someday, visit every single country and have wanted to do this since I was just a child. I also want to see Antarctica. Space is interesting too. I've always wanted to go everywhere. If I haven't been in a place I'll tend to go in just to check it out. Back to my interest in exotic foods, I'd love to try an ostrich omlete if I get to Africa or dog if I go to Asia(this grosses out a lot of people and I try not to mention wanting to do this when in public but logically I eat pig, pig is smarter than dog so it makes no sense to me why it would be moral to eat pig but not dog. The companion animal argument just doesn't fly with me. The dogs prepared for slaughter in Asia were never companions in the first place regardless of whether other dogs are).

Another thing I don't think fits AS. I do sometimes use metaphors as I'm sure anyone whose read this has noticed. (Sorry if any of them were too confusing.) In fact I enjoy it. But for a split second I might get a literal image in my mind of if the metaphor was literal, sometimes with my own spin on it. When I heard a divorced woman was "still holding a torch for him" I pictured her dressed as the statue of liberty complete with green paint holding a torch and I laughed.

I tend to really love anything "trippy". Videos and tv shows people just don't get or find creepy I understand. I also tend to overinterpret what I see on tv or movies, relating what I see to things like "colonialism" or "globalization" or "class struggle". I always doodle in class and tend to draw very trippy looking pictures, often where the things in the picture can represent many different things at once(i.e. a cat's face where the mouth is also a landscape for an example)

My sleep schedule is hard to keep consistent even if I try which makes me suspect I might lack a natural circadian rhythm, my sleep/wakefulness instead determined by how much energy I expend. My room has always been a mess and even though I do clean it I'm usually too lazy to do it all at once, have trouble figuring out where to put things, and when it has been completely clean have found it too "boring". I need some clutter for aesthetic purposes. Is that itself a strange kind of rule? Is it possible to have AS and want a kind of structure and order that would look like total chaos to an NT? Do my interests play into this? Because I became so obsessively interested in how our society works and where all its "rules" come from in the first place I tended to reject society's rules way more than most people and came up with even more idiosyncratic(but more logical) ones.

Another question do strange routines and rituals sometimes exist that are unknown to the person with AS because he/she just doesn't think about it and it comes subconsciously? Sometimes I wear the same clothes everyday out of sheer laziness or because I can't find anything better but if I had a larger wardrobe I'd change what I wore. I actually do care what I wear, which seems to be uncommon in AS but I dress for individual expression not to impress(unless I must). This might reflect a deep desire of mine to be understood. I honestly would prefer being understood but hated to being loved but misunderstood. Its disturbing if I get a compliment on something that I don't feel reflects my true self. I also tend to worry a lot about whether a compliment is genuine or patronizing.

Sensory things? It is very easy for me to look at anything the way most people only look at clouds. I can see "landscapes" in ceilings with mountains, trees, rocks, craigs,... Look at the designs of desks and chairs and see things. By "see" things I don't literally mean "see" things. I mean I notice how it "looks like" other things. I still see it for what it really is. I don't "hallucinate". I enjoy playing with memory foam couches and seeing what kind of things I can "draw" with my fingers.

Good lord, that was way too long. You might be better off breaking that up into several threads. That's a whole moths worth of topics.

This jumped out at me:

How do you reconcile the measurable neurological differences in the autistic mind with the concept of a social construct. If Asperger's was simply a by product of current social definitions, there would be no such differences to be found.

Are you sure there is a real "measurable neurological differences in the autistic mind"? It is not only a question of autistic mind being different of non-autistic mind; are you sure that there are more differences between the minds of a "mild autist" and a "neurotypical with autistic traits" than between the minds of a "mild autist" and a "severe autist"?

I suppose I could quote a few recent academic studies but I would have to look them up again and I don't have the time right now. They have found structural differences in brain scans. The have found measurable differences in the amount of time it takes some autistics to process verbal information. They have reproducible tests for things such as executive functioning.



This is why the word spectrum appears in Autism Spectrum Disorder. Recognizing that there is overlap between neurotypical, high functioning autism and severe autism is not the issue. Data driven taxonomy is not a social construct.

Welcome to WP ... and I suspect one aggravates the other to this very day. I see my own childhood much differently than do/did my parents, yet the "social construct" of that environment still eludes me a bit even though my AS/HFA makes your own kinds of considerations and ponderings possible ... and to me, that indicates AS/HFA.

This is a possibility I have considered, but there are signs of a difference BEFORE I got to the point where My childhood was "screwed up" in any way.

Of course, any differences that lean toward the Spectrum only exacerbate problems I had as a kid. A lack of understanding by parents and teachers and others made the differences even worse because it was like trying to hammer a SQUARE PEG into a ROUND HOLE!

Anyway, it seems that some predetermined order led me to this place for a reason so that I could get some understanding of ME.

It is the issue (at least for me).



"Data driven taxonomy" can be a social construct.

I think the problem is that you are mixing two different questions;

A - The autistic dimension has an objective existence or is a social construct?

B - The autistic taxon has an objective existence or is a social construct?

What all these studies that you are talking can prof the existence of the "autistic dimension", but not necessarly of the "autistic taxon".

An analogy - replace "autism" with "height".

It is a fact that the dimension "height" is real (it is only a question of looking to people in the street and seeing that there are differences between short and tall people); however, this not prove that the taxon "people with more than 1,83 m" has any real validaty (or more validity than the taxons "people with more than 1,94 m" or "people with more than 1,74 m").

Far to erudite for me. I tend towards the pragmatic. Everything you said is correct, but of limited use to me. What is relevant to me is that given a population of diagnosed autistics and a set of specific test, that the autistics will test differently than NTs at a statistically significant rate. This can be separated from culture and society. Is this separation actively sought by clinicians and researchers? I'm not sure how to answer that, but I suspect it is partly the case. But I think it is impossible to fully separate the motivations (heavily culture and social) of professionals in the field with their results. So even objective tests have a social component. Why is an IQ test so popular? If this were an agrarian culture instead of a technological one, would it be as important? It is readily conceivable that a society will develop the tests that it deems important for the furtherance of that society and use those test to partition its members. This does not invalidate the objectivity of the tests and so even if our society has decided that autism is a sub-advantageous variant from the norm, the tests that identify autistic traits are still measuring something real.

Imagine that you are comparing, not a population of autistics with a population of NT, but a population of autistics with "Early infantile autism" (a.k.a. Kanner) with a population of NT+PDD/NOS+AS; much probably the "EIA" group will test differently that NT+PDD/NOS+AS at a statistically significant rate. This mean that we can merge NTs, AS and PDD/NOS in the same group?

Or the opposite - compare a population of autistics+ "nerdy, introvert NTs" with a population o f"social, extrovert NTs". Again, much probably will be statistically significant differences between the two groups.



But the question is not if "autistic treats" are real - the question is if the autistic traits are categorical/"digital"/discrete ("some people are autistics, others non-autistics"), or are dimensional/"analogical"/continuous ("everybody has some autistic traits, in different intensity, without a clear-cut point of distinction between autistics and non-autistics").

Lets put in another way - the "autism spectrum" in 2010 is different of the "autism" of 1983 and much probably will be different of the "autism spectrum" of 2017. Then, at least 2 of these 3 concepts of autism have to be "social constructs"; and, if 2 of 3 are social constructs, perhaps the other is also).

DGuru,

That was a very insightful first post, also known as a data dump. It is good to "get it out" so to speak. When I was eighteen I had a live data dump, augmented by extended anorexia and insomnia, which lead me to the mental hospital and being put on antipsychotics. Maybe my experience would have been different had I been aware of Internet forums in such a context.

I have found with Aspergers that my childhood has exacerbated but not created the fundamental core of the circumstance. I find myself to be a survivor and both better and worse for the wear. Had my parents been more caring and compassionate, rather than mentally and physically abusive, I might have melded into a higher state of "normalcy" but in retrospect I would not change one thing, because I believe I have been inadvertently tempered into having the capacity to see nuances of human characteristics and behaviors I would never had fully pondered had I not been forced to use my mind to survive, rather than mixing in and thinking all things were appropriate.

One thing that is certain is that you have an "IQ" in the upper percentile, which like myself lends to the circumstance where you draw connections between several unrelated things to see a greater truth that may defy conventional wisdom. Do not be discouraged by naysayers who may write off your suppositions merely because they don't fit into "already known reality" to whatever level of capacity that naysayers may have.

If you are not familiar with the term "little professor" you may like to search about it.

I am often stuck between being aspergers and just being too damn intelligent for my own good. The way I see it is that aspergers is merely one group of monkeys describing another group of monkeys and is analguous with a geometric proof. There are many different ways the end criteria can be met, different variables set in between, but in the end there are an uncertain number of differing factors that lead to the many differing displayals of aspergers.

I find the higher the "IQ" per se, the more neurotypical even other autistics may seem.

I'd love to write more but am on a mobile phone and it's annoying since it doesn't scroll with typed text.

You seem to be implying that if the definition of autism changes, it shows that it is a social construct or that non-social construct are invariant. But the Theory of Gravity as defined in General Relativity is markedly different than that in Newtonian Mechanics. That autism in 2010 means something different than 1983 can just as easily suggest a change in the neurological understanding of autism as much as changes in social perceptions and definitions.

Again, I think that you cannot fully separate social constructs from the diagnosis and treatment of autism. After all it is labeled a disorder precisely because it is perceived to limit an autistic's success in this society. But I disagree that it is ENTIRELY a social construct because there are objective measures that allow partitioning a population with at least some measure of consistency. I would hope that the definition of autism in 2017 or 2050 progresses to one that is more quantifiable and consistent, even if the metrics used are embedded within social definitions.

DGuru, Wow. Love the post, it was a fascinating read.

First the obvious disclaimer. I'm not a doctor, and I doubt anyone else who will post here is one either. If a real doctor did post here all they would say is that you need professional psychological testing to get a proper diagnosis, which is very true.

Then you also have the drug use issues. I've got nothing against your personal use of drugs but I hear it will interfere with most diagnosis of mental disorders. Some drug users self medicate to deal with whatever their issues are. So as long as drug use in in the picture many doctors won't diagnose past anything other than "substance use disorder."

One idea that struck me in your post was the signs of a few different thought disorders from your comments on language, saying that you will use made up words, and the way that you structured your post. Thought disorders can be related to Tourette's which you mention having in the past

To clarify "social construct" does not mean it isn't real. The material interactions between the physical environment and between human beings makes it real.

I agree it's based on real physical differences, but I don't see why people assume that ordinary personality traits have no chemical expression in the brain. We live in a physical, material universe so why wouldn't they? The dividing line between where it's just a "flaw" and a "disorder" is arbitrary and socially constructed. Any relative flaw compared to the norm could easily be classified as a disorder and we're headed to that as a society.

parrow, I use less than anyone I know I just tend to go for the exotic. Plus these problems have been around my whole life. As for how I posted it, honestly I didn't post it start to finish. I kept thinking of where I could add something and then had trouble figuring out how to keep the "flow". I'd think of something I wanted to put in there that fit in a certain place and couldn't figure out how to reword it so I could fit both that and the other sentence I already had there.

A Dx for AS can be complicated GREATLY by intervening factors such as you describe.

Certainly, a person who is abused in such a way to be emotionally stunted or ret*d because of coping mechanisms to deal with the abuse can appear to have AS in some ways.

However, other aspects of AS would be present that arguably are not and would not be the result of trauma from child abuse. A skilled therapist/diagnostician should be able to filter out one from the other. It is good to say that IF someone who is an abuse victim gets help overcoming their pain and learning basic social skills with non-abusive people, they should be able to put behind a good deal of the emotional scars and then it would be more apparent that something additional is impairing their social functions rather than it being the result of abuse.

I was the victim of abuse as a child and adolescent (peer abuse) and for the longest time I was dysfunctional just because of that, but once I grew past it and tried to have normal and healthy relations, I could never "get it" when it came to the most basic interaction skills. At some point, I had to question why I was always unable to foster good relationships with people around me even though I had put the pain and scars of my youth behind me years ago and had been working on making new relationships for so long.

Yes ... the story of my life to this very day!

You stole my diary, right?