please help me understand, asperger or ODD, new here

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Hi i was referred here from another website to get some insight into my step daughters behaviour. can you please help, as i feel she was wrongly diagnosed.
for about 3 years i have suspected my step daughter (who is now 13) has a form of aspergers or something.i came into her life when she was 7.
Here is what i noticed back then (which is not so bad now)...
* wanted a lsit put in her bedroom of events happening the next day
* very fidgety when she talks ( and is so now as well)
* obsessive with numbers...always figured out how old each of us would be in certain years. this happened EVERY time we saw her which was fortnightly
* always asks the same questions over and over ie...what would you do if you won a million dollars
* very very picky with food. had tantrums over food, not just an ew i don't like this, it was liek a fear of omg what have you just put infront of me. only in teh last 2 years is she trusting my cooking now but still has a need to ask in advance what it is has she had it before and wil she like it
* 2 yrs ago we lost a baby, i was 16 weeks along. her response was to laugh. then when we said where he was buried she carried on ( i won't go into detail)
* always got into trouble on the school bus for walking around and talking. she didn't get it though and coudl't understand why she was getting into trouble for it
*was doing fine in primary school then a few weeks into highschool and all hell broke loose. she is constantly in trouble. things like walking into friends classes while a teacher is teaching and starting a conversation
* she has mixed up with a really bad influence who takes off at ngiht time quite often and roams the streets. she can't see the danger in that and thinks all is ok if she takes a knife
* 2 years ago i tried explaining stranger danger to her. she was completely oblivious she told me it's ok to talk to me with beards
* when at our house behaviour is fine. normal sort of teen behaviour. mind you we are very routine strict due to having 3 kids under the age of 5. we eat at the same time, bath at the same time etc. she leaves for school at the right time
* when at her mothers she mucks up alot. her mother is deaf so she likes to take advantage of that and tell us she watches dvd's late at night etc. her mother works full time, travels often, always late, step daughter always arrives late at school when with her, meal times range from 7-10pm.
* at the end of primary school she developed a fear of coughing. it got so bad she socailly isolated herself for a while. somehow she did grow out of this thank goodness.

so i tell dh this and we do a checklist online and alot of it fits her. he told bio mum to take her to the dr to get a referal. instead she takes her to her gp and gets told she has oppositional defiance disorder and depression. Now everytime i ask bio mum how was sd today the reply is all about how defiant she is and how she is blaming others for her actions etc.
I have many doubts about this and want her to still have a referal to get check for something else

what do you think?
TIA

Reading your post it does seem to me you might have an ASD.

Welcome!

While some of her behavior from primary school sounds very much like AS, much of her behavior in high school and beyond feels a bit foreign.

I can't speak for anyone else here, but it sounds like she is deliberately defiant in many ways, and that doesn't sound like AS to me. As long as a rule makes moral and ethical sense, it's unlike someone with AS to want to break that rule.

I don't know much about ODD, but I don't think AS is right.

the oppositional defiance disorder and depression is possible along with showing posittive ASD traits. if you want to know whats going on with her talk to a child psycologist not a GP. good luck.

Accuracy regarding which PDD the child may express, is of minor concern compared to intervention quality

Finding a correct intervention that will benefit the child 9rather than further harm the child) is more to the point

Hi Welcome to WP.

It does sound very like an ASD to me too. My own daughter is particularly defiant and I could see it being possible for her to get a diagnosis of ODD, if the assessment wasn't done correctly. Our GP thought she was just really intelligent, nothing else, even though there are major behaviour and personal saferty issues. Fortunately, we're now seeing the right people and they're able to recognise the ASD traits.

Are the school teachers at all helpful? Sometimes they won't suggest a child has an ASD, or anything else, for that matter, until a parent or guardian suggests it first (that's what happens here anyway). I'd recommend you get a second opinion and good luck.

It might be. For starters, the defiant traits and possible teenage rebellion don't rule AS at all. From experience, I wouldn't say that ODD or behaviours reminding of ODD are particularly atypical for an autistic teen who has at least average verbal skills/IQ combined with a mild or moderate social impairment (unlike someone who really hardly interacts at all, for example).

Children and adults with AS who have at least some social understanding and have a somewhat functional relationship to their parents or others aren't free from displaying that same childlike manipulation as typically children do (such crying if they don't get what they want in young childhood or deliberately trying to push back sleeping time in order to do something more fun). That can be more problematic in an autistic teen due to that they sometimes don't seem to have any "common sense" because (for example) they don't pick on the subtle signs of when being stubborn and rebellious is taking it way too and might hurt others.

It's hard to say much more than that though. A throughout testing to see whether she has a pervasive developmental disorder/Asperger's or not is the only way to answer that question.

thankyou so much for he replies so far.

i did forget to add she freaks out in alot of noise sometimes. ie...there are 8 kids between my sisters and my family. she usually makes a statement of oooh too many people this is too loud for me i'm out of here and hides in her room. she has also done this when a friend was over with her 4 kids ( 1 of which was my sd's age and they were getting on good). but the moment we were all in one area together she went to her room. this was oly 3 months ago. however on the flip side she listens to the tv extremely loud to the point you can't hear anyone chatting above it at all.
she is able to socialise and has fine verbal skills yet i feel (and have for quite sometime)she acts somewhat inappropriately in social settings. one probably thinks she is either rude or completely immature because she doesn't know when to stop talking or to join into a conversation properly.
part of the defiant behaviour in my opinion is due to poor upbringing and learned skills. eg if she cries that she wants mummy to buy an ipod mummy will buy it.
there are thigs that throw me though like her ability to make up a story. she cried to us one night that her mother put nail polish in her hair and she had to cut it. the real story was....sd was putting nail polish on. her mother told her not too as she is not allowed to wear it at school. sd told her she would take it off in the morning. instead the mum grabbed it off her feeling sd was being defiant. they fought over it and nail polish went into her hair.
it's so hard because the mum is now set in believing ODD and she has not been assessed properly and i don't know if the mum will do it unless i have proper information for her

It doesn't sound like ODD at all. She's not getting into fights, stealing, being defiant to you. I don't know how others are seeing this.

ODD is basically a diagnosis for problem behaviour, early onset anti-social personality disorder. I have mild ODD and I sound worse than her.

The laugh when your baby died was just her not knowing what reaction to give. I used to badly injure myself and be in hysterics. I never felt pain back then.

It's sounds like she just isn't aware.

Her biological mother sounds very gullible and now because a doctor said it she's seeing those symptoms in her daughter.

She has sensory sensitivity so must block out the background noise by having the TV loud. There was the irritating bass noise outside my room so I blasted my music. It's like we process every sense at once and have a hypersensitivity to certain senses and can't block the information that isn't important to us out (unlike people without sensory integration disorder) so we need to make our own noise to block out the information.

You might want to look into Pathological Demand Avoidance syndrome. The symptoms can be similar to ODD but are more about avoiding doing tasks asked by other people because of severe anxiety.

http://www.autism.org.uk/about-autism/r ... drome.aspx

She could be a bit defiant but not enough for a diagnosis of ODD. She shouldn't even be diagnosed if a GP said it.

Sounds like she could be on the spectrum and it didn't sound like ODD at all.

I am meeting with her mum again tomorrow. is there anything i particular i should say/not say?

Don't blame her mom for anything. If she's autistic, she was born with it and her mom didn't do anything wrong.

Is it a possibility suggesting to her mum that she goes to a developmental paediatrician for an assessment?

Some of it sounds like an ASD, some just does not. If she is higher functioning ASD then she should have the communication skills to know and understand rules. People with AS tend to be strict on rules. Approaching random strangers, walking into classes while the teacher is teaching, mucking up at the deaf mother's house all seem very much NOT AS. In fact approaching strangers just seems way off AS.

Looking up ODD it doesn't seem like that either, you don't really mention much purposefully angry/belligerent behaviour as such.

I guess a simple way to explain it, most people with AS will either try to do "normal" things even if they have trouble figuring out what normal is, or invent their own world and try to avoid hassle. Walking into a classroom while a teacher is teaching definitely is not normal and it is definitely not avoiding hassle. The stranger danger issue is a big problem also.

As for laughing at the baby dying- try not to take it personally. People react to different situations differently. This girl definitely seems mentally "different", she may not realise or understand what she did is wrong, or has no clue how to respond which could result in very erratic behaviour. I doubt the behaviour was truly malicious.

Perhaps it is both conditions, or something else entirely?