Are obsessive interests exclusive to AS?

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Hello everyone, this is my first post. As the title states, I was wondering if anyone knows whether or not 'obsessive interests' are exclusive to AS. I am an adolescent girl with Tourette's Syndrome alone, but all my life I have had intense obsessive interests that seem to 'wax and wane,' as tics do. The way I would describe them would be that I get obsessed with something and I dedicate all my hours to it until I lose interest in it. Between these obsessions there is a short interval (usually lasting a few days) until I become immensely obsessed with something else. There has never been a period in my life when I have not been obsessed with something. For instance, when I was approx. 12 I had an obsession with perfumes and would spend every penny I had on perfumes. I kept all my perfumes in this large plastic storage box and would spend hours just looking at them and re-arranging them and I would make sure no one touched them. I had a similar obsession with video cassettes a few years earlier, which involved the same sort of collecting. Other obsessions have been certain countries, musicians etc. As I have got older, I find my obsessions have limited my opportunities. For example, during school I couldn't put my mind to my revision because all that was interesting to me was my obsession. I would (and still do) sometimes stay up until the early hours of the morning researching my singular interest and get very upset and frustrated if I can't research or do something related to it.

I somewhat doubt that I have AS because I do not think I have problems with non-verbal communication (eye contact, facial expression etc.) but I find it hard to mix with others of my age and as a result, do not have many friends. I have been told that I speak unusually fast and people sometimes tell me to slow down. A psychiatrist told me that all these other problems are a part of Tourette's. But I thought that unless there are co-morbid conditions (which to my knowledge I do not have) that Tourette's is simply a disorder of movement.

I would be much greatful if someone could help ease my confusion.

I think AS is a palette of symptoms, of which you'd need to have a certain percentage in order to be officially diagnosed (somewhere between half and two thirds of the well-known traits, at a guess). Some of these are mutually exclusive, so it's unlikely that many people here could tick every single box.

On the other hand, matching only one or two of the traits is probably quite normal, as most average people display one or two characteristics which aren't, in fact, average. Does this make any sense?

For example I work as a volunteer on a steam railway, so I get to meet obsessive people with poor social skills all of the time!

AS and tourette's can overlap, a person can have both. Your obsessions sound like AS obsessions. The obsessions in typical tourette's tend to be more compulsions then interests, such as compulsively smelling perfumes rather then buying them and collecting them.

Also in AS, there is a tendency to catalogue and categorise a collection, so perhaps you would have separated all the french perfumes from the Italian ones or ordered them by size and colour. I collect minerals and I like to look at them but I also categorise my collection by their chemistry.

In obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) people often collect stuff but the don’t catalogue or categorise their collection. A good example is a person with OCD who never throws stuff away, they collect rubbish that has no purpose and it is not specific nor arranged. They keep all the news papers they bought in last 20 years, all their old plastic bags and broken light bulbs etc.

There is only one other (allegidly) separate condition where there can be obsessions, and that is bi-polar disorder. When people are manic phase (very excited) they can get very obsessed about just one interest - it is called monomania. However, I read recently that 10% of people with Asperger’s also have bi-polar disorder, so again the obsessions in bi-polar disorder may be due to AS/autism.