IQ affecting diagnosis (posted in another forum as well)

Post Reply New Topic

hi, i was diagnosed with tourettes,and ocd when i was 10 years old. my mom has always wondered if i had aspergers or something like it too. Well I ended making an appointment to see a autism specialist in toronto, and went through all sorts of IQ testing, executive functioning testing, aspergers tests, and plenty of other tests. the dr. said that i do in fact have aspergers but she still has to add up all of my cognitive scores. but now i'm kind of worrying. because she said i have aspergers but what if my IQ scores aren't at the range that they need to be in order to have the actual diagnosis? i really need to be diagnosed. it would help with my schooling, and social areas. so i guess what i'm wondering is if IQ scores are below average, and i don't qualify for aspergers, is there something else like it??? any help would be great

I wouldn't worry about it. They have to take every score into account when writing up their paperwork and officially rule out alternatives. When different conditions exist together I can see how this would take longer.

If your IQ is below 70 (which, judging from what you've written here, it is not) you would qualify for PDD-NOS instead of Aspergers - which is still the autistic spectrum and should carry the same or better support/benefits.

Just don't worry too much... That's all I have

You might have a better chance of being diagnosed as an Aspie if you have a lower IQ. The specialist I saw said I seemed too intelligent to have AS or anything on the autism spectrum

I agree to that you probably don't need to worry. I had to wait for my diagnosis until the results of my IQ test were known too. That's because they wanted to know whether they should write down AS or HFA, depending on whether the results were above average or average (which makes NO sense, but whatever).

And even if for some reason you didn't do as good on that IQ test, there is still the diagnosis of PDD-NOS as someone else said already. That roughly translates into having some form of autism. I hope it gets you just the same help, because it shouldn't make a difference whether the paper says "Asperger's" or "PDD-NOS".

I had to wait a month or two, just knowing that "they were sure I had it" as they had said before the IQ test. It's not a pleasant feeling.

That's not true, actually. A lot of us have IQs in the top 1%. Only a low IQ could change the results of the diagnosis.

Things must be different in your area because I heard that from most every psych & organization I saw trying to get services from

Well, a specialist who says "you're too intelligent to be autistic" is already empirically wrong.

Hi LizzyBeth,

Is the autism specialist extremely careful, or very slow at adding up exam scores, or possibly prejudicial about the types of autism and IQ levels?

One Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) specialist I was in front of with the U. S. Merit System Protection Board (MSPB) posed the question that if I was neurologically impaired, I would have to have below average exams scores that disqualified me from employment with the federal employer. And if I had higher exam scores, then he would hold that I could not be neurologically impaired.

My exam scores were at 100%, and no other applicants for the job positions had as high, or higher, exam scores. Since I was told by the State Rehabilitation Department that my neurological impairments were too severe for rehabilitation, the ALJ declared that I failed the exams with too low score results to be qualified for the job positions. He also ruled that the documentation of my perfect scores was irrelevant to my case in front of the MSPB.

To appeal the MSPB decision, I was obligated to make my appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia (I live in the State of California). I contacted my Congressman for the content of the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA), and through his office, my Congressman informed me that there is no equal access to justice guaranteed in the USA with the EAJA. I didn't receive any services under the EAJA, and my Congressman later became the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and he will soon be the next U.S. Secretary of Defense.

The Appeals court issued a summary judgement against me, holding that my exam scores were too low from my proclaimed impairments, and it upheld the ruling that the fact of my perfect top exam scores were irrelevant evidence in disproving that the exam scores were erroneously taken as at a disqualifying low. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider my request for writ of certiorari about the judicial rulings being in contradiction of uncontested facts.

In more interpretive, non-objective, psychological/cognitive exams, the results are often "tweaked" by the evaluater of the exam results. Even in in "purely" objective exams (here, my experiences are with taking/learning/giving the MMPI, that comes the with spiel of "no right or wrong answers"), the results are often "adjusted" on the basis of the examiner's subjective observations and assumptions or weighted bias. These "adjustments" often further damage the objectivity and validity, rather than improve such, but the issues are very complex, and even any Dr. Dork gets confused (such a Dork example is in "Research Methods for Social Work" by Rubin & Babbie (2011), pages 204-205, often at books-dot-google-dot-com, and/or preview with amazon-dot-com, and also examples of validities of the MMPI).

I often wish more tests would be conducted also on the testers and evaluators, to detect the effects of bias on the final constructed, or assumed, scores. Many specialists are also very assumptive, careless, and fickle, including with IQ/cognitive tests results.

Tadzio

Rubbish! You can't be too intelegent to be on the spectrum :-/

Most everyone I saw told me I was. Psychs, specialist & others in mental health field must be different in Louisiana

Hey, I'm not Autistic I'm to intelligent I guess everyone else who is autistic is worse the me What sense does that make! I mean most autistics are like Top 1% and if they aren't it might be dyspraxia. Whoever said Autistic people are mentally ret*d (Unless its co morbid) don't know what they are talking about.

My IQ without language is low average, but cognitive testing is evenly near intellectual disability in most areas...
I think ASD should imply more details than assumptions.