Anosognosia

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Anosognosia is a concept I first became aware of in literature about dementias. The word means a condition in which you are unaware that you have a disability. Sometimes, a person with dementia has no insight into their own mental decline, and therefore believe their relatives are just trying to "put them away," maybe to get control of the person's money or just to be rid of them. (This is NOT true of ALL people with dementia.)

I do see a few people at WP who seem to think there is no social skills deficit in them, and the "problem" is in everybody else in the world. Typically these are the folks who don't feel they should adapt or change because it's all NT's problem, not theirs. They can name and diagnose the problem all those NTs have (typically named as an expletive). If you suggest anything the individual could do to manage a situation better, these people reject the suggestion or even take it as evidence that you are demeaning them.

Can you see this in posters here? Do you think it might even be true of yourself? (hint: if you think you may have anosognosia, you probably don't!)

Absolutely. We all know who they are, too.
It's possible, but I know I rub some people the wrong way, so I'm at least aware that something may be amiss.

The challenge for those of us who want to help a person with anosognosia is to project a loving and supportive involvement, without losing compassion, even though our best efforts are always rejected.

There is nothing to be gained in getting angry about it.

I have learned SO MUCH from being a caregiver of a spouse with dementia, and from the caregivers' support group I go to. People think caregiving is entirely negative, and it does come with a lot of depression. But I love my husband none the less for his dying brain. I care for him because I want to.

I don't see any posters here with anosognosia , I see ASD , depression & anxiety issues

I don't have anosognosia but my self awareness is s**t so that is a bit of a contradiction

Acting "normal" takes so much work that I only do it for paid employment and certain social situations. I usually don't bother here.

I definitely see a lot of people on here who refuse to believe they have a disability and try to make it seem like NT's are the abnormal ones instead. It often comes across as really aggressive to me, especially when you hear people saying things like "We are the gifted ones, NT's are the disabled ones" etc. (Not a direct quote).

I don't believe I will change the way I am even though I know I'm the disabled one. I think the main reason for this is that I just don't care enough. I'm easily exhausted socially (and in many other ways) so I'm reluctant to add an extra pressure of trying to fix the way I am, I did this during all of my school years and to say I was exhausted by it would be an understatement, I refuse to go back to that state of being.

As well as Anosognosia there seems to be some kind of "aspie/Autism superiority" complex in several people I've seen on here. I'm inclined to disagree with their way of thinking as we are the ones that are crippled in many more ways than the average NT.

It is certainly possible to be gifted and disabled at the same time!

That's a really interesting question, Bea. I was talking to someone on another forum who was considering a diagnosis, but going through the usual "imposter syndrome" feelings, and I said to them that I suspect that autism, especially when undiagnosed, has a way of blinding us to our autistic traits.

A friend of mine who has had persistent problems with mental health and social interaction speaks very often about the confusion of having no "base-line" by which to compare his cognition with other people. If we have the intelligence and observation skills to devise work-arounds for our deficits, and have been doing this since infancy, unaware that most people don't have to, then how are we to know? We can see that outcomes may be different, but without insight into other's minds, there's no way to see that this is caused by underlying differences in cognition and mental processing. Whatever difference in outcomes remain can easily be rationalised as the consequences of depression, insomnia, having a deviant personality, deficits in other people, or just plain bad luck.

Looking back to my own pre-diagnosis life, I can see how this applied to me. I found the initial suggestion that I might be autistic very hard to accept, then decided that this must be because I was a "mild" or "borderline" case. It's only over the course of several years that I have finally accepted that my differences are far more profound than I ever could have imagined.

Yes, I have seen it. It's especially marked in the Aspie Supremacist threads. Some people posit that the world would be a better place if the NT to Aspie ratio was reversed. No it wouldn't. Most of us would probably die off. That's not to say that Asperger's is all bad though. There are some spectacularly gifted Aspies. I have a few talents too which I doubt I would possess if it wasn't for the way my brain was wired.

Even before I knew I had Asperger's syndrome I could have told you that I was screwed up six ways from Sunday. However I never would have guessed that I was autistic. Don't know if that counts as anosognosia. I had a bunch of assorted conditions that were like puzzle pieces and I couldn't figure out how they were connected. There was no real denial once presented with the diagnosis, though it came as a shock. The pieces suddenly fit and I had a major "Ohhhhhh, now that explains a lot!" moment.

My pre-diagnosis life was filled with thoughts of "WTF is wrong with me?", even after earning a few successes along the way. A chance encounter with a psychologist at my son's school changed everything. She gave an off-the-cuff diagnosis on the spot, which was later confirmed and elaborated on by three of her colleagues. This explained everything, yet left me with a sense of somehow being cheated out of an earlier diagnosis. If only ... if only ... if only ...

You and me both. If only.

Add me to the list.

Oh yes, very much so; acceptance of this has been very hard to come by, and I still have some way to go.

I think there's also a residual lack of trust in my own self-reflection. Forty-plus years of being told that "everyone does that", "you're just pity-seeking", "just get out and practice more", "pull your socks up", and so on, left me constantly questioning whether I really knew my own mind at all. Yet, at my formal assessment, the psychologist said that the conclusions I'd drawn from my self-reflection were actually extremely accurate and had made reaching a diagnosis much easier for her. It has been interesting to look back on the things I tried to tell people about myself pre-diagnosis which were always dismissed. Old CBT session notes and songs/poems that I wrote as far back as my teens paint a very clear picture of a struggling autistic person when read with the benefit of hindsight.

sounds familiar.

I first came across anosognosia when I was writing my book "You Can't Sleep Here: A Clown's Guide to Surviving Homelessness." The term helped to explain why the homeless world is over-populated by the mentally ill. A lot of folks I've met did not actively seek out help for housing because they thought that nothing was wrong with them and living on the street was normal.

Anosognosia is a good topic. I definitely used to be in steely strong denial about my autism and truly thought that most people were deeply flawed: giving so much weight to feelings that they made horrendous life choices, caring so much about relationships that they failed to achieve academically or at work, being preoccupied with social nonsense, TV and music personalities and watching sports or car races or the like. I did see myself as being superior (I’m intelligent) and I blamed others for behaving in ways that seemed to make it more difficult for me to interact with them or to socialize. I really had a dim view of people and I saw animals (who I could better relate to) as being more virtuous than humans. I was very successful professionally, but my social life was dismal, my friendships few, and my marriages ended badly. I had a bad case of seeing myself alternately as being very superior to others versus being a complete loser.
How I got to that point was that I got mainstreamed in school and it was not OK to ever talk about the program for kids with developmental problems I had been in for a year, not OK to act differently, not OK to draw attention to myself much less get into trouble. Things happened such that I wound up with PTSD and for ages I couldn’t acknowledge my autism and alexithymia, although therapists would always end up pointing it out at some point. So I couldn’t accept my disability for ages and instead I projected my difficulties onto others. It took until I was in my late 50s to eventually process the memories of my autism diagnosis and my mom’s horrified reaction to that, and to understand just what it meant: that I’m mentally and emotionally different with impairments in social interaction and big differences in how I think and communicate. I had to review most of my life experiences and do a lot of forgiving of myself and NTs. And I had to let go of certain cherished dreams that I had. But I now am able to build more honest relationships with people and I better understand my strengths and weaknesses without being such a hater. So when I see some folks on WrongPlanet who seem to think that it is NTs who have the problem and take suggestions for managing interactions better as being demeaning, I can relate to that and I want to help them through it. But I can only make gentle suggestions. Blaming others for our problems isn’t limited to autistics after all… One blessing that has come out of it is that I now see NTs sort of as generally good-hearted but sometimes odd critters who do this social thing that I can’t quite flow with but which can be endearing anyway. Sort of like a bunch of parrots chirping and squawking at each other, preening their plumage, flapping wings, fluffing feathers…