Do I have it?

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I'm not sure how many people have asked this question on this forum, but I truly don't know the answer. Do I have Asperger's?

I'm eighteen and most people see me as "strange" or "different". When I was about nine years old I was obsessed with road maps, to the extent that I brought a book with road maps of local towns to school, for quiet reading in class. By the time I was eleven I began collecting golf scorecards from local courses, my dad had a job which required him to travel, and he would get scorecards from courses hundreds of kilometres away, and I memorised the distances of each hole, the pars, that sort of thing. I played golf, and many kids at school said that I always talked about golf and that I was obsessed. Now I'm interested in post WW2 military aircraft, and often trawl through Wikipedia looking at articles on such aircraft.

I was always (and still am) very good at mental arithmetic which made me slightly popular, until high school, when everyone now had a calculator and I was bullied quite a lot for reasons I couldn't (and still can't) explain, although this bullying had basically stopped by my third year of high school, thankfully.

My father is basically a loner, he sees most people as having illogical emotional responses to certain situations (as he says, "if you bang your head on a wall, don't complain about a headache"). His brother (who has never married) is a woodworker by trade and does woodworking in his spare time, and has pulled me aside at certain family functions to talk my ear off about woodworking - not that I mind, although I would rather be playing fetch with the dog.

I have a small group of friends who have noted that I tend to put things into patterns, and that I tend to rock back and forth in my chair when sitting down, but it wasn't until a certain situation (when a girl was apparently flirting openly with me in a cafe, and I didn't notice) that I guess I really started to ask if there was something "different" about me. I've never cared for fashion or celebrity gossip or any of that vacuous rubbish, and I've never dated, although I would like to.

The reason why I'm asking whether or not I have Asperger's is because while I'm pretty sure that I do (why else would I be here?) I would still like to see what other people have to say.

Pez201

Ugh... long wall of text... i hate reading walls of text... so... in ym eyes... welcome aboard...

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When in doubt, ask an autistic. Chances are, they're obsessed with what you need to know.

Autism Speaks will NEVER speak for me

CLASSIC AUTISM

Do you have:

Welcome Pez201!

Have you considered a professional evaluation?

Thanks for all the quick replies!

I haven't considered the professional evaluation because I'm low on cash, and I'm not really sure how a doctor could help me.

For Gillberg's Criteria, I would say I fit the first five but not the sixth - I wasn't all that good and never played sport (apart from golf) but I could kick a soccer ball ok, and I wasn't bad at discus. I guess that's why I'm here asking, because while I fit five of the six criteria, that technically rules out Asperger's.

Pez201,

You DO sound like you could be AS! Daniel is quoting a guy that doesn't REALLY follow the DSM. That sixth one is one of the funny differences, the most glaring difference is slow acquisition of speech. Others define it as NOT having a slow acquisition of speech.

In any event, most testing for the sixth have a STRICT definition of motor control. Can you CATCH easily? It is one thing to THROW a ball, and quite another to CATCH. Most define it as an inabiity to do something as simple as CATCH.

In any event, a failure there doesn't mean you don't match the DSM requirement in any case. Many, including myself(catching basically), have problems there, but certainly not everyone.

Welcome, close enough, we are people, not something defined by psychobabble, which if you look closely, Warning causes headachs, you would see that they do not agree, and are each trying to carve the pie toward their field.

Those who do fit one Dx or another, are nothing alike, it is just a lable, which does not cover the subject, unless the subject is, "Will Psychobabble for Food."

So come in, help yourself to anything that fits, and enjoy it.

You sound aspie to me, actually, you remind me of myself.

Thank you all for replying.

I guess if I act like an aspie, then I must be aspie! It's not that I want to be an aspie, but seeing that I basically fit the description, I'll accept it.

And thank you Inventor for what you said about psychobabble and labels, because I get VERY confused when I read psychiatry stuff.