"I'm not crazy - AS is different . . . "

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I experience AS as more of a lack of craziness than a type of craziness (although it's easy to argue that everyone is crazy to some extent). Perhaps this only pertains to my own variety of AS; I might see things differently if I had meltdowns or other emotion management issues.

Instead, I think that AS gives me a degree of objectivity that many people lack because they perceive reality through the lens of their society and culture. Being an outside observer gives one an objective perspective. I also enjoy the fact that I don't experience the extremes of emotion that so many people seem to.

However, the simple fact that AS is: in the DSM, described as a mental disorder, and considered to be a form autism which is so prominently (and unfairly) stigmatized these days . . . makes me hesitate to tell anyone about it for fear that they'll write me off as crazy.

I've come close to telling a few people, but it just didn't feel right, or the right opportunity didn't come up, so I didn't go through with it . . . yet. It is now a personal goal for me to confess to someone that I have AS. I often dislike the label, but I think the fear of talking about it is something I need to get over.

How do you tell someone about AS without leading them to believe that you are crazy? Are there any success stories out there among the denizens of WP?

I don't tell people about AS until I think they like and trust me for who I am, and only when the conversation pertains to the subject of AS. If they don't know me well enough they may make misleading inferences about it. Some people have mentioned AS in front of me without me telling them anything and without them knowing or in many cases even suspecting anything. To them I'm just another, maybe slightly odd, guy and that's perfectly fine with me.

Actually whats awful is if like me you are mentally ill and it comes out in front of people you work with, I was having delusions in front of my boss...

But anyway, I don't think most people would understand, so I would say nothing. If you really are mentally ill, stay on your meds and eepecially don't say anything.

i dont see insanity as an insult. if a complete stranger thinks im crazy for having AS, well then theyre awfully obvlivious to the blue hair and the platform boots with the one-inch spikes on em psh, i dont care if my classmates think im crazy either, just means less ignorant people bothering me when im trying to do my work or have a quiet morning.

but, thats not why i dont tell people about my AS

i dont do it because half the people i could tell are too ignorant to understand. theyd be like "wutz ass-burgerz?" and i just dont have time to explain the world and its workings to a random person who probably isnt listening or will forget all about it the next day. however i have no problem telling my close friends about it (my close friends are rather strange themselves, so its all good)

i suppose if i had understood what aspergers was when i was younger (elementary school, middle school, etc) and tried to explain it to people, i probably wouldve come off as crazy and wouldve actually cared that they thought i was crazy (i didnt have fridnds untill 8th grade. other peoples opinions hurt more the less friends you have to back you up)

Mm. In Pratchett's 'Thief of Time' one of the incarnations of Time's son has an aspie-like super-focus and also some serious OCD issues (he killed a guy who kept his clock 5 minutes slow) and he's described as 'completely sane. Not just crazy in social acceptable ways like most people, but utterly sane.'

That's not really related. Anyway, anyone who thinks I'm crazy is going against the evidence of their own eyes and therefore insane themselves, so I can ignore their opinions.

That part is pretty consistent with my experience of AS, but I don't know how to communicate it to people without sounding arrogant. It's also somewhat time-consuming and challenging to explain the way AS is for me and how that relates to the diagnostic criteria and the descriptions that are prevalent online.

Aside from AS, I have had bouts with severe depression. It also runs in my family - some of my relatives have an extreme kind called "depression with psychosis" and have had to be institutionalized. So I'm familiar with mental illness. It can be pretty destructive, but I think that a lot of psych disorders come with some advantages, just like AS.

Because I've had severe depression and seen many close friends and relatives suffer horrific effects of more debilitating conditions, I can see how AS is different. Based on my own experience, it belongs in a different category entirely.

This is hard to explain to people because most people want to divide everything into black-and-white dichotomies such as "sane" and "insane". I'd have to describe myself as "sane but different, perhaps more sane than average, except when I'm very depressed".

It's kind of impossible for me to avoid it, because I've got some mental illness going on in addition to the Asperger's, not to mention some pretty extensive SI scarring which I can't hide unless I want to cover everything from neck to wrists to ankles. So I figure they're either going to think I'm crazy or they'll accept me; and, at any rate, mental illness is really stigmatized a lot more than it ought to be, and it's stupid that I should have to hide it. It's not like you can be held to blame if your brain runs away with you. The only way it could be worse is if my problems involved delusions, which is the classic definition of "crazy"... all I've got is depression and PTSD, both currently in remission; but I think a lot about people who do have delusions, and how it might be possible to get them accepted more than they are... Apparently they do way better in third-world countries because here, there's very little family support and you've got a good chance of just getting abandoned to the system. Kind of scary considering we have all these advanced medications, and they don't.

Given that the meds frequently cause brain damage and don't necessarily help the delusions (I've talked to people who talk about "going into the system crazy but not sick, and leaving both crazy and sick")... maybe not too surprising. I remember reading a book where the author named and dismantled the myth that psychiatry's methods are always "the best they've ever been", too.

I posted something on the stereotype topic also. I was wondering if telling someone who is "different" would make a difference. There's someone I suspect has it and if they don't then they have something. I wonder how they would take it, like, if they would be more accepting. I don't know this person very well but am considering telling her I have AS to see how she reacts to it. I would never tell someone who I thought was NT but if it was someone with AS traits or characteristics would you be more prone to telling them you have AS, even if you didn't know them well?

Depends. Lots of eccentric people would be more accepting than most; but some eccentrics have the same autism stereotype and ideas about disability that most people do.

Dude, everyone who knows me knows I am pretty odd...the most common reaction I get when I tell people is "Oh, so THAT'S what it is..." It's not news that I am different - the actual name of the condition might be new information, but that's it.

I'm often told that I'm a bit "strange" or "different", but when I told my friend about AS he just laughed and said: "You can't live without any label, can you?"