People confiding in you they think they have aspergers

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Just wondered if this was something that happened to anyone else or not.

Recently I've been slightly more 'out of the closet' about my diagnosis, although it's still a long way from being general knowledge. Anyway, as people find out about me, they often start confiding in me that they think they might have Aspergers too.

In some cases, I guess there is a genuine chance. But one of the people who said he was convinced he had it must be the biggest social animal I know of!

In a way I feel like it's not my right to say anything at all, or even really have an opinion. I don't know what to say. I find it all very strange.

Thoughts? You ever experienced anything similar? What would you say/what advice would you give?

So far, people only told me about their kids. Of course, I only HINTED at my own situation.

It has occasionally happened to me. I have an online friend and he said he may have it, he took the tests on rdos and then he told me what his symptoms were. Sounded like AS alright.


I have another online friend who was diagnosed with ADHD, the one who likes going to pubs and drink beer and goes to sport games. Well he read my fictional stories and I had AS in it and he started to learn about the condition and the fact his aunt told him she thinks he might have it because she is a special ed teacher and she has students with it. Well he went and saw someone who works in it and she diagnosed him with it. I was the one who told him people with ADHD don't get obsessed and aspies do. I also told him they aren't inflexible either.



I wouldn't worry about people who think they might have it. There are things I think I may have but I don't say I have them because I am not diagnosed with it or even been told by a doctor I have it.

Maybe you should just tell them to go have it checked out or that you're really not qualified to give an opinion one way or the other. I would guess that's pretty hard to have to listen to. This only reminds me why I'm glad I'm not socially active.

Or have them look it up and read more about it.

Sometimes they are quite frighteningly well read on it already... Probably more than I am - I never read any books, even around the time of my diagnosis. The very social chap actually has a child with classic autism, and has worked in a college for young adults with aspergers. He believes in the whole 'extreme male brain' theory. I think he thinks of it as an entirely positive thing in his case and doesn't see the point in having a diagnosis.

On the music forum I post on there is quite a large sub-group of people who think they're undiagnosed aspies. I'm actually quite convinced by a couple of them, but they tend to get a lot of abuse from other posters who think aspergers is a 'made-up' disorder. I tend to keep my mouth shut, but sometimes feel like maybe I'd have something good to say and should say it? Trouble is, there's usually about a hundred posts of utter idiocy before I can tap out something sensible.

It's the new 'gay' isn't it? I suppose even fakes and wanna-be's contribute to it becoming more well known and understood, so since there's nothing you can do about it, you may as well go with the flow. You can always answer a question with a question if you think people are trying to trick you into an admission. The social guy you mention sounds genuine, but it's up to you whether you want to disclose or not. It can impact on other family members (because it's largely genetic) and you may want to take their wishes into consideration. or not.

Last edited by Postperson on 18 Aug 2008, 7:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

My sister once asked me if she has it, which I found totally bizarre because she is a very social person who generally has little trouble in making friends, certainly in comparison to me. I told her flat out, "no," and that I thought it was weird that she asked. She knows a handful of people who have it and are diagnosed, not just me, so I would have thought she would know better. I don't know if it was an honest question or just her weird sense of humor--because she does have a weird sense of humor. Like my dad, I actually think that she has a handful of the cognitive traits like the ability to hyperfocus, high perfectionism, difficulties with executive functionin, a great memory for details, can read super-fast. But that's just high intelligence and possibly shades of ADD and other things. I don't see how someone with her history of social success could possibly be on the spectrum, and I don't understand why she asked.

I'm very social and reasonably successful at it, but I'm still a pretty classic aspie... we don't all have to be total recluses.


I tend to have the opposite problem. I wonder about a number of my friends and I'm longing to bring it up with a couple of them because I'm convinced they're aspies too, but I don't want to offend anyone!!

This is quite a common scenario for a lot of parents in their 30s or 40s. They slipped through the diagnostic net when they were children, because it wasn't in the DMV, it wasn't diagnosable.

And remember, with respect to many traits, it's a developmental delay (not a totally inability). Older people who weren't diagnosed as children will have muddled through and adapted and adjusted, some much better than others. Lots of older Aspies will still be very obvious, but others will have become quite good at 'pretending to be normal'.

They only realise when their children are diagnosed and start reading about it and realise how much of it relates to them and their behaviour, especially as they were growing up.

Remember, you didn't know this chap as a child, how he might have struggled with social skills or friendships. You only know the person he's become, not the effort it's taken for him to reach that level.

Also, if he has an autistic child, then it's more likely that he is also on the spectrum because of the genetic/hereditary connection.

I'm in a very similar situation. I had actually confessed to a couple of my cousins that I believe I have Aspergers. I don't think they really took it seriously. So I decided to bring a dvd that was like a short documentary on Aspergers (and secretly hoped that they might see a part of themselves in the documentary). Well, they went out of their way to not pay attention and got themselves wrapped up in their computer game and started talking loudly to drown out the dvd. It was quite amusing to witness the self-denial and overcompensating behaviors.

They are relatively more successful than me in life, both hold down stable jobs. One is married with a child and the child I suspect is on the spectrum or ADD. They've both had active social lives to some extent. So it's understandable that they cannot relate autism spectrum to themselves...plus I think they merely have a traditional, mainstream concept of autism (which isn't exactly up-to-date to today's academic understanding of autism spectrum).

I also see behavioral clues in their parents as I have in mine. These guys have been a part of my life since I was a little kid. It would not surprise me if they actually sought out a diagnosis and got it... Actually, it would surprise me if they sought one out in the first place.

I'd have to know more. There are autistic people who develop an excellent ability to rote-memorize social stuff, but behind the facade they are really suffering. So I tend not to make assumptions either way, because some people mask it really, really well.

I think people (including, doctors etc.) forget that autism is the underlying neurological state, not the effects of it. I mean... think of the following questions?

If a blind person can pass for sighted, are they no longer blind?

If a deaf person can read lips and speak well enough nobody notices, are they no longer deaf?

So if autism is an underlying neurological/perceptual/cognitive/motor state, then if an autistic person manages (as not all can, obviously) to do a lot of things that are not at all the stereotype of an autistic person... then are they no longer autistic?

Here is a short article by someone who passes really well. Is it good to assume that, because she passes (or, is passed, as I like to say -- because people aren't looking for autism and if you can manage a few cues they will often disregard and explain away your lack of various other ones), then she's not having to do enough hard work to be driven to suicide because it doesn't seem like it'll ever end? That she's not autistic anymore, because she's memorized how to grit her teeth and socialize no matter how painful it is from a sensory perspective?

Because that doesn't make sense to me. There are internal consistencies within autistic people's cognitive profiles, there is an internal setup that is autism, and some autistic people are able to pass and some are not, just as some deaf people can pass and some can't. I don't think ability to pass necessarily means anything about how autistic a person is (sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, is my guess -- what type might be a better term than how much autistic a person is).

In fact, a researcher asked me at one point, essentially (this is a paraphrase coming up), "Since we don't actually know what is at the heart of autism, how do we know that 'more autistic' people do worse on things? How do we know that autism isn't all somewhere based on a particular skill, that if you have a lot of it, it's easier to function in society than if you only have a little of it with an autistic cognitive profile?" She pointed out that it's simply not known.

Which is a good point to keep in mind. None of us truly know the specifics of what autism is. But it's at least a safe bet, that what it is, is an underlying state of the brain (like deafness is an underlying physical state of the ears and/or brain) and that most of what we know of as autistic traits, are simply frequent results of autism (some, even, frequent results of autism in particular contexts but not others), not autism itself.

So I'd rarely to never say that I was utterly sure that someone else wasn't autistic, and definitely not based on an outside description on the Internet. It's just too tricky to tell.

It's the people who go around needing to prove something all the time that one has to wonder about.