Is Self-Diagnosis Valid?

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It's weird how the symptoms one must exhibit for a given psychiatric diagnosis change with every new revision of the DSM, but the symptoms needed for a diagnosis of a physical illness always stay the same. While a psychaitrist might give a patient a diagnosis of ADHD-NOS or PDD-NOS or Mood Disorder NOS, never will a physician tell a patient that they have Back Pain NOS or Heart Failure NOS and then request that the patient see them in a month and have a nice day without a much-needed prescription.

Psychological problems are usually not as 'visable' as physical illness, I do not think the symptoms of psychological disorders totally change with every revision.......they might add more or specify what is already there but yeah the symptoms do actually tend to stay close to the same.....though there is less known about a lot of psychological disorders considering they can usually figure out if someone has a psychological disorder but none of them have an exact cause......its always a combination of biological, environmental and social factors and different people with the same disorder can exibit symptoms differently.

Although there are indeed specific critereon from the DSM-IV-TR that must be checked off before one can be diagnosed with a psychological disorder, every time a new DSM comes out, entire disorders are removed or added. Plus, unlike most physical disorders that have tests to confirm a diagnosis/find the origin of the problem (that are accurate a majority of the time) psychological disorder diagnoses rely mainly on the patient's history. I wish that there were definitive tests to find out that a suspected psych diagnosis was a certainty.

As a rule they are added, the number of disorders in the DSM has increased with every revision. Also actually a psychological diagnoses relies on the patients history, the symptoms they are exibiting and how severe the sympoms are as well as how long they have lasted. It would be half assed if a psychiatrist for instance tried to diagnose someone based on their history alone.

The reason there aren't usually tests that can without a doubt 'prove' a mental disorder is because there are various factors involved.....it rarely comes down to one specific thing. So it ends up being more based on what symptoms someone has.

There are so many reasons that people don't get evaluated as children. In my case, my father was absolutely against any kind of evaluation of mental health care for me or my sister. Plenty of adults expressed concern as I was growing up, but people blamed it on my father's abuse, decided I was lazy or stupid, or whatever. Very few people took it far enough to suggest I had neurological difficulties. Looking back, I actually could have been diagnosed with autism under the DSM-III (but it wasn't out until I was 11 years old) and the fact that I didn't have a speech delay meant that there was already prejudice against diagnosing someone like me.



I resorted to a self-dx of Asperger's Syndrome at the age of 41 to explain a lot of things. I've never really been concerned about my social adequacy or inadequacy. I was actually pretty oblivious to it. It was more of a shock than anything else, because prior to learning about it, I didn't really think there was anything different about me. I actually knew I had it three years before that, but I was mostly in denial about it. I actually didn't really establish an understanding of my social limitations until after I looked into AS. What I found was pretty surprising - NT social perceptions are downright weird and somewhat fascinating to me.

There was a period of four months between my self dx and official dx, and my official dx was not difficult at all to get - not because the person diagnosing me was inexperienced or whatever, but because apparently I was really obvious.

If you're aware of your differences all your life, it can be easy to not understand why people who aren't aware of their differences can slip through the cracks, but so many do. Part of it is that autism is an invisible disability. Not that people don't show visible signs of being autistic, but that others who look at them may assume other things about them, most of them negative and relating to perceived merit. To most people, if you don't look obviously disabled, then they will assume you are not disabled.

I know people who were diagnosed as children, and they talk about never having any idea what it is like to see themselves as typical, whereas I had no frame of reference to judge what typical really was, and so assumed I was typical. I needed explicit, detailed descriptions of what it's like to have ADHD, to be autistic, to have fibromyalgia, in order to understand that I had these. Other people just thought I was weird and found me "best taken in small doses." My father decided I was lazy and stupid. My mother decided that I was just unwilling to take care of myself because my grandmother supported me after a couple of attempts to live on my own failed.

Oh, there's at least one moderately autistic person who is also Australian on this forum who was not diagnosed in childhood, b9. It can happen, and if she's not autistic, most of us aren't.

I answered "other" to the poll:

People are going to self-diagnose. Some of them are going to be wrong. Many are going to be right. They're looking for help and support and probably need it. And they may very well be correct about what they have. I don't see a problem with someone saying that they have Asperger's Syndrome if they're clear that they're self-diagnosed. I don't even see a problem if some of them determine later that they don't have it really, that they might have ADHD instead or some other thing. I can live with the uncertainty of not having 100% accuracy, and having been misdiagnosed by professionals before, I don't particularly hold their opinions on a pedestal.

I am also not so invested in what other people want to do that I would tell them to self diagnose or not.

But I do think people should be open to being wrong. I also think that self dxed people should be responsible about how they present themselves.

b9 wrote:

b9, this is harsh. I'm somewhat surprised to see something so narrow minded from you...bordering on arrogance. I was never diagnosed with any particular label as a child. But that doesn't mean I went completely undetected as being odd & different, as well as socially inadequate. I knew I was never "normal." I just never knew what it was that caused me to struggle so socially or academically. There was no name back when I was a child....there was no label that explained my oddities. I was female & while boys got labeled as ADD or other issues with attention & social issues, girls flew well under the radar as far as social problems went. It was recognized by most if not all my teachers & it was mentioned on every report card that I didn't get along with peers. There was only the DX that I was willful & stubborn, spoiled & selfish. I always had problems making friends. I was more often than not, left out of most social activities...when I was included there was much vocal protesting by the other kids who openly despised my presence. I was hated across the board....parents, peers, teachers, family, etc. I had only one friendship when I was a kid that lasted longer than a few days. My longest lasting friendship was with my dog...nearly 16 years. I do wish I could say that for humans too, but sadly, there are none. I was constantly bullied from a very young age & it's followed me through-out my entire life. Do you know what it's like to be bullied at 49? It feels pretty much the same as it did when I was ostrasized as a young girl. Do you know what label would fit me if it's not AS? There's just no other reasonable explanation I have been able to find. The only reason that I have not been properly DX'd is that my insurance doesn't have a proper psychologist who understands adult females on the spectrum. They like making a profit & hiring an expert in this area costs money. In fact, the whole psych dept is unable to see what I see....same insurance I had as a child. So apparently that makes me still willful, stubborn, spoiled, & selfish? And my social inadequacies that have plagued me my whole life are entirely my fault not because of hard-wiring but because I am too stupid/lazy to fit in? Uh gee thanks for the insight.

It sucks to go through life seeing that I am always on the outside. Never fitting in...never belonging anywhere. I have often observed other women who shop together as a social activity or out enjoying a meal together. I just never get invited to those kinds of activities. People say they want to be my friends but they never call me or go out of their way for me. I am always left out & on my own. I can assure you, it sucks to be always alone when you're female & socially inept.

i very obviously was not capable of being schooled in a normal way, and it was not possible for me to proceed normally through a schooling system.

i was severely affected, and my teachers could not cope with me. something had to be done.
i took no notice of anyone. i trusted that they were not going to kill me so i did as i wished.
punishment meant nothing to me. if i was forced to spend lunch in a room by myself, i still had as much fun.

people did not touch me with any kind of force because i reacted extremely negatively to being touched. therefore they found it difficult to stop me from doing what i wanted to do.

i took no notice of anyone else including my family. i was trapped in my own microcosm.
i was totally unresponsive to all attempts to communicate with me when i was a small child.

i looked at people talking to me, and i was only interested in the creases and contours of their face contorting as they said words, and if they said them with passion (e.g anger or frustration), i liked it more because i knew i could at least interact with them in a way to influence their facial contortions i was watching, and their faces looked funny to me (i liked that (it was amusing (it led to laughter fits (which caused multiple confusions in my psychiatrists head (which produced contours on her face as well (wow snow balling "win win win win win win" situation)))))).

but ostensibly i was isolated from everyone on the planet and the fun i was having was not expressible or shareable. i did not care but they did.


they saw me laughing in my own world and i was lost to them, and they wanted me back.

i think my mistake is in thinking that everyone who has AS is as severely affected as me.
i think i am severely autistic but i have a good (well good for me) brain that is my savior from being drowned in my inadequacies.

i have learned that autism is a "spectrum" (bad choice of word really). not in variety but as in a continuum of deepening severity.

i now believe (i do not care mind you) that i am near the bottom of the AS level, and the people like grisha and face of boo and emlion and moog etc are not as affected as i am, but it does not mean they do not have AS. in the beginning i would have ignored them as frauds, but i realize that there are milder versions of AS now, so i believe them.


i am more ret*d in many ways than most people here, and at first i could not believe people were autistic who posted here, but now i realize they are near the surface of the pool that i am a ground dweller of.

hmmm...why then did you consider AS as an option?

how can you describe what you were "oblivious to" ?




that does not compute.

you said

considering the amount of agonizing over whatever it was that you did not post that led you to the idea that you had asperger syndrome, your settlement upon the idea of AS should not have been a shock.

my cpu is very old, and i can not keep up with new trends, so maybe the mistake is mine, but to me it looks like yours. and that is reinforced by this:



how could you be shocked then?

anyway whatever. i could not be bothered responding to the rest.

Self diagnosis works in gals for yeast infections & dry/damaged hair. Since I'm not a boy, I cannot say for certain what they would be capable of diagnosing on themself!

I was constantly failing in mainstream schools and couldn't function in them, but instead of getting help for my problems I was punished for being "lazy." Most people were irrelevant to me unless they decided to bully me (which happened more often than I care to think about). I rarely had more than one friend in any given school year, and often didn't have any, but I didn't really care about that because everything I wanted to do I wanted to do alone. I remember spending one year in high school trying to work out how insults work, what clever insults might be, and being told by an adult that people don't like to be insulted. So I dropped the project as I was trying to learn to do something I thought people did, I didn't want to do be mean, just to understand.



Because I read writings by autistic people and it was obvious to me that they were describing as "autistic" experiences I never realized differed from other people, but were extremely familiar to me. Sensory sensitivities, sensory distortions, perceptions, thought processes, experiences with NTs, life experiences, school experiences, work experiences, social functioning. Things that I didn't really think about as noteworthy were again and again described as autistic experiences.



I've spent the last several months trying to understand my social differences.



There was no agonizing. I was oblivious. At 38 I came to the conclusion I likely had it and found the conclusion to be a bit of a shock. It turned my whole world upside down and I did not know how to cope with it. I did not come to this conclusion because I was looking for it, I stumbled across it while reading material I was curious about.

I did have major depression as a consequence of my impairments, and a lifetime of not being able to function properly, but I had no idea as to the underlying causes of my lack of functioning. To my own perceptions, I was my own worst enemy and I could not figure out why.



As I said above, I was shocked at 38, not 41. When I looked again at 41, I had a better idea of what to expect, and was ready to deal with it.

I didn't have an easy life free of impairments, and the things that a diagnosis on the autistic spectrum explains are things that never made sense to me, even though I never thought before that they had anything to do with me being different. Just a lot of things over the years that I didn't understand, that caused me a lot of trouble, that I couldn't explain under the assumption that I was not dealing with impairments to my functioning. There is no mistake.

On my second appointment with my therapist in February, she said that she saw clear signs of "high functioning autism". In April, I was diagnosed. My diagnostic report makes it clear that I was pretty obviously autistic during the appointment, and since I was behaving as I normally do, I would be surprised if this weren't the case in other contexts. Every now and then she says something about just how different I am to her: She can't read me. I don't think like other people. I barely show emotion, and so on.

Anyway, your perceptions of this aren't just a matter of severity - there are people who can be quite severe who go undiagnosed, even in Australia. You were caught early, and that shapes your perceptions. I know people who were caught early with ADHD who have similar perceptions - who find it difficult or impossible to believe that anyone could get through school without being spotted and diagnosed. But it happens, people slip through the cracks all the time, regardless of severity. I don't know how severe I am because I have no frame of reference, but I have been told my problems sound "severe" or "extreme". I realize that when people say this they may not have a frame of reference that includes as wide a range of severity as really exists, so I do not assume it means that I am "severe" but what I do assume is that it means that my problems are more pervasive and severe than I personally would assume.

My self-diagnosis was accurate. I didn't go looking for it, I stumbled across it. I was too socially oblivious to even notice how pervasive my social difficulties were, and even now that I have a sense of how severe they are, I really don't care all that much. Getting a diagnosis was pretty easy. I have been told in several ways that I come across fairly obviously. What can I say? I don't see the point of questioning people as to whether their self-dx is accurate. Even people who insist they're probably very mild might be extremely mistaken. If someone's here with a self-dx, it's probably because they have real problems, and I don't see the point of lashing out at them or treating them like they're trying to get away with something, or treating them as if they couldn't possibly have real problems. Or piling legalistic conditions upon them to tell them how they are allowed to describe their problems.

I do think that people who self-diagnose have a responsibility to keep in mind that they may be wrong, and not position themselves in such a way that others are drowned out.

I do not think doctors are the be-all and end-all when it comes to mental and neurological diagnoses. They can and do make mistakes.

Thank you, Verdandi. I have dealt with real tangible problems for a lifetime. Problems with sensory issues, socializing, holding down a job, being bullied, feeling ostracized, etc. I think I have experienced enough difficulties in life to kind of get it that I am far from normal, even though I can't catch a break for getting a DX. I know for a fact there is something that isn't right....hasn't been since I was a little girl. I wish I could have gotten a DX as a youngster, but since I didn't all I have is my memories of all the troubles I found myself immersed in, just by not being a typical little girl.

Verdandi wrote:

After a lifetime of being oblivious to why I didn't fit into the "norm" (if there truly is such a thing), about 5 years ago is when I stumbled across Aspergers. So far, it's been the only label that accurately depicts what's been going on with me since I entered this world. I have no other tangible explanation. If there is one, I'd be willing to look at it as well.

Heh.

My AS resulted in me being an exceptionally well-behaved child, hence, I was never "caught."

Regardless, my psychologist was pretty amazed that no one thought to have me evaluated earlier.

I am willing to accept that you meant this honestly, and not as an attack on anyone else. However, it is plain to me that you have no understanding of what things are like in other countries, what they were like in the past, what they can be like in dysfunctional families, or how other factors can combine to obscure the truth.

When I was growing up, I never even heard of autism. One of the first mentions I recall encountering was in the 1970s, on the US television show St. Elsewhere, which had an autistic character, Tommy. Tommy was silent, often sat staring into corners or rocking, and was violent for reasons that were never clear. (I think the show's writers went for dramatic effect, rather than choosing to portray even a severely autistic child accurately.) If there were a few specialists who were aware autism meant more than this single stereotype, they were in the minority.

I was born with severe vision problems, endured dozens of visits to various eye doctors as a child, and was finally identified as legally blind by a noted eye specialist at the age of eight. (In spite of this, I was not actually diagnosed with ocular albinism, the condition I was born with, until the age of fifty-one - forgive me if I'm not terribly impressed by the abilities of medical professionals, although I will admit I have a lot of respect for the doctor who finally got it right.) Others often explained my difficulties as related, directly or indirectly, to my vision. In fact, I grew up developing my own theories as to how and why my vision might lead to this or that oddity, since I didn't know of any other specific reason.

In addition to that, I was hyperlexic, able to read and comprehend a college textbook in fourth grade, when one of my teachers thought to "test" me by giving me one of her recent textbooks, then getting me talking about it after I'd read it. I don't know precisely what level I read at before that, as no one thought to test me, and in fact my second grade teacher chose to assume I was lying about my vision difficulties. She even persuaded the school nurse of this theory (I now understand this may have been in part due to the fact that OA means I do not have functioning normal vision at all; what would have otherwise been my peripheral vision adapted to let me see as much as I can. So I didn't act like or have the same abilities as any normal nearsighted person.) But I was able to read books from the adult stacks at the local library in the first grade, and I did understand what I read. So I got the label of "genius", or "absent-minded professor", and that also helped "explain" a lot of my differences.

My teachers - even the ones who came to understand some of my difficulties - all made an issue of my inability to get along with others, the difficulty of controlling me or getting me to pay attention to anything I wasn't interested in, and so on. However, in the US, at least at this time, they had little legal power to act without my parents' permission, and they refused to consider having me evaluated. (Even if they'd agreed, at this time, in the 1960s, autism was so little understood that I doubt the evaluation would have reached the right answer, especially since I don't think I had a speech delay. I don't know about that for certain, because I do know my father's speech was delayed, so my parents might not have considered that odd enough to mention.)

The one evaluation I did have (conducted by a school "counselor" who did not have a mental health degree) was done behind my parents' back at the instigation of the second grade teacher I already mentioned, who hated me because I already knew everything she had to teach except handwriting. This "counselor" was amusingly incompetent; he failed to take into account that what I'd been reading for the past year or two was sea stories from the adult shelves in the library (mainly Edward Rowe Snow, for anyone who recognises that name, although I also read A Night To Remember, about the Titanic, a book about the sinking of the Andrea Doria, and so on) rather than Dick and Jane stories like other second graders. So since I didn't want to talk about bunnies and puppies, but about fires at sea and shipwrecks (what else do you get in tales of the sea, after all?), he concluded I was a psychopath and called up my parents with a hysterical rant. While I will admit that my parents were far too eager to ignore any evidence I was not "normal" (just as they ignored the fact they were far from "normal"), his claims were so wild and absurd they gave them a solid reason for rejecting any possibility I might be different after that.

My parents themselves were extremely odd, to say the least, and over time, with the "genius" label, the vision problems, and my nutty parents to distract them, pretty much everyone else gave up looking for any other explanation for why I was so very unlike everyone else. I know that I was convinced for years those three things between them could explain everything about me.

Then, when my son was diagnosed with ADHD, although my initial reaction was to disagree with one of the basic assumptions of the psychologist's report (and I still think my point of view has its merits), over time I began to wonder if I might have ADD or ADHD. And when I looked into it, the symptoms fit. But they didn't go far enough to explain all the deeply odd things about me. Still, I was sure that must be the end of it.

In 2006, I ended up doing some research for an acquaintance, looking up blogs about Aspergers and autism. When I read them, some of the things mentioned made me think, but I was sure I couldn't be autistic. Besides, I do know many people imagine they have whatever symptoms they've just read about, so I assumed it was just that. But the topic did seem interesting, so I read a bit here and there, always with this uncomfortable feeling that I shoved out of my mind. Then, in the summer of 2010, my wife finally, after thirty years of knowing me, grasped that there were certain things I just didn't "get". Her sudden comprehension got me thinking. I began to wonder, although I still rejected the idea at first. But I sat down to read. Then, I noted all the diagnostic criteria laid out in the DSM, and wrote my own response to how well I seemed to fit. (I used not only my own opinion, but comments I got from others: for example, almost everyone considers me "aloof", even though that is not what I feel inside.) I shook myself up by how well I seemed to fit.

I still wasn't totally sure, until three other things happened. First, in reading here on Wrong Planet, I discovered there were other people (not always the same ones, but other people) who shared every one of my most deeply weird traits, the ones I'd always thought were completely unique to me. Second, I was diagnosed with ocular albinism - and learned I had an actual, diagnosed, medical excuse for my dislike of bright lights. The important part about this was that, although the fact bright lights hurt my eyes was hardly a surprise, my annoyance at bright lights was more or less lost among other sensory issues, including some which bother me far more. Surely, if this one is "real" and diagnosed, it shouldn't have been that buried among others unless they also are real, and not just the result of my being "a baby". Third, going through papers my father had saved, I discovered a number of notes from various teachers, and found that I was even more weird and disruptive than I remembered. Today, just the content of those notes would be enough for a school counselor to send a kid to at least be evaluated for an autism spectrum disorder or something similar. The overriding theme of every one of those notes was that I had no idea whatsoever how to get along with other kids, and seemed unable to learn.

So why don't I have a formal diagnosis? Well, in the US, that would cost me well over a thousand dollars, which I don't have. Even if I had it, it is hard to find someone who understands autism in previously undiagnosed adults. The autism specialists almost all work with kids. And I'm old enough, it wouldn't change much in my life. So why starve and struggle for something that isn't likely to help me? And, frankly, although I do know my own limitations, I'm not sure "professionals" are nearly always right. Just a few years ago, I was helping take care of a neighbour's pet guinea pig, who was very ill. Observing his symptoms (you have to understand, medicine, or veterinary medicine, is an area where I know relatively little), I thought I should mention I wondered if he had kidney failure. The neighbour passed this on to one of his vets - who was a professor at a highly regarded school of veterinary medicine where she was taking him. This professor shrugged the idea off - so I shut up, because, as I said, medicine is not an area where I know enough to feel sure of myself. This "professional" prescribed a course of treatment I had to help implement while the neighbour was at work. The same day I observed an unmistakable symptom that proved this treatment was going horribly wrong - the poor little guy was catastrophically dehydrated - another vet, an "ordinary" one, figured out what was wrong with him, and verified it by tests. He had kidney failure. So my amateur guess was right, when the "professional" who actually taught other professionals got it wrong. No, that hasn't persuaded me I ought to try figuring out what is wrong with my cats when they get sick and treating them myself - but it has taught me to be very wary of the kind of "professional" who is so impressed by their own credentials they fail to listen or to consider they might be wrong.

I hope that gives you a little idea how it can happen to someone.

Wow, when I saw this thread title, I wasn't quite sure if it referred to AS self-diagnosis or mental illness self-diagnosis.

It appears to refer to mental illness self-diagnosis, so I clicked 'Maybe'

I do have the advantage of previous care by doctors to base my decisions about whether or not I am mentally ill. That being said, I identify with the 'Catch-22'. There are sometimes you just cannot know you are mentally ill, as in the case of psychosis. It wouldn't be psychosis if you knew you were psychotic. In the case of diagnosis, it also helps to know where you have come from, I don't have that, I am adopted with no known genetic history whatsoever.

If you know your body and moods well, and you are well-versed in depression, or have been previously diagnosed with depression - that is a condition I believe can be confidently self-diagnosed. I have had both a diagnosis and access to a DSM, and now the Web, in regards to depression. These days I know exactly when I am depressed, there are obvious physical markers and I know my thought processes when I am depressed, been there many times.

With respect to OCD, ADHD, and personality disorders - these are more difficult to self-assess in order of increasing difficulty. Personality disorders are tough either way because they need an objective observer and an observer (doctor) that has enough access to you and your personality.

I would say that I proved to myself that there is a lot of gray area when I found Asperger's. Without considering Asperger's, only the overlapping symptoms of AS and many other mental illnesses were examined. I have been diagnosed professionally over the last 23 years by different doctors, and they came up with depression, bipolar, and once schizophrenia (don't worry, I'm not an imposter - no schizophrenia, just AS up the yin yang). My mother has often told me that I have Borderline Personality Disorder.

As far as these professional diagnoses go, only depression has really stood the test of time.
In hindsight, I can safely disqualify Schizophrenia by lack of symptoms at 40 years now. I can admit to a possible mild case of Bipolar in the sense that while I do seem to have mild hypomanic episodes, they are often very short lived and have absolutely no pattern whatsoever. My 'hypomanias' have also been, in my opinion, simply brief remissions in my nearly permanent depression (dysthymia). I seem to have SADD too.

What actually led to my schizophrenia diagnosis by a shrink in 1990 was a late-teen Aspie focus on psychedelic drugs that, coupled with either hypomania or depression with psychotic features, expressed itself in a 2 week psychotic break that I wound up hospitalized for. To tell the truth, it was a very educational experience that I almost look back on fondly (kookie Aspie, right!!).
It was the basis for my wholesale discard of religion, I thought I was 'touched', as in prophet of God. It was awesome. It was very telling when it came time to rationally analyze Jesus, Muhammed, Joseph Smith et al. later in my life. I was also so terrified of being schizophrenic, that the as-of-yet unknown Aspie in me delved into the DSM and other books to figure out just what the heck was going on.

Over much time, I decided I have dysthymic depression because I have never, never even one time, had serious thoughts of suicide, only going so far to as to wish I had never been born. Also, my depression has definitely become a sort of 'part' of my personality as my friends and family could attest - this is a component of dysthymia.

What is really funny and sad is the fact that most of my lifetime depression was situational - as in, the result of being different (Asperger's) and not knowing it. The sensory issues, the odd arc of my learning potential, and my absolute inability to communicate effectively what I feel. It hit hard in my teen years, really really hard, and I think I would say that period of my life destroyed any chance I had for a normal existence. It was the perfect storm of teen angst, parental conflict, and being Aspie without knowing it.

I self-diagnosed Aspergers at 39.
I can tell you, I was totally 100% clueless until that time. For real, no docs, no teachers, no friends, no parents or siblings EVER even suggested it to me. In the last year, I presented my case for AS to my family and asked them if they had known and not told me - as far as I can tell they honestly did not know, just as I did not. My poor parents have labored under the impression that I was Schizo, or Schizoid, or Schizoaffective for my entire adult life.

Reading Verdandi's post, I could have written it almost verbatim along with some other posters stories:

WOW... I could have written that, word for word - it is my story too.

When it comes to self-diagnosis of Asperger's, gees, it's just a no-brainer because it is so technical and black-and-white. I still get goosebumps when I read the Wikipedia page for Asperger's, it is literally like a checklist of all the things that made me 'different' throughout my entire life. All the stuff I tried to blame on this or that mental illness or personality disorder, and all the things that I thought were just unique to me and made me 'me' were suddenly rolled up in one nice neat diagnosis. I mean, they even have tests like the AQ, and I score well into the AS range on every test I have taken. I also have nearly all of the common physical traits of Asperger's.

An Aspie knows detail, an Aspie knows focus and I was focused on my internal issues, depression etc., for so many years -- finally, FINALLY I thought, the quest is over.

Time to get on with life. Time to Rock n' Roll.

It didn't take long to find WrongPlanet after that. (There is a mention/link on Wikipedia AS page!)
I took it all in for about 8 or 9 months before becoming NTbadMEgood here on WrongPlanet. I started a few accounts, because I was always seeing stuff that I wanted to respond to here, but never confirmed the password. Eventually the lure of WrongPlanet, with the amazing posts here, people just like me - sucked me right in.

Can you tell? I like to riff, I like to monologue, I like to write because my emotions get in the way of my communication in person - more Aspie traits.
I have waited my whole life to have something to write about, and never knew what it was. I absolutely cannot write fiction, but I can blabber incessantly about things that interest me, one-sided style, like a good Aspie!

NTbadMEgood is a reference to the way I always viewed the world around me before my self-diagnosis. I always saw other people as barriers to my success, saw their stupid NTisms, but could never put a label on it. I could never understand why low IQ people could best me in life when I studied so hard and knew so much.

Now I know, and I want to share on WrongPlanet in hope of doing the good I always knew I could, and spreading the knowledge and experiences I have stored up. I can see in my own life how simple awareness could have saved me from much of my troubles and torment. My story is very useful in a clinical sense, even I can see that, it is so cool that at the moment, I feel less depressed than I have in years. I finally have a reason to live and something to do with my time. That alone makes all the difference in my life as of late. I can only hope that all this stuff I throw out on WrongPlanet will be analyzed by neurologists and NT's and others, and will help future 'me's' to do something with their lives instead of winding up victims of circumstance like myself.

Perhaps a person who has what you have could not escape the scrutiny of authorities for more than a couple of years after birth, but not everyone has what you have. Your ASD is not the one true ASD.

Your suggested professional diagnosis of AS a couple of years after birth is patently impossible for a person born before 1992. A person who is in their mid-20s has had plenty of opportunity to develop (whether adaptive or maladaptive) coping mechanisms before the diagnosis of AS existed and therefore is too old to have been diagnosed at the optimal age at which the child is expressing a reasonably full personality but has not been conditioned to avoid expressing that personality after repeated social failure. And, bear in mind that parents and teachers generally are not in the habit of reading the new DSM the day it is released, so it can generally be expected that new conditions are not going to be known to these people for at least a couple of years. I am 29; AS didn't exist in the general consciousness of parents and teachers until I was about 16, before then there was no category they knew of that I could fit in, (indeed, my mother tells me that when I was a kid my teachers often "didn't know what to do with [me]") other than "being an awkward neurotic weirdo geek who needs to get out more and harden the f--k up". Absent extremely attentive parents (to the point that most teenagers would consider them overly intrusive) and teachers not already burdened with poorly achieving students, disruptive and bullying students and students with more serious conditions such as bipolar, I don't know where a professional diagnosis was going to come from.

What about all the professional diagnoses on adult patients who had never been psychologically assessed before? Are those professional diagnoses wrong? After all, they weren't attended to by professionals as 2 year olds...

this is some deep stuff, *dizzy

i can see how what i wrote could could be construed as that.

i said


it was ill versed.

my parents and sisters were alarmed at my atony when they held me, and my indifference to their presence. they thought i was brain damaged, and so did my parents friends.

obviously they wanted to explore the problem, so they sought medical advice, and when i was very young (a few months old), it was suspected that i had autism, and by the age of approx 2.5 i was diagnosed with autism. not "AS", but simply "autism".

i was thought to reasonably severely autistic because i had no interest in the presence of other people. when people smiled at me and tried to engage my attention, they failed, and they started to wonder whether i would ever be able to learn anything.

i did not say anything until i was about 3 years old. i knew how to talk, but i never said anything. i remember.

my first words were a complete sentence. i do not remember saying those first words.

it was decided to try to school me in the mainstream, and i was put in classes where slow learners and otherwise challenged people were educated when i was in kindergarten.

the teachers left me alone. i lied on my stomach in the clover on a grassy bank where no one else was on sunny days. i looked at insects and tried to understand them.

at other times i played with my cars and planes by myself, and i learned a lot from my playing, but the teachers said i was oblivious, and that i was not learning anything.

as i grew older, i integrated somewhat more, but i also had (and probably still do) "ODD", and i would not do anything that i did not want to do.

by year 7, it was obvious that i had to be schooled in a psychiatric facility, and i was sent to an adolescent unit where my doctor (psychiatrist) was studying the notion of what she called (non cognitively impaired autism), and i was used as a test subject for her research into the validation of "asperger syndrome" for acceptance into the diagnostic manual (she was one of many contributors).

i believed her ideas, and i bonded with her, and she bonded with me, and she is one of the few people i ever did bond with. i was excited and eager to tell her the answers to the questions she asked.

it was not intended that i remain in an adolescent unit for the duration of my schooling. the intention was to "habilitate" me into accepting authority, and listening to what i was not interested in.

i was often enrolled by them back into in mainstream schools when my maximum stay of one year was up, and i was very annoyed, but i did what i was slated to do, and i just had so much trouble doing what teachers said, that i gave up trying, and i eventually refused to comply with anything they "demanded" after a few days.

there were some spectacular dramas, but i always was readmitted to the adolescent unit after a few weeks at most.

i was "officially" diagnosed with "AS" in 1996. this is why:

after a series of serious driving infractions (no injuries to anyone), i had to get a lawyer because i was worried that i may be severely punished.

he gleaned from me my history, and after investigation, he advised that i should be assessed for asperger syndrome. he said that it could explain why i was so reckless

i saw a doctor who the lawyer chose, and he interviewed my parents and sisters, and he reviewed my school records, and the records of my psychiatrist.

he then told me to watch some videos with a hat on that had a sensor (weak laser) attached to it's visor that was pointed at my eye, and the sensor traces where my focus visits during my watching of the clips.

i was then diagnosed as "AS". it was 1996. who cares.





maybe there are different levels of severity of autism married with different levels of intelligence.

i was thought to be severely autistic when i was little.
people who have ascended into their 20's without impassable resistance from the world are not as severely affected as i am.

i do accept that there can be milder forms of autism than mine that cause people grief that is greater than mine (i have no "grief" actually), and i think that their problem is a weak attitude, rather than a weak constitution, but it is possible that i am incorrect.

uh oh. maybe i am succumbing to oppositional impulses.
i do not know.
i really could not care past this point of my energy expenditure.