Not Autistic Not ADHD But Not Normal

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Autistic people, but also some other types of people who are developmentally different, tend not to have the same sense of social dogmas as those of us who are typically developed.

(A dogma is an idea which is accepted as objective fact.)

This is because there are certain times in childhood when most of us are working on pretty much the same social skills at the exact same time. We neurotypical people learn how to read faces at the same time, how to lie at the same time, how to conceal our emotions at the same time. If someone has a very different kind of brain, they could be working on how to process errors before they work on face reading. This would make a child not even look at a face, but spend time, say, organizing toys, or criticizing others who played "wrong." Autistic people do build social skills, but they tend to work in a more mechanical way than neurotypical people's skills. They notice different things and act on things in a different way. Over time, it does seem to be pretty functional.

It is not just autistic people who are like this. I have several ADHD people in my family and they are like this as well. My mother has bipolar disorder, which she does not treat properly, I would say. She is probably the most different person I have ever known. Asking her opinion on something is like looking at the world inverted and upside down. If you asked her what is it like to be a woman, or a white person, or a human being, she'd tell you something or other so weird you'd want to sit down and watch Sesame Street for awhile.

I know too little about ADHD to venture an opinion on that, but you do come across as Autistic in the historic sense, as described by such as Aaron Rosannoff, and Humm and Wadsworth, whose personality scale would have been big news around the time Leo Kanner wrote of a handful of kids he considered to fit the bill.

Let me be precise here; Kanner’s subjects appeared to be Autistic, as it was then understood, but they were only a tiny sample of a population of millions who fit that description.

Now we have the ludicrous situation in which researchers treat autistic and autism as if they are interchangeable, even thought the definition of autism has been so widened that the majority are not at all autistic, which is no longer even tested for!

If your research engine works, try looking at the Chandler & Macleod 5 minute on-line test on this site, from many years ago. The full test was developed from the work of Humm and Wadsworth, which was a large population study of Rosanoff’s Theory of Personality (available on google science) and has been widely used by recruiters worldwide, to which I was subjected in my 20s and was the first indication I had that I am Autistic (it wasn’t in the news so much back then).

Though the on-line test no longer works, it did provide a readout of each user’s characteristics, and you may well find some that match your own assessment. Among the most interesting outcomes is that the majority of those diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome were as likely to be as strongly Epileptoid (another aspect of the psyche, along with Paranoid, Manic, etc., which together determine one’s personality) as Autistic. This would be a fantastically useful research tool, but the “experts” of the “autism” research industry refuse to even consider the possibility of using it, so don’t expect any enlightenment on this score from any clinician.