in the past year or so 6 of my friends have claimed to have

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aspergers. hmmm now theses are all friends i have known for varying amounts of time from months to years, but for some reason all of a sudden one by one say to me "believe it or not i have aspergers (usually emphasizing the mild part). also i know all of them from random places none having anything to do with aspergers,just ppl i befriended somehow. is this because i attract high functioning aspies, or because my friends like to pick trendy disorders. none of them i would consider "neurotypical" however they all also suffer from some other disorder as well like bi polar,personality disorders,adhd e.t.c. also important to know is i never tell anyone i have aspergers not even my closest friends. do you think they catch on that something is different about me? or perhaps just that i am easy to open up to and understandtin.... what is the reason for this phenomena??? and why just within this year and a half,when i had known most of them for 5 yrs plus.

Weird.

Maybe they're trying to figure out what else might be "wrong" with them. Possibly, their other diagnoses don't quite make total sense to them, so they've done some scanty Web research, found that some traits of Asperger's fit them, and drew the conclusion (hence the "mild" qualifier).

Or--maybe it actually is true. (Hey, anything's possible.)

Suggest they take the AQ Test or the RDOS and see how they actually score.

Yeah my step-sister claims she has AS but I think she just uses it to be a jerk...

I asked my Step-dad if she'd been diagnosed and he told me quite bluntly, 'no'. I think some people act like jerks and just want an excuse. AS seems perfect to these people

I have doubts about anyone's self-diagnosis. I think what happens is that people come across a disorder or illness and then convince themselves that they fit the criteria. Medical students are famous for doing this, for example.

Something similar happend to me.
I never knew anything like Aspergers existed... then a long comes the hottest guy from my uni and brefriends me. We get chatting and he tells me he has aspergers...
couple of weeks later my best friend and I are in an arguement she tells me in her difence that she has aspergers.
Then i go back to mr cutie from uni, n he tells me I may have Aspergers. I tell my best friend, she agrees. Then my best friend of all time tells me he has aspergers, and then my friends best friend has it n i know him too, and then my new friends little brother has it. all in all within the past 6 months i have found out that 4 people i know, myself and one brother of friend all have AS....
Weird world....

Weird, something similar happened to me.

I was at a party with this rocking music and the hottest guy in the room comes up to me and we start chatting, and I learn that he has aspergers. I went to one of his band sessions and met his rock buddies, and it turns out that all of them have aspergers including the drummer. Then, one day, I went to the mall with him and 2 of his buddies to hang and we bumped into these 4 blond girls with abercrombie shirts and somehow aspergers arose in the conversation and we learned that two of these girls had aspergers. Then this guy suggested I might have aspergers and since there are awkward moments in my conversation at times, I think he's right!

For a disorder that only 1 out of 100 people have, it's weird how almost everyone seems to have it. I must have a gift for running into Aspies.

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Last edited by blindJustice on 25 Dec 2011, 5:01 pm, edited 2 times in total.

ADHD became a trendy way for parents to explain away their troublesome children (and a clever way for pharmaceutical companies to sell lots of incredibly addictive drugs to children). If AS becomes "trendy" then I am out. You heard me...Out. I will swap the label for "weird", like I gave a damn what label was attributed to me in the first place.

I think that people who are alike naturally group together.

Ditto. Asperger's has become a joke. A complete joke. Like ADHD in the 90s, now AS is the disorder so many claim to have. Few really do have it. Many people identify with Asperger's, introverts, Highly Sensitve People, emo teenagers, and people who actually have other disorders which share similarities or one or two symtoms which overlap AS. Identifying with AS doesn't mean you actually have AS. I read a study somewhere that said of all people who are self diagnosed only 20% really do have it. Few people really understand AS, if they spent tmie with someone who really does have it like my full blown classic AS husband, they'd soon realize they don't have it. Many people are misdiagnosed with all kinds of disorders before they are correctly diagnosed with AS, however the reverse is also true and many people are wrongly diagnosed with AS. There is now so much information and books about AS that some wannabes are lying or exaggerating to get the diagnosis (I've come across this) this makes it so much harder for the genuine Asperger people to be taken seriously. I am officially diagnosed by a leading expert and I am swapping my label for "weird" too, or only telling people about the other disabilities I have, I'm so sick of the "autism" community, it's a shame that there isn't a physical marker for AS or that diagnosis doesn't involve brain scans so we sort out who really does have AS and who doesn't.

-hugs FaeryEthereal-

Fair enough. I stumbled across AS as an interesting possibility but I don't really know. A professional diagnosis would be interesting but I don't think I have the insurance or money for it.

Before hearing of AS I had wondered if I might have some kind of anti-social disorder.

Are these people diagnosed with ASD?

On the Tumblr autism tag, I sometimes see people posting that they got a 32 on the AQ, so they are autistic.

These people must note the 'THIS IS NOT A DIAGNOSTIC TEST' warnings all over the bottom of the AQ test... Also, if you believe you have something enough, you might be able to manipulate the test to make it look more like you do. Although I went through a long period knowing I had AS but with no diagnosis, I wouldn't have said that I definitely did have it.

It does seem to be becoming a catch-all description for people who have some sort of apparent social difficulty. My response would be to ask them about their sensory issues, as these are specifical and strong ASD stigmata that aspie poseurs might underestimate the importance of. If I ever knowingly meet another aspie (and I haven't yet), the aggravation of small sounds in quiet places would be one of the first things I would want to talk about. I suspect someone in a rock band wouldn't know what this is all about.

I've always tried to fit in, and repeatedly failed. I never wore 'wierdness' on my sleeve. Even then, it was the sensory issues and a lifetime of never making eye contact that finally made me seek a formal diagnosis.

I hate the idea that after a lost early adulthood and a lifetime of looking, I'm finally joining some sort of Emo-type youth fad.

Yes. The test was normed in a clinical setting where the proctor was there to clarify questions and these people were random people so they weren't as motivated as hypochondriacs or pseudo-hypochondriacs to manipulate the test score, so quite a few people online will score higher than they would if they weren't as motivated to "look for an explanation".

However, even taking that into consideration, 7% of the population scores above 32 on the AQ test so if 32 is the cutoff, than that means 7% of the population has aspergers, lol.

I am self-diagnosed, after years of wondering why I was just "weird."

However, two of my professors also recognized it in me, without my having said a word, because they saw similarities between myself and family members of theirs who are professionally diagnosed.