Things About YOU That You Attribute to Aspeger's

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I'm looking to get an assessment for Autism in August. I'm not looking to copy anybody, but the neuropsychologist asked me to list traits about myself that lead me to believe I'm autistic. I'm actually drawing a bit of a blank, feeling that I'm missing things, not considering everything. So I want to compare notes with other Aspies.

List what relates to YOU as being part of your condition. I'll see if I can / can't relate.

I'll start listing things for me, as this thread will mostly be for me. My pet thread.

Damn the lot of you!


-- Executive functioning problems
-- Bad inter-personal skills
-- Missing social cues, non-verbal communication break-down
-- Sensory overload (though not as bad now as in my youth)
-- Stimming (more prevalent as a kid) though I may still stim in some ways without knowing it
-- Black-and-white thinking in some regards. Intellectually, I know this way of thinking may not make sense, but I need some set of rules or standards to follow to navigate life (as I don't naturally fit in the way NTs do).

^^^your post is a public service for the rest of us, you described me to a T.

Is there anything else you can add that you attribute to your Autism?

you seem to have nutshelled it perfectly. all i can say is just the commentary on each of your points which is just nibbling 'round the edges of what you said. i am sensitive to extremes in temperature more than most of the NTs i've met, as well as loud sharp sounds which i can't stand. squeaks and rattles drives me batty more than they did my sister who was more NT than me.

I match every description in the DSM5.

Did your assessment person give you Developmental History questions?
Those should serve as prompts to help you think of what to write about.

I was given so many questions to answer, I wrote a 188 page book to respond.

May I ask, when were you formally diagnosed? What age, and how did it come about?

I can tolerate tags on shirts now, but I remember as a child, I'd insist my mother cut the tags off my shirts with a pair of scissors. She thought I was being difficult, I remember I really couldn't stand the feeling of a tag just below the nape of my neck. It wasn't painful, but rather very irritatingly noticeable. I couldn't tolerate it.

-- Textile sensitivity to tags

about age 42. at end of long journey of learning about me. first schizoid, then ADHD [inattentive subtype] then AS. psychiatrist dx'ed me, told me there wasn't much he could do to help me.

Assessment person merely interviewed me back in April, said there were no diagnosis openings until August. She seems to think that "something is going on," but told me to come as I am with a list next month.

Is there a free version of the DSM5 somewhere that I can read so I can compare notes?

Of all the things I listed, is there anything else that applies to you that I didn't mention? Did any of the things I mentioned NOT apply to you?

Were you specifically seeking a diagnosis of Asperger's / Autism? Or did you not know what it was then? What led you to go to the psychiatrist in the first place at age 42?

Here is DSM5 for ASD.


https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/hcp-dsm.html


I'll see if I can screenshot a chart version elsewhere.


Here's a chart version.

Last edited by IsabellaLinton on 16 Jul 2023, 10:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Everything you said pretty much sum me up. I pretty much force myself not to be black and white by trying to break things down to separate components.

II struggle with fitting in. But, now I am sixty, so I've picked-up on much.

If you haven't already, so a therapist, particularly one that is familiar with autism. If you already are, or are just simply not up to one or don't have access.

I wouldn't make rules too complicated. And don't try to be too perfect. I pretty much had to pick up things by osmosis.

I still say in appropriate things, though not as often, It's not entirely avoidable. But sometimes I know not to joke about certain things, even if other people can do it without much issue.

Unfortunately, being neurodivergent isn't something that you can resolve with a single posting. I would bring up things as they go along. So post the latest most pressing issue, and know that there may be some back and forth to understand the issue.

These are all appropriate examples but they will likely want you to elaborate on them with examples, and give as much "proof" as you can. The proof could be from home movies, parents' statements, your baby book, school reports, job evaluation reports, etc. They also want to know that these behaviours happened repeatedly and not just once. The questions I was given asked the same questions over and over for all my developmental stages like pre-school, primary school, adolescence, high school, etc. I felt like I kept repeating myself.

Here's a thread where I discussed assessment with someone called Pency.

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=386469&start=16


In this thread I told Pency all my Developmental History questions.

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=387337&p=8526013#p8526013











Obviously you don't need to prepare all of that if they didn't ask you to, but that's the sort of background info they wanted from me prior to the assessment. In the assessment itself I didn't get to talk about any of it. The assessment was all clinical standardised tests with very little chit-chat or conversation about what I'd written.

Last edited by IsabellaLinton on 16 Jul 2023, 10:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I've had two assessments (in about 2009 and 2022) and both came back inconclusive. Neither a yes nor a no. So I still don't know if I am autistic, although there are things about me that I can't explain in any other way. And the experts doing the assessment agreed, in that they saw these things too, but also said that since some other autistic traits are absent, then I couldn't qualify for a diagnosis, which makes no sense to me. Either the traits that seem to be due to autism are actually due to something else altogether, or they are due to autism. It has to be one or the other, it seems to me.

For me, it didn't make sense to try to persuade the experts that I am autistic, since it's what I was actually trying to find out, but I think that the only way to get an assessment is to do exactly that: be persuasive.

I went at age 49.
I assumed I would be called "High Functioning Autism" since "Asperger's" was no longer a diagnosis.

I ended up being Moderate ASD which is Level 2.

My assessment was with a neuropsychologist, not a psychiatrist. Where I live, psychiatrists can't diagnose ASD because it's not a mental illness. Psychiatrists only work with mental illness.

I went so I could make sense of myself. I needed to know why I acted in certain ways which made me vulnerable to trauma and CPTSD. I wanted to stop blaming myself for mistakes I'd made when judging and trusting people. Learning I was autistic really helped because I knew I was born with those innate limitations, instead of making bad choices.