No Idea If I'm In Right Place-- Help Please

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I just got here. I've had maddening, inexplicable difficulties in interacting comfortably with people. But it's just an idea I'm cautiously trying out here, the idea that it can have the tag of "autism" (or any variant) attached to it. So I'd like to ask advice on trying to figure out whether this syndrome does apply to me.

Keeping in mind, please, that I have a serious eye disorder and have to not read lots of text, such as medical articles...

I have a complicated, intractible, undiagnosed neurological disorder, but it started at 22 and I'm more than twice that old now, and the social difficulties go back through my entire life.

"Just go to a doctor" for the autism possibility isn't really an option, now anyway. I have good reason for considering psychiatry destructive as well as inappropriate. I need to find out for myself what this phenomenon is.

I have major doubts about taking ways of thinking or being and labeling them "medical" and giving them medical names, unless it's proven they are medical. I usually operate on the assumption that bad experiences and just being different from most people, account for the bad interaction with others. But I don't know. A lot of it seems impossible to account for.

Sorry I'm going on this long. Can't self edit tonight.

Another issue: Is there any way to blow up this print, for my eye problem? Some sites refuse to enlarge when i turn on my "accessibility features" on my computer. This is important.

*************

To sum up---

One, hello.

Two, how might I figure out how this syndrome might apply to me, without extensive reading? I can't even stand to scan through the various boards, with the eye thing.

Three, any secret to blowing up print on this site?

Any help appreciated.

Suilad. Hope you enjoy your time here and find out what you're looking for. As for your second question, try looking for the DSM-IV criteria for autism or Asperger's syndrome. This will provide a basic understanding of the conditions. Thirdly, when I click on the tool bar on Internet Explorer to make the font larger, it makes this site larger. That should help. If this fails, be sure to read Sophist's posts because she posts in larger font than the rest of us.

Hi, welcome to WP!

I use Mozilla Firefox and can just press Ctrl+[plus key] or Ctrl+[minus key] to change font size.

I've also turned off all images and colours because I find them distracting too.

Couldn't have put it better myself! You're not alone..

Try searching for the AQ test (Autism Quotient) by Simon Baron-Cohen. There are other diagnostic criteria apart from DSM-IV which may help you to make sense of things. Most of them you'll find in the this forum.

Here's one alternative:

GILLBERG'S CRITERIA FOR ASPERGER'S DISORDER

1.Severe impairment in reciprocal social interaction
(at least two of the following)
(a) inability to interact with peers
(b) lack of desire to interact with peers
(c) lack of appreciation of social cues
(d) socially and emotionally inappropriate behavior

2.All-absorbing narrow interest
(at least one of the following)
(a) exclusion of other activities
(b) repetitive adherence
(c) more rote than meaning

3.Imposition of routines and interests
(at least one of the following)
(a) on self, in aspects of life
(b) on others

4.Speech and language problems
(at least three of the following)
(a) delayed development
(b) superficially perfect expressive language
(c) formal, pedantic language
(d) odd prosody, peculiar voice characteristics
(e) impairment of comprehension including misinterpretations of literal/implied meanings

5.Non-verbal communication problems
(at least one of the following)
(a) limited use of gestures
(b) clumsy/gauche body language
(c) limited facial expression
(d) inappropriate expression
(e) peculiar, stiff gaze

6.Motor clumsiness: poor performance on neurodevelopmental examination

There are others too...no-one can quite agree 100% as yet!

Hi, Welcome to Wrong Planet.

splunge wrote:

Two, how might I figure out how this syndrome might apply to me, without extensive reading? I can't even stand to scan through the various boards, with the eye thing.

[size=18]I really don't know what your Eye Condition is, so I can't help you there, Sorry. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, however I must say that reading post can help, as well as draw parallells with whatever condition that you have and the conditions of other people here. It has helped me gain some more insight into myself. You may also want to take some online tests to help gain more insight to your condition as well.

Bear in mind, however that any 'online test' is essentially for informational purposes only, and self diagnosis can be fraught with erroneous assumptions. Any 'real' diagnosis has to be performed by a qualified professional, however any information that you can provide via online assessments might be beneficial in producing an accurate diagnosis. If you should choose to seek more information from a professional, you may want to see a Clinical Psychologist, rather than a Psychiatrist, as a Psychologist will be better trained to look at the behavior aspects of your condition, while a psychiatrist will be more apt to look at your condition as a medical condition to be treated...with medicine.

Good luck in what you choose to do.



This is dependant on the Browser that you use. With Firefox, hit the ctrl and the '=' key simultaeously for instant enlargement of text.

With Opera, ( I am currently using this Browser) hit the 'Shift' key and the '+' keys simultaneously to increase the size of the text by 10% until you have readable text.

Any help appreciated.[/quote]

Hope this helps out.

EDIT FOR SIZE/SPELLING 3:23PM

Last edited by Fogman on 02 Nov 2005, 3:32 pm, edited 7 times in total.

For blowing up the print when the browser won't let you (and I hate that too), I just use reading glasses that are stronger than my natural prescription. Also, I adjust the colors on my monitor, turning the red way down and the green down a little, to give a nice blue-green hue. Those two things make the reading a little more possible. Also, I often have to follow the words with my fingers on the monitor.

As for your other question, no, sorry, I don't think it's possible to find out if you have this or not without extensive reading. Perhaps if someone else read for you. But with those three things: reading glasses, turquoise plastic over the white printed page (or sunglasses in a pinch), and my fingers to follow along, I can stand reading a little longer than I naturally could.

The Autism Quotient Quiz referred to above is located here:
http://www.msnbc.com/modules/newsweek/autism_quotient/default.asp

Also, here is my page on Autism, on the right side there are many informative and definitive links. I hope that narrows your reading search down as much as possible.

http://www.blueginger.org/aspie.html
Good luck.

Have you had any luck with text-to-voice software? A friend of mine uses it and says it works well, expect for the American accent in most programs.

And, most importantly, welcome.

BeeBee

Welcome to Wrong Planet.

We used to have one with a fake Aussie accent, it was hilarious.

Welcome to Wrong Planet Splunge, cool name btw. May the seven pillars globdu be with you.

Hi!

Welcome to Wrongplanet! I hope you enjoy posting here!

WELCOME TO WRONGPLANET! (I checked and Mozilla can blow up WrongPlanet quite effectively!

splunge,

I was thinking about your post and I had one more question.

Does your "complicated, intractible, undiagnosed neurological disorder" have a name? I know you are not officially diagnosed with it, but I was wondering if you had any guesses as to what it would be. I am interested in researching it more to learn more about my own vision problems, which I crave to understand.

Thanks,
Laynie

thanks everybody. i have to turn off accessibility features just to see dark blue-on-black thread titles. Toolbar at top doesn't enlarge. Not a vision problem but very different severe eye problem. glasses don't help.

I bookmarked laynie's site. Gillberg revealed what i suspected would be true: this isn't science. At best it's so vague as to not be helpful. It's subjective superficial judgements based on interpretations of behavior they think they're seeing. The word "inappropriate" is the biggest giveaway. There's nothing more meaningless and in-the-eye-of-the-beholder as "inappropriate". Inappropriate according to whom? Ultimately we all have to decide that for ourselves.

If this site provides an opportunity to connect with others and increase interaction, great.

Handing over interpretation of oneself to people labelled as experts doesn't work, at least for me, and the very idea has problems. Psychotherapists have over and over made wild, hasty misinterpretations of whatever i've said to them, not reconsidering when i told them patiently that they'd gotten my meaning wrong. They start from a position of having no respect for my ability to have any knowledge about myself that might be valid, and i suspect it's that way for clients in general They put one in the position of a child, and that's hardly "therapeutic", though it may make some feel more secure in the short term, just at the moment when they need that. (and the idea of experts on human being's insides is questionable, and my experience says anyone who believes himself to be one has delusions of grandeur)

I'll throw in here the book title: "Against Therapy" by Jeffrey Masson, former keeper of the Freud archives, and once a very respected figure in psychiatry. Among other things, he revealed how many therapists eventually question the efficacy of what they do, and whether they've ever helped anyone... this coming after years and years of seeing clients, and having everything go smoothly, seemingly, up until that point.

[/i]

I agree.

That reminds me. The other thing I wanted to say was that I completely agree with your stance of avoiding therapy, clinical intervention, and official diagnosis.

I take this stance on all aspects of my physical care. After enough years of doctors being unable to fix a problem, you lose faith. For me, this is a good thing. Now, I do my own research, and I solve everything in my body. I am my best "doctor". No one understands my body better than me other than God. I ask him for a lot of advice, because I know he understands the Autistic body better than anyone in current science does.

Modern science couldn't fix me. I had many physical problems. They never healed anything. I fixed them all, with research and with God, his power and his advice. I just don't trust doctors anymore, they don't understand my body. So, for example, I gave birth to my second son, at home, with no doctor, intentionally. Aspies can learn anything. That's the joy of our abilities.

Then for the safety of this website we maybe should switch back to IE. [explodes]

Am I imagining it, or did Splunge just say in a rather round-about way that Aspergers doesn't exist? Splunge, experts may not know the exact biological nature of Autism, but then again, they didn't know the biological reasoning behind diabetes until they discovered it! Whilst as an Aspie I have great trouble understanding the very concept of 'inappropriate behaviour', I have it on good faith that it is an existing concept that most neurotypical people get most of the time. The condition is still not well or fully understood, but it is by no means a superficial diagnosis...

First I want to make sure to thank everyone for typing in all that information, no matter what I may have said about it, none of which was meant as a criticism of anyone here, and wasn't meant to invalidate anybody.

I was expecting a verbal avalanche to fall on me, so thanks also for the positive replies.

PheonixK......... I wouldn't call it imagination. I'd just call it an understandable misunderstanding. Every single bit of every difficulty everyone experiences here is definitely real. I say that even without knowing any of you.

I may have to stop any second and come back to this point, so if I do, please give me the benefit of the doubt until then... the eyes are one reason. Anyway... I have great difficulty forming and holding on to an argument long enough for me to express it, because of the neurological condition I have. This is not what I suspect to be Asperger's, or something like it, in my case though.

I'll start and see how far I get... the phenomenon, or group of similar phenomena, that affect people here is real. I won't claim to believe for certain that it's a definite biological thing. I can say that. It's no more a criticism or invalidation of the patient as anything else people are saying on this thread.

From what I can tell so far from the list given above, the idea of "Asperger's" is a model. It's a construct. It's a frame to put around the phenomenon to try to make some sense of it. If it turns out to stand the test of time, and turns out to be a useful model, and a useful way to look at it, we'll end up keeping the term. Names are important.

Models like this can be more or less useful or valid. If it depends on a set of criteria such as the list given earlier, there are problems. I won't repeat that part of my earlier post. Another problem happens when these semantic models are presented as, and mistaken for, solid things in the physical world... and the medical world itself does this. Especially psychiatry. (Is Aspergers supposed to be 'psychiatric'?) Psychiatry deals with ideas and models, and treats them as being as "solid" as a broken knee or a tumor. We are conditioned so thoroughly to accept anything a doctor says as "solid" in this way that we treat psychiatric ideas like these as "solid" too.

This isn't to say the phenomena are any less real. We just need to be more open and flexible as to how we look at them. Psychiatric phenomena weren't "discovered" in test tubes. They are ideas. Such ideas can assist in finding strategies to deal with them. Maybe some drug or psychotherapy helps some people who are given the label. But such ideas or labels can easily (and often do) lead doctors and patients to apply wrong and even harmful strategies.

The appropriate question isn't "Is Asperger's" "real". We wouldn't all be here talking about it if it weren't, but the question misses the point I think. The question is, does the idea of "Asperger's" serve as a useful way to look at it, for whatever reason, and is it helpful in alleviating the problem? People here would say yes, therefore it is, at least to some extent.

I still say the model has problems.