Asperger's Syndrome

[Octopod]

I just found out I have a condition that makes me slightly different than everyone else in the world, and sometimes I have different feelings or opinions on things. Thankfully now I'm on a regimen of 14 different pills. Since taking them I now enjoy wearing khakis, going to an office, coming home, drinking beer, and watching football and then tuning into Glenn Beck. It's a good thing I saw that ad for my condition on fox.

[Ivo]

read this thread
http://www.racketboy.com/forum/viewtopi ... perger%27s

Its another Asperger thread with a self test.

You know I had the impression of a thread like that, I searched the forums and it didn't turn up.

Sorry mods, feel free to merge.

Ivo.

[jp1]

If you try to strike up a conversation with me, I respond with rehearsed reactions.

Reminded me of this for some reason.

There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman.
Some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me.
Only an entity-- something illusory.
And though I can hide my cold gaze...
and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours...
and may be you can even sense our life styles are probably comparable,
I simply am not there.

[jp1]

I just found out I have a condition that makes me slightly different than everyone else in the world, and sometimes I have different feelings or opinions on things. Thankfully now I'm on a regimen of 14 different pills. Since taking them I now enjoy wearing khakis, going to an office, coming home, drinking beer, and watching football and then tuning into Glenn Beck. It's a good thing I saw that ad for my condition on fox.

I realize you are joking and I agree that a lot of parents put their kids in a group they don't belong in simply because they don't act the way they want to. The problem is though that a lot of people can't even grasp the possibility that there are real people with real problems suffering from these types of disabilities. I hear a lot of comments about "I wouldn't put my kid on a pill, they are just being kids." The problem is for someone who doesn't live with it, it can be nearly impossible to understand.

When you try to have a conversation with a loved one and you look into their eyes and see nothing but a blank canvas, it can be scary. Especially under the circumstances that someone has been hurt or there should be a real genuine need for empathy and the lack of it is startling. The hyperactive and social issues are only the tip of the iceberg.

These people can also be prone to bouts of rage from the frustration they incur from trying to fit into a society that isn't built to accommodate them. Self mutilation can occur. Aggressive behavior towards others as well. It is a daily struggle for them and the people responsible for them such as parents and other family members as well as teachers and other members of the community. It's sad really that so much fun is had at the expense of AS/ADHD/Autism because it is no different than making jokes or having a dismissive attitude towards any other disability.

I'm not pointing the finger at you jreece because as I said I knew you where having a laugh but the general lack of understanding is staggering.

Just because some percentage of people might pretend to be crippled and use a wheel chair it wouldn't be cool to go around making jokes about how it isn't a "real" disability.

I realize the percentage of unnecessarily diagnosed cases is much higher with the other disabilities that I mentioned but that doesn't make them any less real to people who have to literally build every aspect of their lives around them.

[coastercrazy10]

Likely, if you realize you have a disorder, you don't have it. A lot of people tend to diagnose themselves with a "socially positive" disorder, because if they have it it's a conversation-starter. If you say you have OCD, chances are someone will ask you "what do you do that's so OCD-like?"

Also, asperger's is (essentially) a less-impactful form of autism. Your social abilities must be severely impacted, not just a little difficulty in public. I'm not talking about an inability to speak, but rather an extreme underdevelopment of the parts of your brain related to social interaction, and thus fewer connections in that area.

Two of my friends have asperger's (one has a much more severe type), and they're both savants to the common person. They will never be diagnosed as such because they're truly not, but they have some amazing abilities. For example, they both learned to solve the rubik's cube by themselves and their solutions are both elegant and fast. They were able to crunch the numbers in their head using college-level math as 8th graders. That's not something you find every day. They're both incredible at chess and, after their attempts to explain how they do it, i have such a small comprehension of what their brain is doing that it must be doing something drastically different. They both are anti-social in different ways (one typically, one hyper-social but in a very strange way. It's hard to explain). From there they diverge a bit, but from what i've learned both have clinical asperger's.

In short: just because you can diagnose yourself with a few symptoms doesn't mean you have a disorder. The DSMIV (aka DSM4, a standard for diagnosing psychological disorders) has certain requirements you must meet, and in the case of autism (and asperger's by association) they must be socially dampening. They must control parts of your life, make it difficult to function normally. You need to have a medical professional check you out in order for you to truly be able to say you have a disorder, because chances are if your friends or family can't identify the problem, you don't have it.

-CC10

[Ivo]

I tried out the poll on the other's thread link, but considering the questions I have to doubt its predictive power. I'll post my results on the other thread.

I think the correct view here is that many people (or most, even) have a bunch of mild traits, some stronger than others, that correlate with it. But very few people actually have something that can actually be labeled a disorder.

For me at least it was rather interesting to be informed about the symptoms, because even without having a (the) disorder I think it is fair to say that if you have a certain trait that correlates, not only is that just part of who you are but it might make you think about that particular trait in a different light. Which may or may not be helpful but anyway

Ivo.

[Ivo]

According to the quiz...

Your Aspie score: 138 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 67 of 200
You are very likely an Aspie

Based on the questions I find it hard to believe this quiz can be very conclusive.

Did we have the results of this quiz from anyone with a professional diagnosis, by the way?

Ivo.

[Niode]

Oh dear.

Your Aspie score: 179 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 44 of 200
You are very likely an Aspie

poly12c.png (81.3 KiB) Viewed 530 times

[Ivo]

Wow Niode, you really kicked ass at the quiz

I really don't think the quiz is very telling though. It hits on the symptoms qualitatively, but it doesn't really evaluate quantitatively.

For example, it asks if you mind being hugged by someone you don't really want to hug you.

Now, my response is yes I do mind, so I pick "Yes / often". The other choices are "A little" and "No".

But there is a big difference between someone not liking it when it happens and responding to it by getting just a bit anxious or agitated and someone that may completely freak out and/or get really very anxious or agitated if this happens (I don't know if someone with the disorder would freak from something like that, it was just an example demonstrating that the quiz doesn't really quantify things very well).

It seems to me that the big difference between someone that actually has the disorder is not the number of symptoms they have (that match the list) but the severity of the ones they have.

The quiz seems to denote as "Aspie" anyone that has a high number of symptoms even if they are all mild.

Ivo.

[Niode]

Wow Niode, you really kicked ass at the quiz

I really don't think the quiz is very telling though. It hits on the symptoms qualitatively, but it doesn't really evaluate quantitatively.

For example, it asks if you mind being hugged by someone you don't really want to hug you.

Now, my response is yes I do mind, so I pick "Yes / often". The other choices are "A little" and "No".

But there is a big difference between someone not liking it when it happens and responding to it by getting just a bit anxious or agitated and someone that may completely freak out and/or get really very anxious or agitated if this happens (I don't know if someone with the disorder would freak from something like that, it was just an example demonstrating that the quiz doesn't really quantify things very well).

It seems to me that the big difference between someone that actually has the disorder is not the number of symptoms they have (that match the list) but the severity of the ones they have.

The quiz seems to denote as "Aspie" anyone that has a high number of symptoms even if they are all mild.

Ivo.

I really hate being hugged by strangers. Likewise I hate shaking hands with people. It makes interviews very awkward for me, because I'm very anxious when meeting somebody knew to begin with, knowing that I'm going to have to shake hands with my interviewer makes that 10x worse. I end up babbling because I'm just thinking about how/where I can wash my hands next.