I'm Not An Aspie. I Lied During My Assessment.

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Autism is a spectrum, meaning we can have a variety of traits at varying levels of severity. You seem to be focusing on a few traits that you think every autistic person must have. Not every autistic person is a STEM super genius or incredible organizer or has perfect pitch (which I didn't even know or think to be an autistic thing). If you're a woman, traits can manifest differently than in male aspies. If you're dissatisfied with your current diagnosis, seeking a second opinion could be a helpful option.

Are you at all inattentive? Inattentive ADD is a lot like autism.

@Black Cat: huh?
@Keladry: I can't really have a second assessment, as my Dad is dead, my Mum's in a care home and I no longer speak to my brother. I know that to be properly assessed, a family member has to be inerviewed, (I contacted the Leeds Austism Service and was informed of this). When I spoke to someone at the services, the person told me that she had no reason to believe I wasn't autistic.

I'm of the belief that there should be list of traits, that people should have to be diagnosed has having aspergers. The list would include: being good at maths/music/art/writing; not able to read people's emotions; not able to hold eye contact; must be a good systemiser; must be a visual/verbal/maths/music thinker; must have meltdowns; have a special interest, which is all consuming; have overloads of all the senses, (not just one), and; speak loudly/softly/quickly/monotone. If the traits couldn't be ticked off, then a person wouldn't be considered an aspie. It's a pity that there isn't a blood test for autism.

Almost all of your examples are wrong. The answer to almost all of them is that it's a question of degree, certain things are learnt through practice, we are just slower at them than NTs, most people have some traits but not all.

Your list would exclude a huge number of autistics that are clearly autistic enough to be impaired.

I agree with underwater here.

OP, you sound a bit like I felt some years after I was diagnosed, I highly recommend going to some meetups. That helped me a lot to realize it was a spectrum.

But I lied, during my assessment. Two psychologists have said that I'm on the spectrum. I can tick off most of the traits associated with female aspies, but the fact I told a lie, is bugging me.

But was it really a lie? I mean, did you already have a different, simple and true answer but decided to tell something else?
Or maybe you just have very high standards for honesty and going with not-absolutely-precise, or sometimes even random because of confusion, answers is equivalent to a lie for you?

I agree with Magz here. She makes a good point. I had a similar thing when I read the report from my psychologist who diagnosed me, where it seemed some of the information was not 100% accurate to my degree of precision. I did not lie or try to mislead, but somehow it got communicated inaccurately. After thinking about it and discussing it with my therapist, really the points are very minor and inconsequential. Meaning that the psychologist did not make the diagnosis off of one or two specific things that I said, but really rather was looking at the big picture which was a combination of things I said, results from diagnostics, and her own observations. The big picture is something that is much harder for aspies to see. I too got caught up in the details of those specific statements and it plays on my mind too - does this mean that my diagnosis is wrong? Or, I don't meet X trait, etc. so it's wrong. But that's just us focusing too much on the details and not the bigger picture.

Unless you were intentionally lying on every question, I wouldn't question the bigger picture viewpoint of the person who diagnosed you. One or two small inaccuracies is not going to change that at all.

This brings up a question that I wasn't going to bring up:

The people at PPR are convincing me that I can't tell an Asperger's person from an NT. Supposedly many, most or all of those people were diagnosed Aspergers's, but they could have fooled me!

Though I'm not into politics, you can observe rampant NT sheep-like herd-behavior in the political posts.

In philosophy-discussion, one can observe the usual typical NT aggressive arrogance there. ...including people whose signature says that they're diagnosed Asperger's or Autism.

If those are Asperger's people, then I admit that I can't tell an Asperger's from an NT.

Michael829

@Magz: I over exaggerated. I knew that aspies can be rude/offend people with things they say. I've only offended people a couple of times, (when I was at primary school, on one occasion I was talking to a teacher, after school had ended and I said something and she told me off for being sarcastic).

I'm overly polite and can honestly say, that, in the 20-odd years, since asking a lecturer, if she thought about wearing make-up, I've never said something that has offended anyone. I might have said things, to people, that I worry about afterwards, but not things that might offend.

I did ask someone, that works, for one of my clients, if she was South African, (as over the phone she sounded as if she came from South Africa), and I was worried that I had offended her.

The problem is, I don't possess any traits, such as being a systemiser, good at a particular subject, etc, that ever other aspie has. If I'm supposedly an aspie, why don't I fit in with one of the three groups of thinkers? Why don't I have a special interest? Why am I able to read people's emotions? Why did I change my Asperger's Quiz questions, so I would have more ND traits, than NT traits, (originally, both sets of traits were equal)? Why can't I guess correctly which pattern comes next in a sequence?

There is a sticky in the Women's Forum with lots of reference resources for women who are or might be on the spectrum.


Women Specific

The Pattern of Abilities and Development of Girls with Asperger Syndrome by Tony Attwood –
http://www.tonyattwood.com.au/index.php ... Itemid=181

Asperger Syndrome in Women: A Different Set of Challenges? By Catherine Faherty -
http://www.autismtoday.com/articles/Asp ... _Women.htm

An Aspie in the City by Carlin Flora -
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles ... n-the-city
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles ... ity?page=2
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles ... ity?page=3

So, you sometimes offend people not meaning to and have to be careful not to do it. +1 to aspiness.


You are just systemising. Anyway, what are they? I don't know about it.


Your special interest is overthinking your behaviors and the feelings of other people, IMO.


You learned. By <see above>


Are you confused by the lack of precision in the questions, maybe?


It's not your superpower.

It's okay, it seems you are the camoufleged "female-type" aspie. Exaggerating one answer is nothing close to lying. But your black-and-white, all-or-nothing thinking is clearly hinting you are on the right planet here

This is why I lose my special interest sometimes. I am so busy analyzing whether or not it is a "real" special interest or if I "really" have Asperger's that the overthinking/analyzing becomes my special interest.

I admit I mainly want to use this thread to share my own story that upsets me, but I think it might help you as well.

I sometimes feel like I exaggerated during my diagnosis as well, but subconsciously, since I was pretty obsessed with gaining info about it. Look up "medical students' disease" - pretty sure it's a common thing. Nowadays I'm trying to be compassionate, fair to everyone, especially people I work with etc. I started to feel to be too high-functioning to be considered even mild Aspie. I talked that over and over again with the psychologist that was a part of the diagnostic team and she claimed she'd considered everything I said to her after DX.

So, I'm 29 now and everything seems to be good, I'm not afraid of meeting new people, talking in foreign language to them, going abroad on a long airplane trip etc. I don't even suffer sensory stuff that much (except I bite my t-shirts to the point of destruction and crack joints too much, even the feet ones ). Not anywhere near those "real stereotypical person with ASD"-problems. Also, I managed to work from home and earn money from digital stuff I sell (indie video games).

Yet, during an one-week trip in with people from industry I work in, someone commented that I'm not so social and lack empathy (and that I should probably talk to some psychologist). Those people didn't really like my sense of humor and some annoying guy reminded me the last day about that with annoying jokes ("raise your hand when you're joking, so we know it"). I accused someone of not giving me any respect and that person told me about other people who didn't give me any respect... and I had no idea they didn't. I though I'll explode and make stuff even worse, fortunately, I managed not to.

So, it was like a punch in my nose after I started feeling too confident. I'm pretty sure I'm not quite normal, but if it's really ASD, it's very mild. It's easy to forget about that stuff if you just work from home, including managing your own little projects. Also, people from my own team are weirdos/tolerant themselves, so well... Guess I'll just book the sleep place myself next time.

So, just talk to your diagnostic team about your feelings about the diagnosis. If it turns out to be not the ASD case, don't fret about it, just ask them for further directions and help. If they're any good, they won't just ignore you. If you're feeling/treated like a weirdo and it affected your whole life, then I'd say something certainly is there and, eventually, it's up to you to find the best way to deal with it. Good psychologist and their labels are supposed to help you deal with your problem, but the main work is still on your side.

Must confess I've had occasional doubts about whether I was entirely straight during my autism assessment.

I had a strong motive to make sure the DX was positive - my employer was trying to force me into doing a kind of work that everybody hated doing, it rode roughshod over our rights to leave at the allotted time and to take days off when we wanted to, it involved being under the command of a complete jerk of a supervisor, and it involved performing largely menial tasks instead of the higher-status science work we had originally been hired to do. The staff weren't organised enough or strong enough to fight back. A diagnosis of disability was the safest option I could see. And some of my responses to the assessment weren't absolutely correct.

But my "incorrect" responses were never blatant lies, they were well within spec for the NT world, they were just slightly stretched here and there. Mostly they were pretty straight. One of the biggest "lies" was that I said I was a creature of routine, which isn't 100% true, I sometimes get bored with the same old stuff and break out of it to do something different.

When presented with the Aspie-Quiz as a pre-screen, I should ideally have refused to answer most of the questions, because there was no box for "yes and no," they're so reductionist that I can get any result I want without exactly lying, but instead I probably erred on the side of giving Aspie-type answers. Had I failed the AQ, there would have been no grounds for doing the full assessment.

I think it's (ironically) my autistic pathological honesty and perfectionism that made me suspect myself of cheating. I'm no more a cheating NT than Ned Flanders is a cheating immoral atheist. My diagnostician watched me carefully during the DX, and my long answers accurately covered most of the nuances that the AQ test wouldn't let me explain. She also asked my (then) wife about my behaviour. So many things about me began to make sense once I saw myself as an Aspie. And now I'm retired, I no longer have any need to pretend anything. I don't get any disability adjustments or benefits. I could sit here and brag about how I fooled everybody and ripped off my employer so I could have an easier life. But all I did was to bias the DX result a tiny bit, the result was essentially correct, my Aspie traits really have played havoc with my life in many ways. Compared with the way employers (and benefits officials) so often pretend the disabled are not disabled at all, any sin I committed was negligible. I'm not guilty, and IMO neither is the OP.

PS: My apologies, OP, for expressing my earlier suspicions of you trolling. It did rather look that way for a while, but your subsequent post(s) have cleared that up. I'm still not clear what your motive could have been for these lies you accused yourself of.

Well, let's define a difference between "lying" and "confirmation bias."

You feel that you don't regularly say things to offend people. I feel the same way. GUESS WHAT? I regularly offend people if I'm not careful.

I have no INTENT to offend others...indeed I get distressed if I find that I have offended someone else. The question, on it's face, is misleading. They should ask if you often say things that offend others whether you intended to do so or not. That's a more revealing question because people with Autism/AS do things that hurt others not realizing they are hurtful or offensive.

Likewise, "confirmation bias" is when you do things or adhere to sources that produce a desired outcome or validate an already embraced dogma.

My community college had computer-based tests to indicate what job fields were best for a student undecided on which way to go. It was garbage for a singular flaw....

If a student already had decided what kind of job they wanted, or what type of life they wanted, they could easily craft their answers to produce the desired outcome.

It's the same reason why many people are discriminated against in these "hiring tests" where there is supposed to be no wrong answers. The exam profiles your personality, and being honest may show things the employer wants to avoid. Lying doesn't always help because the test is designed to catch potential liars...however, most of us learned to deal with the hiring process by giving the correct answers and not the true answers.

So, I'd call you out if you deliberately plotted and schemed to lie your way into getting a formal diagnosis for a condition you really don't have.

If you think you were dishonest because the question was poorly crafted and you "filled in the gaps" and felt the "false" answer was more correct, that's one thing. If you were too invested in the belief that you had to be on the spectrum, you might have "lied" to ensure your pre-conceived self-image would be retained. These are understandable as if one was to undergo a formal diagnosis, finding out you are NOT something but not being told what you ARE is very frustrating. I have many "issues" I cope with...all relatable to Autism. If I was to be told I'm not autistic (even by a liberal interpretation), I would want my diagnostician to give me solid answers on what, instead, I am. Otherwise, I'm lost in a fog knowing I have issues but no idea of what is wrong or how to cope with them.