'Mild' AS vs introversion or shyness

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Dear ShogunSalute,

Thanks for your response which I have selectively included above.

I would like to deal with your three points in turn;

1. I am recently diagnosed and until five minutes ago I didnt know what stimming was. I just Googled it and I would like to state the following in regards to that;

I seem to have exhibited ALL of the stimming characteristics as a boy. I remember that the hair twisting in my case went quite a bit further than twisting as I used to actually pull hair out of the top of my head (no one else did that and it used to freak my parents out) . I also used to bite my nails 'somewhat severely too'

I could go on for pages but I dont want to babble.

As far as faking stimming is concerned, in my professional position there is certainly ABSOLUTELY NO MILEAGE in broadcasting the fact that I have an ASD. I can't and won't go into detail and if you check my profile you will see that neither my occupation or country of residence, date of birth or real name are given (for the same reason)

2. I did only gave 3 examples of AS traits. Like you I could have gone on for pages but am working on 'moderation' as part of my non medication adaption skills.

I will volunteer that I do exhibit all of the traits in DSM IV and Gillberg.

I will also volunteer that my IQ has tested in the top 2% which means that I have been able to compensate, to some degree, by sheer intellectual effort.

I am now at a stage where this is no longer sufficient and I am therefore developing ways of adapting my behaviour and it is really hard work.

3. Thank you for expressing your appreciation for the style of my response.

Tolerance of others is one of my bigger blind spots and in real life (outside of cyberspce) I expect my response would have been more of a reaction and would not have been so polite.

Message boards allow me the time to pause and think before responding and is good training (for me).

As for yelling at you and 'reporting' you to Moderators goes well;

Firstly: your posting, while perhaps adversarial was neither (in my opinion) offensive nor rude.

Secondly: you seem like a fairly bright guy and so I thought I would give you the chance to show your hand a little more and you did and in my opinion we are less far apart now than before my first response to you.

Thirdly: I am a newly self diagnosed Aspie. It is very seductive to read nothing but posts that reinforce my own opinions. It is very healthy (for me at least) to rub up against different opinions that challenge my own, whilst I keep an open mind.

Fourthly (and perhaps most importantly) you are entitled to an opinion and here of all places you should be allowed to air that opinion.

You can follow my solo road to adaption on my blog.


Thanks again.

The point about having a job and friends is possible. Some jobs are well suited to an asperger's personality and friends can be colleagues with the same set of interests.

Casual informal chatty type friends will usually not feature in abundance.

I taught a subject area that I was passionate about. When I could I went home for lunch as I couldn't relate to other members of staff.
I wasn't one who socialised with workmates at all, and I know I was considered antisocial, should have been "asocial" but the "normal" people have no conception of this disposition.

My father taught at tertiary level, all his non work contact with others was through "music" his academic area. As far as I can remember he had only one friend. This man shared my father's passion for rock fishing, and his wife got on well with my mother. We saw these people once a year as they lived far away.

Apart from grandparents we had no visitors .

Both my parents were content to live without being in a social scene. They had acquaintances at church.

There are other similar stories of family members having jobs and no really social type friends.

Again, this response has nothing to do with you personally, just to the points you made. The DSM for AS has long thought to be too general and as far as I know it is being revised to a great extent to be alot more specific. You are right about your level of intelligence helping you deal with your symptoms, I've seen this many times, and you are lucky to have this gift. This is another reason I don't beleive in mild AS, I believe some people that have AS but say it's the mild version are actually able to deal with the condition better and, to a certain extent, mask it's traits more thouroughly. They are still AS though, not mildly, but fully. Their exhibition of the symptoms is what is mild.

ShogunSalute,

This is a good point.

Perhaps those that would term themselves MILD simply have better developed coping skills.

In my case I am developing my positive adaptive, compensating and adjustment strategies by reading large amounts of information (from quality sources) and simply putting it into practice.


One of my 'techniques' with the few acquaintances that I have shared my AS with, is to physically move my head back to an eye contact position, with the palm of my hand, as soon as I know I am looking away from the person opposite me.

I am able to laugh about this as I am doing it but I do really feel very impaired that I have to do this.

I am convinced that I would 'lab-test' as AS and I am equally convinced that I can overcome some (if not most), of my AS behavioural traits in a way that will significantly improve the quality of my life and in such a way that I stop APPEARING to be weird.

I think that is something that we can perhaps both agree on.

What we may not agree on is the labelling of this combination but in the context of this posting, I am not sure that the label is that important.

Of course I fit criterion C or else I wouldn't be diagnosed. But I didn't use the DSM I used the DISCO and whatever the equalivilent is to criterion C on that I obviously fit. I am mild and I do have a few friends to call my own but there are other areas of life that are affected. Organisation has always been a problem and I've had to start getting help in art at college because I'm all over the place, I seem to be growing up alot slower than my peers and I only feel about 12, eye contact feels like the other person is shooting lasers into my eyes, if that isn't "significant impairment" I don't know what is.
Also my "shyness" is alot more complicated than run-of-the-mill shyness, I can't explain how but it is, it just feels different.

I am definitely with you, with the lasers

My goodness, that is exactly how it feels, I just never found a way to properly describe it before.

INFACT, it even feels like that when it is ME consciously trying to look at THEM, when I actually WANT to look at them.


I almost just blinked out one of my contact lenses because I was laughing so much at this.

I really am impaired..................HOORAY

First of all calm down (nothing is more guarenteed to calm a person than being told to cal down lol). Maybe if you looked at the level of impairment as mild or sever you'd avoid an aneurysm.

I am sensing only mild impairment in this message or perhaps.............an HFA altert

Was it the spelling that gave it away? lol I came back to fix it but I can't now you quoted it, think happy thoughts!

Actually I missed the cal (instead of calm) but noticed the sever (instead of severe)

AND..........my post was not related to the spelling either



Now THAT'S got to rank as a wonderful mutual (read social) 'ASPERGER'S MOMENT'


whoops.............I feel another 'poll' coming on

see below.

Ah yes definitly. I have spoken to close friends that I've fancied and I want to look at their eyes, so I do then I'm thinking "aaaaah look away look away!!"

There really is no "mild" AS. The symptoms of AS are normally 100% present, but the experts say how "intense" any symptom is can vary from patient to patient. So, you can have AS but have mild symptoms on 60% of the list but more severe symptoms on the remaining 40%. At first, I thought I lacked some of the symptoms of AS, but when I thought on the examples given, I recognized that I did have the problem, but I learned to effectively adapt to it years ago or I never considered it to be an impairment.

I think "spectrum disorder" is intended to reflect that a condition has many symptoms but no set pattern of how intense any or all of them will be in a given patient. Hence, you fill a room with AS patients and you might not find even 2 with identical symptom patterns.

Asperger's is NOT a spectrum disorder, it is ON the spectrum of Autism disorders.

If that were true, all cases of Asperger's would be pretty much the same. But they're not; they're different.

If you look at the distribution of people we have here, you see that Asperger's fades smoothly into neurotypical, classic autism, and PDD-NOS. There aren't any sharp dividing lines and there are a lot of people here who are on the fuzzy border between Asperger's, PDD-NOS, neurotypical, and classic autism. The cases of Asperger's that are closest to neurotypical can be called "mildest", though of course even there you will have quite a lot of diversity because AS can express itself differently in different people, so you can't presume that even "mild AS" will be the same from person to person.

Actually, you can get this just from the definition of "spectrum". Think of the light spectrum, all the way from gamma rays to radio waves. Pick out one part of this spectrum--let's say visible light, really a very small part--and look at it. The visible light still has different wavelengths, which we detect as different colors. And each color goes from longer to shorter wavelengths, too. A continuous spectrum, by definition, means that any sub-section of that spectrum must also be continuous. Autism's that way too, except that you'd have to say there are multiple spectrums, because there are multiple dimensions along which you can measure autism.

This is an interesting topic, GreenGrrl. And it seems to have started off more threads about 'mild' Asperger's (or maybe that's a coincidence)
I agree with the others whom have stated that it is possible to have a 'clinically significant impairment' even if you have friends and/or a job.
1. You could find it hard to be emotionally close to people, so your friends are more like 'close acquaintances'. Therefore, you might only have a few friends (but they aren't what people would call 'close friends').
2. You can only get along well with people whom are 'eccentric' or 'strange', and you can't relate to anyone who is what society labels as 'normal'.
3. You might have feelings of isolation/anxiety/depression because of the above (even if you have 'friends').
4. Maybe the feelings of isolation/anxiety/depression have caused you to self-harm or take drugs/alcohol to feel better.