Adults with Aspergers Seem 'Normal' to Me

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No, as I'm not what's commonly termed a hypochondriac

Are you familiar with the concept of 'just trying to get on with things despite the difficulties'?

Many people can use a computer, yet are unable to feed themselves or do much of anything else.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNZVV4Ciccg[/youtube]

No, these are real sensory issues, caused by autistic neurology. I experience many of the same things.
Even if Tuttle were a hypochondriac, which she isn't, at least she isn't a [edit: insult removed by mod]
Asperger's and autism are disabilities. Sometimes, people with the same label as you may be more disabled than you are. Why are you so threatened by that?
If you aren't disabled I don't know why you have a diagnosis in the first place; all that type of thing does is to feed the idea that people with AS are just quirky people who'd be fine if they tried a bit harder.

I don't know why I was given a diagnosis either - it was occupational health at work who foisted it upon me - I certainly didn't go looking for it

A hell of a lot of misdiagnosis occurs

There evidently are people who are autistic with all these sensory issues and then there are others, like me, who because we have some minor trait in common with autistic people eg find it hard to communicate with people, get wrongly diagnosed as autistic

Which leads to me not being able to relate to most of what people say on this thread

Doesn't that strike you as odd if we're meant to be in the same 'family' of diagnostic category?

I'd say it is - it implies I've been 'categorised' wrongly

I didn't need 'categorising' in the first place!.

If I don't eat the same sandwich for lunch but I want to make something else I would probably starve. My brain can't decide what to get and usually I end up panicking and then making myself a sandwich. I like when I have leftovers from dinner the night before. It's so much easier.

I need to eat around the same time everyday and there's people downstairs who are going to do some filming. I want to stay right away but I need to eat. I need to decide where I'm going to go when the filming starts. Otherwise I'll have a hypoglycaemic reaction. I like it when I'm able to focus anyway.

I have severe sensory issues too which I need medication to decrease. Still, I have to wear dark glasses so I don't get a migraine. I will still get sensory overload despite being on them.

I don't dissociate when I go down town, I have derealisation, which makes me see the world as kinda weird a dreamy and I hallucinate. I'm pretty sure I have depersonalisation too because I don't feel close to people. It's like there's a wall between them and me.

I pushed myself once...I ended up having severe seizures and shutdowns followed by cognitive regression. So now I pace myself. My symptoms are worse since the regression too. So push yourself, regress and less people would be saying you seem normal.

Don't really. It's an awful thing to go through. I've had to rehabilitate myself twice now. Know your limits and don't let people that tell you you're not trying hard enough get you down.

Look. The other day, I was overloaded, and my visual processing broke down. The only reason I didn't get run over crossing the road is that there were no cars coming, because I couldn't work out the traffic.
Are you going to call that laziness?
I regularly teach my students with a foggy head and a thumping headache because a child has screamed on the bus.
Are you going to call that laziness?
If my bus ride to work is bad enough, the "simple" acts of making eye contact with my students and getting words out is enough to make me fall over with exhaustion after work.
Is that laziness?

Yes I realise that

I was talking specifically to a person who was posting on a discussion forum though so I'm presuming she'd at least be able to order herself a pizza online and hence not starve (as long as her sensory issues weren't playing up too much on that particuar day and she was able to work out how to put her account details onto the computer, which, as she's got some kind of advanced Maths degree I'm guessing shouldn't be too much of a problem for her

One never knows though as one thing I have learned is not to expect the slightest degree of logic or consistency in these matters

"Severe Seizures"?

So you have epilepsy as well as autism?

You have this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epileptic_seizure

Having my brain (and not that of someone else who is different from me in this aspect), it occurs me as perfectly logical to not be able to do it as an autistic person, going to an unfamiliar website and filling out an unfamiliar form without support. Depending on the style of writing and despite that I can score very high on IQ tests, it can be very difficult to understand the written directions that are given to lead people through the process of ordering.

I don't have an advanced maths degree (like Tuttle?) but I guess a high IQ and having been in regular ed will do as these usually make people think means I can do all sorts of things others can including ordering pizza. I struggle with it anyway, I'd certainly try and perhaps I'd succeed - if not, I'll make someone else do it (and, for example, go hunt for cutlery instead) and likely ask them to teach me if I think it is useful and that I can master it.

Watching (non-autistic) friends ordering pizza online or by phone I know that it's perfectly logical to them to be able to do it because that's how they function. I'd think it odd if they couldn't do it - though the guys are sometimes too lazy to bother and will try to wriggle out of ordering food.

I would have trouble ordering pizza on the phone because it involves calling someone and I don't do so well with that it provokes much more anxiety than it should but yes I have been physically unable to make calls before because it was simply to anxiety provoking or whatever....so I use phones a little as possible.

I would go hungry before I would order food on the phone. Because of anxiety I won't make the call or get the food when they come and deliver it. I only get food delivered if someone calls for me and gets the food for me.

Ordering online can be hard because you still have interact with a delivery person to get the food, plus I don't know if places let you order online without a credit card.

Most of the time I eat cold leftovers out of the fridge and my cooking mostly involves heating up cans of stuff like soup.

One does not have to have epilepsy to have a severe seizure.

Well I am ok with interacting with the delivery person, I mean I'm the one answering the door they are the one knocking, hoping they were sent with the right order and maybe spent a while trying to find the place...and last time I ordered pizza I did it online with no credit card and just payed cash when they came.

I would have trouble ordering pizza on the phone because it involves calling someone and I don't do so well with that it provokes much more anxiety than it should but yes I have been physically unable to make calls before because it was simply to anxiety provoking or whatever....so I use phones a little as possible.

I agree with everything you say. Sorry if I'm a bit strident, I'm in the midst of law school finals, and have been answering legal hypos all day and night. I also wasn't trying to put words in anyones mouth, just trying to set up a rhetorical framework. Hopefully this post will be better.

I guess what I meant by the self-victimization thing was that I resent that in order to have the fact my mind works differently, I essentially have to medicalize my personality. For example:

in college, a person with AS qualifies for 'special accommodations' for testing and class. Provided, that they have a medical diagnosis of AS. This is where I become troubled. From my perspective, there's nothing wrong with me; the school has arbitrarily tailored its curriculum to a more NT learning pattern. Because my purpose is to learn and I would have no problem accomplishing that but for the NT-oriented curriculum, I do not like that I must be medically diagnosed with a condition. I appreciate that the school is trying to accommodate my difference, but I don't like being forced to claim that I am disabled. Being disabled carries social stigma, no matter how much people protest. It is a negative word. And the fact that it is pronounced by a doctor is even worse- for millennia doctors and disease went hand in hand, the association between AS and illness is inescapable.

My objection, I guess, is that in order to gain any kind of understanding for society, it must be because we are 'disabled' and therefore worthy of pity. I would rather be recognized as a fully functional human being who functions in a particular way. I want the motivation to accommodate me to be 'we need him', not 'we ought to help him'. I hope I've made the difference clear. It's not simply a question of semantics, either. I don't want to need a doctors note in order for people to help me, I want to be recognized as a valuable person in my own right, and be allowed to give my talents in the manner that's most effective

As for the WHO definition of disability, I know that it is a broad term. The reason it is designed so broadly is, as I alluded to above, being 'disabled' allows a person to qualify for all sorts of social services in many countries. Understand, all social services share a pedigree of charitable services. That is, their social role has traditionally been filled by (usually religious) charities. They typically served the homeless, the maimed, and, to an extant, the insane. Again, the motivation to help was borne out of pity, or a sense of religious obligation. Carry this forward to the present, and you see that the justification for services, or accommodations, or the like, is need-based. The only reason we help a person is because of his lowly status, be it destitute, or mentally ill, or disabled. Whatever the program, there must be some valuation of the person before aid is given. So, in order for society to justify special treatment at all, a person must have some sort of defect.

This is part of the underlying current behind the broader medicalization of society. We (society) want to help those who need special accommodation, but we have centuries of social norms that require recipients of special treatment to have some sort of defect in order to to deserve it. Thus, we begin to classify more and more things as disabilities. The problem is that the stigma associated with disease cannot be decoupled from the involvement of the medical profession.

So, I am not ignorant of what disability is 'supposed' to mean. I also agree that a person could describe the effects of AS as disabling, but that would be merely descriptive. I object to the term as a label. I would rather people think about AS/NT people the same way we think about short and tall, or left and right handed.

tl;dr
Sorry that I put words in people's mouths, I didn't intend to offend, and am sorry that I did.
My thing about self-victimization was concern that 'disabled' and it's medical context carried stigma, and that I resented my difference being recognized as a disease. Finally, definitions of 'disability' only further the troublesome medicalization of social problems; a less stigmatizing way is to think of AS/NT more like physiological differences.