Rant about people with "self-diagnosed" AS

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Who is a sixteen-year-old to tell anyone that they don't have Asperger's? Do you have to march into the forest and tell every tree "you are a tree" before they can say "thank God I'm finally a tree"? I think that generalizations are inherently bad, because no two people are affected by the same circumstances, and you should evaluate each and every one of our reasons for not having obtained a diagnosis before you make accusations of hidden motives.

hi Zancaur
i am so far a self diagnosed aspy and i am waiting for my apointment with the mental health team. i am over 40 and had to live with
the symptoms all my life. my life has been allmost hell, allthough i have got through life ok i am a total failure. the longast time i have held a job down for is about 6 months. i have had mental breakdowns, and loads of other stupid problems. if i new then what i know now
things would be totaly different. put urself in my shoes and imagine trying to get through life with aspys but not ever knowing whats wrong with you, drives you insane. fortunatly i discoverd this sight and the more posts an threads i read the closer to the answer i get.
i am not eccentric nor a nerd i have chosen friends and i am antisocial but not by choice. to come to terms at my age that i have aspergers takes alot of courage and self understanding. but i understand your concern but like i say imagine living through life not knowing

I know how OP feels about the self diagnosed.

I used to be against it too, I used to think it was wrong to say you have something you haven't even been diagnosed yet because you could be wrong.

I had a bad experience with someone who wanted to have the condition so what did he do, he started to change and act like he has it. He didn't care what I said, didn't listen to me, didn't take me seriously, and he was harassing me. Then it turned into stalking because I'd block him and he IM me under a different sn. He was basically following me on AIM. And c'mon I had spoken to lot of aspies on IM and none of them acted like that, they were all respectful and sensitive. Even they agreed with me he was a jerk and a stalker and the fact he was trying to control me.
he also happened to have brain damage because he was hit by a car when he was almost seven so I couldn't say if he had AS or not because head injuries can cause the symptoms but if he was so sure he has it, I told him he should talk to his mother about it and go see a doctor. I even tried asking him questions about his early childhood to know if he was an aspie or not but he couldn't remember so I told him he would have to ask his mother then.

For a while I thought self diagnosed aspies were just like him, all rude people and stalkers and don't care about other people or even listen to them, curse at them, using AS as an excuse to manipulate people. But I learned from reading on the forums that is not true. I learned why people don't even bother going for a diagnoses, it's also obvious they have it because they have lot of the symptoms and a lot of it in their childhood so it explained everything about themselves. Also the fact that some had already been evaluated as kids but couldn't find anything wrong with them because AS wasn't recognized back then, but instead were labeled 'odd' or something. Some even said they were told someone suspected they were a little autistic or acted it so that also hints to them they have AS.

But what does disgust me is people finding out they have AS and then they start using it as an excuse and they like give up on themselves, say they faked being normal instead of learning how to cope in life. My ex is an example because I believed he used it as an excuse because he acted like he did, even one of my own aspie online friend's thought so too.

I certinally don't see myself as faking anything. Am I faking social skills I have learned when I do them, am I faking knowing personal space because I know how far back to stand away from people now after my mother had told me to stand an arm length away and if my hand goes past them, then I am too close so i have to back up. If I am more than an arm length away from them, I am still fine.
Am I also faking flexibility, am I also faking by not talking about my obsessions over and over to the same people?


Even NT kids go through the same thing, they also learn how to behave and act but does that mean they learned how to fake it?

That depends on what exactly people are learning.

Your experience sounds very far removed from, say, learning that some strings of sound go with other strings of sound, without knowing (or without always knowing) the meaning of said strings of sound, and learning to listen for some so you can say others out through your mouth, while in situations that cause you tremendous amounts of overload, and at the same time suppressing every unusual movement your body does that normally allows you to deal with overload (or suppressing it until you get in private), making excuses for the times when you can't speak at all or when you say things that have nothing to do with what you mean (because you can't let on that these are due to a speech problem, nor would you even necessarily be able to), regurgitating a whole lot of rote-learned social conventions without much understanding, and all of this while people are constantly touching you (which is painful), talking to you (which is painful and often incomprehensible), etc.

And then, on top of that, all that stuff you're doing means that you have nothing left to understand or properly react to the situation left, because there's no energy left for comprehension even if you'd otherwise be able to understand. Nor is there any energy to actually socialize in the ways you'd normally be capable of, because you've just spent all of that energy elsewhere. And wondering daily when you're going to be unable to hide certain things anymore (because you're running up a massive debt in cognitive and physical energy), and what is going to happen to you at that time.

(The "you" in this is "you-plural" although the person I'm replying to is included in this.) If that, or something like it, is not your experience, then you should be aware that this is similar to the experience of most people who actually talk about what that was like. If it was, even if not easy, still not unusually difficult for you to maintain this stuff once you learned it (and/or if your only obstacle to doing these things was not having known to do them before), if your climb uphill was one in which you ended up with your feet touching the ground at a higher altitude instead of dangling off a cliff by your fingernails at the same altitude (that's a post about a metaphor I've used for this particular difference in experiences), then you shouldn't judge the people who did experience it as dangling off a cliff, and as impossibly hard to sustain. It's two totally different experiences, and they can't really be considered equivalent to each other just because the outward results might seem similar to some people.

Edit: Post removed.

Last edited by Zancaur on 08 May 2008, 8:47 am, edited 1 time in total.

I guess not everyone reads every single page before replying you know. A bad habbit I have too but luckily I read every page before I replied.

I don't mean this in a patronising way, I just think you are too young and don't know enough about it to make any judgements. Im glad you've accepted you were wrong about some things, although I don't think you quite get it still.
Im only 20, 4 years older than you, undiagnosed, 5 years in the mental health system, lots of self harm, ODs etc.
I know a 7 year old who was diagnosed at 6 and so she gets all the support and help through school when she grows up her family will know that any oddities are due to her AS, they'll be able to support her, explain to her why she finds things hard etc.

For those of us who didn't get diagnosed as children, we struggled at school, some of us found some lessons hard, some might have been really good at some things, we were the ones with no friends but no one knew why, they just thought we were odd. We might have been bullied, stayed in the library all lunch, reading everything, writing. For me, I didn't know how to play games so I copied people, I copied everyone my whole life until I ended up in a psychiatrists office and she said 'This isn't you' and I had a total break down. At 16 I started to become myself again.


If you have aspergers diagnosed as a child it is so very different from growing up not knowing why you are different, finding that light bulb description for you is a huge thing, that is the most important thing, them knowing, finding it. Then its up to them what they want, if they need the words or that piece of paper then go for it, it its going to affect future jobs then don't. If its about money then obviously its up to them, for me its about a new beginning.
Just because you don't like it, it doesn't mean everyone should go and get a diagnosis.

Yes there may be some people faking, but there are people out there faking cancer, depression, EDs...all sorts of things. Just feel sorry for them, because obviously they have their own problems if they are so desperate to be diagnosed with something.

However, this formed part of one of your "apologies":

I can't think of a more dismissive attitude. You either have not read, or have not understood, many of the posts in here.

Wow, just joined and this was the first thread i came across.

I'm not diagnosed (though i have been to a doctor who didn't really put any labels on what i may have). I just assumed some sort of mild cronic depression coupled with a bit of social phobia.
Why would I want to be diagnosed? To have a name attached to my uniquenss? What does that do anyway?

I've always thought my view of the world was a little off-just kinda attributed it to my own weirdness. Never thought about anything like AS, but reading about it on wikipedia i was kinda creeped out by how well it described me and my tics and personality traits.

Thought I would look into it more, but now i don't know if i'll come back since i'm not willing to go ask a doctor to put a label on me.

I recently self-diagnosed. For me, AS is a useful model for understanding my personality and for understanding and caring for my toddler, who is on the spectrum.

I wish I would have been diagnosed when I was six, because it would have helped my parents raise me differently. I am 28 now, self-supporting, and on my feet. It would not help me to get a diagnosis at this point in my life. Only my wife knows what I think and I do not share it with others at work, friends, or family. Maybe after a few years of thought, I may find that it is helpful to talk to others about an actual diagnoses.

It feels good to know that places like WrongPlanet exist, and that a formal diagnosis is not a criteria for entry.

I am SO sorry. Please don't judge the entire community here on this thread!

I'm self dx'd, too, and have been really restraining myself here.

Anyway, welcome!

Thank you, after reading some other responses i think i will stick around. A lot of you seem very interesting and intelligent.

Somehow I missed him saying he was 16 when i read it too. That would have made it have less of an impact. Not saying teens don't have anything good to say, but, well everyone's an elitist nowadays.

Why? You didn't take the opinions of anyone but yourself before you "flamed," as you so eloquently put it. I did, in fact, read each and every post in this thread, and I still think that your overall opinion is inherently flawed. You didn't even apologize for most of your accusations, and there are still obviously things left unresolved. If you really think that further discussion is pointless, then you would have done the obvious thing, which is to remove the thread entirely.

I apologize for my abrasive attitude as well; I just dislike people acting superior to others, especially a group. honestly, this is the first time I've disagreed with anyone on Wrong planet. :D

I personally don't want an "official" diagnosis. I have 4 children(one is a foster baby we are adopting soon) and I don't want to be labeled as having a disability that some people think can hamper parenting skills. I have a 10 y/o daughter with an official HFA diagnosis. My psychiatrist basically told me she thinks I'm on the spectrum and that the "apple doesn't fall far from the tree." She's not an expert though and won't officially diagnose me. I'm good with that.

Many of us are adults and there was not a spectrum diagnosis available when we were children. If we functioned, we weren't thought to be autistic. We were labeled as "emotional troubled", "antisocial", and as having personality disorders and other problems. It's more difficult to get a diagnosis as an adult because you're missing the diagnostic criteria required for the early years of life.

I don't see HFA or Asperger's as a disability. Sure, I have some limitations because of it, but I also have great strengths because of it. Unfortunately, there's a lot of people out there who don't see the strengths and won't look at the individual if they have a diagnosis, a label to go off of. They look past the person to the disability.