Allowing myself to raise the question: Am I on the spectrum?

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Even though I was diagnosed with autism around 1964, I first learned the term "autism" on a TV public service message about 1971 or so. At first, I thought they were talking about "artistic" children.

It has only been fairly recently that there has been knowledge of anything but the most severe autism or that adults or females can be autistic. Many clinicians especially regular doctors have an outdated knowledge of autism. Some clinicians do have an updated knowledge of autism but do not agree that any autism that is not severe or very obvious is "real autism".

That was a common misinterpretation at the time. "Neurotribes" discusses this.

In this case, they were discussing autism correctly; I just heard the pronunciation wrong.

I had tons off issues growing up and autism was never considered. Asperger's didn't even exist when I was a child. Just because your 27 doesn't mean someone would have noticed by now. Many people aren't diagnosed until later in life and many are missed. As others have noted unless a therapist has training in autism there are not any more likely to notice than anyone else - especially with adults whom have already developed coping strategies.

Not everyone needs or wants a Dx. There are pro's and cons. If you have the time read The Complete Guide To Asperger's Syndrome by Tony Attwood. In it he recommends three tests as part of an AAA (Adult Aspergers Assessment), the EQ, AQ, and FQ, to help determine if a full assessment with a clinician is warranted.
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Thanks for the link.

I scored a 34 on the AQ, 19 on the EQ, and 42 on the FQ, which according to them, are more common among people with ASD than neurotypicals.

I'm skeptical of self-diagnosis but this will provide me with a starting point for discussing with my therapist. I appreciate it.

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Not necessarily, and not if the traits etc are not obvious. Certainly my memory of therapy was that the therapist and I dug down more to details of things which seemed to get in the way of making good relationships with others, and we worked together on the basis of building skills in the area more than seeking any underlying cause.

Being skeptical is a good starting point. There is a term I have heard of called Cybercondria where on the basis of reading up about some illness or other people become convinced they have it.

However, it is not unknown for people to form a suspicion of being on the spectrum, and find on doing those "Quizzes" (AQ, EQ etc) that their scores are more consistent with being on the spectrum than not, and do their research carefully. While one is not strictly competent to "Diagnose", one can research carefully, piece together episodes from ones history, feedback one gets on specific items pointing to traits, and find, if seeking a diagnosis some time later, that one's research was good.

You seem to be following the same process as I did, following up a suspicion by using screening tools and then piecing together bits of ones life history. The AQ, and EQ especially are recognised tools and used as part of one of the recognised diagnostic tools by professionals doing actual diagnosis.

It is interesting you have been given feedback around one trait associated with the spectrum, which was eye contact, especially that you were consciously making eye contact at the event, to the point you were feeling uncomfortable, and yet people gave you feedback that you were making too little eye contact.

You wrote of feeling periods of isolation etc. That sometimes happens with being on the spectrum - the traits and areas of difficulty can stand in the way of making connections with other people and end up with isolation etc.

You may find it interesting looking for whether any traits seemed to become more apparent when life increased its demands on you, especially thinking of Social aspects and Exective functioning stuff.

Examples I found when looking back were the transition from being an only child living at home to going to nursery class a day a week - I really did not do that well. i did primary school a lot better. I loved learning things like reading and doing sums, but still once every few weeks i did some sort of social error and got a bit stressed up about it - to the point of an asthma episode. Things became rough in the area of executive function transitioning to work in my twenties, and I did not always get the social finer points of the workplace - in fact had one or two words of guidance / verbal warnings in that decade.

Some months back we were pointed to some published research on people who did their own investigations as to whether they were on the spectrum. They were found to be more accurate than might have been expected. TOny Attwood has expressed the opinion that people who have assessed themselves have often been right. A feature of certainly the aspergers subset of the spectrum is that we can be detail oriented and can tease out a lot of detail. There is also no significant secondary benefit from the diagnosis encouraging people to fake it .

I saw a lady therapist for years before my mom and sister suggested to her that I might have aspergers. Lay family members suggested it TO her. And the lady therapist said she had never even heard of aspergers before mom brought it up. So the therapist read up on it that night, and I agreed I might have it!

And this was well into the 2000's, a decade after aspergers had been accepted into the DSM in 1994. A couple years ago I took the exhaustive battery of official tests and was officially diagnosed with aspergers.

So a shrink could very well be staring your autism right in the face, and not see it.

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I don't know your house-mates or their relation / experience of Autism? I think it is natural to seek answers and validation of your suspicions especially when you are in this grey area of 'am i?'or 'aren't i?' as you have no doubt discovered it's a pretty complex area and often is the case the more you look and analyze the more questions need answering. You're life experience and the screening tests you have taken make Autism a possibility in which case and if it is an option available to you then maybe it would be worth seeking a diagnosis -- it could rules something in but on the flip side rule something out, but at least you would know.

Do you know the name of the article?

Often, they are right.

It's not really a glamorous thing to find out that one is Aspergian or autistic.

People won't come running to you to give you gifts because of it.

I'm posting this to kind of follow up on things.

The day after I posted all this stuff, I was really embarrassed and asked for it to be deleted. I later talked to one of my housemates and she told me she didn't think I had autism, and I trust her. I no longer think I might be autistic.

But really, who knows? For instance, since I've posted this, I've gotten comments on eye contact from professional mentors. People don't like playing Cards Against Humanity with me because I can't not take it literally. At the same time, I'm really into puns and idiomatic expressions, and from what I understand, autistic people have a lot of trouble with those things so that seems like one of those things that rules it out.

But really, at this point, it doesn't much matter to me, either way. I'm a PhD student which lets me dive deep into a topic that's interested me my entire life. I get paid to travel places and talk people's ear off about it, and I get rewarded for it. Those seem like traits which might be associated with autism but which work out in my favor in this context.

I've been experiencing a lot of change and some traumatic events recently, and I think they've made me try to find answers to who I am and why I am the way I am, so the need to find a label seemed important. It doesn't seem as important anymore.

OP For what it's worth, the first time I had someone tell me they thought I was on the spectrum was this year. I lived all these years with no clue. I knew I was different, to the point of feeling broken somehow, and had been called lots of things like: weird, over sensitive, socially inappropriate, idiosyncratic, and even neurotic ... but never autistic. Turns out I was. It explained a LOT.

I'm not trying to encourage or discourage you any which way but "not having this or that particular autistic trait" or being good at things "autistic people are not good at" is no way to make a determination. I've seen people say "I can read faces well, I can't be autistic" and "I don't stim, I must not be autistic". Those are not diagnostic criteria and it truly is a spectrum disorder. Those things vary from person to person. Have you read the DSM-V? It might not be perfect but I think it does a pretty good job of laying out the core of Autism.

And SaveFerris makes an excellent point about interval vs. external.

I've looked at the DSM-5, but I feel like diagnostic criteria is often overly broad to allow for clinicians to use their professional judgement without being bogged down by overly-specific checklists.

But, one of the criteria in the DSM is: "Symptoms must be present in the early developmental period"

Honestly, I have no idea what that means, since early development period isn't defined. My initial interpretation would be before school starts, so meeting the milestones, like crawling, walking, talking, and bring potty trained on time, which I was. However, once I began school, there were some issues. On my report card in early elementary school, I got all As except I consistently got a C for conduct and could never figure out why. When conduct stopped being a letter grade, it moved to discursive comments about me having friendship problems, and these types of comments continued through middle school. In middle school and high school I couldn't anyways tell when I was being bullied, either.

So I don't know.