Aspergers or Social Anxiety?

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Hi

Hoping that someone can give me some help/knowledge/advice as I'm becoming really confused!

Would someone with Aspergers behave totally differently depending on the social situation? e.g. could they appear comfortable and 'normal' when they're with family, or people who they're used to being around? Or, would they still lack eye contact etc?

What they're seeing from him is totally different to what I, or others close to him, see. Would this still be the case with people who have Aspergers? With us, he's relaxed, talkative, sarcastic, and shows his true character. With them, he's very anxious, whispers, probably avoids eye contact, and acts totally differently.

Is there clear way of dinstinguishing between social anxiety and Aspergers?

Last edited by SallyCinnamum on 10 Jan 2014, 6:51 am, edited 1 time in total.

You might ask for him to be evaluated using the ADOS (autism diagnostic observation schedule). It has a module that is used with teens and adults, and is considered the gold standard for diagnosing ASD.

One difference you might see between someone with just anxiety and someone with ASD is sensory sensitivities -- having trouble handling noisy environments, smells, textures, glare, sudden loud noises, picky eating, crowds, etc. In some cases much of the anxiety is coming from being on high alert that some unexpected sensation could happen at any moment.

Others, though, are anxious because of social reasons -- they have had so many negative interactions, and just don't know what is expected.

Many with AS have great eye contact, especially with familiar people. My son, for instance, doesn't seem to mind looking people in the eyes, and the more relaxed he is the better his eye contact is. He does glance away a lot, though, and in his case it seems to be more of a case where he can't process auditory and visual information simultaneously -- he glances away while retrieving the next phrase before speaking.

Thanks, Zette. I'll have a look at ADOS.

He hasn't had troubles with noise, smells, food, food textures, was a bit fussy about labels on clothing (he wasn't slow in letting us know when things annoyed him), but the Dr's aren't slow on using something like this, or something that he may have just done once or twice, to tick one of their boxes to make a diagnosis.

'Many with AS have great eye contact, especially with familiar people. My son, for instance, doesn't seem to mind looking people in the eyes, and the more relaxed he is the better his eye contact is. He does glance away a lot, though, and in his case it seems to be more of a case where he can't process auditory and visual information simultaneously -- he glances away while retrieving the next phrase before speaking.'

I'd say he didn't look people in the eye because he was either anxious, aware that he was doing it, then felt even more self conscious, or looked away because he wasn't interested or believed in what they were saying.

Why are you so against the diagnosis of Asperger's?

Social anxiety often goes long with aspergers.

The defining characteristics of aspergers are difficulty in social communication, restricted and repetitive interests and patterns of behavior and sensory issues.

All of these factors can lead individuals with ASD into socially unacceptable behavior or blunders. This leads to punitive responses from the social group and repeated experiences of this kind result in social anxiety.

It's quite rational to be anxious socially if a high percentage of your social forays result in negative consequences.

So the key question should not be "is it just social anxiety' but does he have troubles with social perception and expression, narrow and extreme interests, repetitive behaviors, etc.

The social anxiety is then a secondary issue. If he doesn't have these things, then the anxiety has some other cause.

If you are recognizing that he does have enough issues with social communication, restricted interests and repetitive behaviors, sensory issues, etc., but are now trying to find thresholds of severity to make those things seem outside the definition of ASD, then it sounds like he's got it and you sort of know it but don't like it because you have an excessively narrow understanding of autism. If that's the case, self education will make you feel better.

What's the difference, really? Not knowing how to interact with people adequately automatically makes you anxious in social situations. I'd have to assume that my selective mutism when faced with an unexpected social interaction is probably tied to my hyperanxiety, as well as my brain's inability to automatically understand and perform appropriate social actions.



I'm in my 50s and only marginally more comfortable with my family than I am with strangers, mainly because they are rather uptight religious fundamentalists and I am not, therefore our world views are widely divergent, which limits topics of conversation. I learned ages ago how to fake eye contact with short glances, just to let the speaker know I'm listening, but around people who know my condition, I feel less obligated to make a show of it, as opposed to, say, a job interview, during which I could fake eye contact and conversation perfectly normally for a half hour or so at a time, but I'd be mentally drained afterward.




I was much more open like that around family as a kid, and ended up being a radio disc jockey for decades as an adult, where I could be talkative and sarcastic in a closed room by myself - but when they sent me out to do remote broadcasts, I would go round the corner and stand behind a dumpster to phone in my breaks, rather than talk in front of real people. So yeah, that's pretty normal for AS. During my 20s, I had a small group of friends who shared the same obsessive personal interests (most of whom I suspect fell somewhere on the Autism Spectrum) and we were extremely talkative around each other, but social by varying degrees around other people.



Well, I'm no expert, but I would point out that AS is Autism, and Autism is not just a social disability - in fact, the social problems are a side effect of the central disorder, which is: Hypersensitivity to Sensory Stimuli.

Our disabilities in learning appropriate social behaviors and reading and comprehending nonverbal social cues, etc., are the result of the autism, which causes us to experience all incoming sensory data: sound, touch, taste, light and so on, at essentially the same mental 'volume level.'

Where normal brains automatically filter and adjust sensory data to differentiate between what elements are important and which are irrelevant, the autistic brain does not perform that function automatically (at least not nearly as well), so insignificant things like light or sound that normal people wouldn't even be aware of, can distract us to the point that it interferes with our abilities to function socially. It can be overwhelming trying to juggle all the signals at once, so socializing becomes dizzying and very stressful.

It's easy to miss pieces of a conversation when you're trying to maintain eye contact, but become distracted by a person's facial features, or the movement of their lips as they talk. Because of that, the act of making eye contact becomes uncomfortable and feels unnatural. In the same way that one feels the heat emanating from a light bulb when you get close to it, sometimes you can almost feel a person's gaze pounding you as they look at you and their eyes seeming to bore a hole through your head. It's the loud wave of sensory data that can't be filtered out or turned down. Same reason sounds can sometimes be experienced as physically painful (for me doorbells are a common culprit - I hate 'em).

How does that differ from Social Anxiety? I have no idea. I have never looked at the Diagnostic Criteria for Social Anxiety. My guess would be they first screen for the sensory issues and if those are not present, then it's not Autism, so it must be Social Anxiety.

I just read this article on anxiety and social fears for individuals on the spectrum. It included some strategies to overcome them that I thought were pretty good. Here is the article Overcoming Anxiety and Social Fears for Individuals on the Spectrum You do have to register to read it but it's free to register.

I think the Sensory processing issues are a key part but not "the central disorder" -- there is good evidence to suggest a more general information processing disorder that is evident in deficits in social cognition. I found Valerie Gaus quite convincing on this in "Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Adult Asperger Syndrome."

In our experience our daughter - who is an aspie with sensory issues and a non-verbal learning disability - behaved completely differently at school, out in the public, at relatives and at home. It really depended on the sensory input she was getting and her comfort level.

As she got older and learned to control her reactions her behaviors actually got worse at home and better everywhere else. She was comfortable at home and we wanted her to feel free to 'be herself' instead of trying to fit into the NT world.

Now that she is a teen I would say that she behaves pretty much the same everywhere - she has mastered her NVLD and no longer has so many sensory issues.