Why Do People Hate Self-Diagnosers?

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I don't hate self diagnosers but I don't think you can diagnose yourself as you can be biased. You need to go to someone on the outside who can recognise autism symptoms. I think it's okay for people to suspect they have a disorder and say that but not say 'I HAVE autism and I diagnosed myself' because that's not been confirmed yet.

I hear what you are saying, Starfox, but believe me, psychologists and psychiatrists can be biased too. That is one reason why so many people on the spectrum have been diagnosed with other conditions that they didn't have.

How about if I called myself an Emeritus Aspie? Emeritus actually comes from veteran soldier--after 40 years of making seemingly every social mistake I figure I deserve that title, as to many other old Aspies. One can presume that an Emeritus Aspie doesn't have an official diagnosis--nobody got them when we were kids. Now that we can get one, we have somehow adapted so well that we don't need one. We don't need validation that we are Aspies, nor do we want to lead the cause. But we can sure talk about old war stories!

Last edited by BTDT on 12 Jun 2015, 5:59 am, edited 1 time in total.

It was one of a string of issues both my wife and I were being accused of. The thing is, this lady was making stuff up and it was obvious to the social workers what was really going on. She called DHS on us 3 separate times. I probably shouldn't get into the details here, but it's not unheard of that being on the spectrum is enough to lose your kids. I'm not trying to unnecessarily spread fear or anything, but it's known to happen.

That happened several years ago and we've had no problems since. But I do have difficulty trusting people outside my family with any kind of information. And I know without any doubt DHS is not my friend.

I'm not aware of any media in my area ever mention it and thats why it took so long to figure out what was "wrong" with me. Most people don't even know what it is around here and even still, why on earth would you want to fake being oblivious to social cues, struggling with empathy and finding it difficult to make friends?

ADHD/ADD on the other hand.......

The most important purpose of professional diagnosis is outside observation to match individual traits to traits of autism.
The individual who self-diagnoses cannot do that, no matter how well they know themselves from the inside.
The autism traits are to be matched with individual traits from the outside, not the inside, so self-diagnosis of matching outside autism traits with inside individual traits is misuse of diagnostic criteria.
Self-diagnosis misses the most important component of autism assessment, then replaces that component with misuse of diagnostic criteria.

you know what else mental health professionals have? Training and accreditation.
do you have either of those to assist with your flawed self-diagnosis?

What then is your explanation of professional misdiagnosis? What goes wrong with those missed or misdiagnoses?

No diagnosis is guaranteed to be accurate.
Professional misdiagnosis or missed diagnosis do not add validity or credibility to self-diagnosis.

I have no answer to your transparent attempt to elevate self-diagnosis beyond flawed.

Yes.

I think people become deeply conditioned to believe that 'the experts' know it all. The problem is such 'expertise' is very often normed on a certain set of people, and if you do not belong to that category, no matter how much you feel your reality, it becomes harder to get official validation for it. This has been historically true of women's knowledge (western, 'scientific' knowledge has traditionally been white, male, colonialist knowledge in the guise of 'science' which has led to horrors like wanting to bring 'civilization' to the 'heathens' based on 'expert scientific knowledge' about what is the 'right' way to be. We can spend the rest of this millenium going round and round about self-vs. expert diagnosis, but the truth is some people have to rely on self-diagnosis because they are simply not given the validation by the 'expert' because they do not fit the 'norm' of whatever 'disease' they are looking into. This happens with heart disease, diabetes, and ASD. I am highly educated, pretty damned smart, and have known for a long time that I am not 'normal', and when I started to research AS and pretty much self-diagnosed, my doctor refused to accept it, my therapist refused to accept it, and my 'friends' definitely refused to accept it. I now have a diagnosis from a bona fide ASD-specialist psychiatrist and my doctor and therapist STILL refuse to accept it. I think we follow a herd mentality when it comes to 'must have diagnosis by an expert, otherwise it is not valid.' I am not saying it is smart not to pursue an official diagnosis, especially if that brings along some resources or accommodations with which one can do better in this business of living life, but even if someone is faking it, wanting attention, and has falsely 'self-diagnosed' -- who cares? If a self-diagnosis helps someone feel a little less in pain, why does there have to be gatekeepers of 'pure'/genuine Aspies and non-genuine Aspies? Any kind of purity-based rhetoric should be instantly suspect, especially by a group of people who are united in their experience, in greater or lesser amounts, of being marginalized and made to feel they are 'less.' I have to be honest; I was quite surprised at the amount of 'us vs. not us' that I have read from the posts in this forum. I am a newly diagnosed Aspie, and very disappointed that there is this kind of separatist, purist rhetoric that I have come to expect from the general NT world. As someone else wrote on this forum, I suppose this is simply about being human and living up to our inability to get along and live and let live, and nothing to do with NT/AS-ASD types. It is pretty disappointing, though. In some ways, it is worse to feel an outsider in a place where one is hoping to find less of the divisiveness one deals with in the NT world everyday than in the NT world, where one has pretty much come to expect it. Who cares if someone has self-diagnosed. Let them be. And be kind to them. They are hurting, too.

To the person who is struggling and in pain, and has felt this pain her/his whole life, a 'flawed' self-diagnosis might be a sanity- or life-saver, and far from irrelevant. Also, what is considered 'flawed' is probably based on 'objective' criteria set up by a limited group of people in power. Research criteria/parameters and scientific/social science/medical research-diagnosis research methods which are considered as leading to 'flawed' results when the results are outside of those parameters at one point in time becomes the 'norm' at another point in time, if enough people fight for their voice and against discrimination.

I am well aware of the positivist belief that value judgments never enter into positivist science, btbnnyr. And also of the considerable body of critique of positivism; between theory and methodology there is a positivist minefield, as you will also know. I don't share your faith in the pristine application of positivism in the soft sciences which rely on human interaction.

Personally I think that in this area of applied psychology, it is riddled with value judgments, and gaps in existing knowledge and theory complicate that process. Assessment is not just a clinical process; it is also a communicative encounter between unique individuals, inherently biased by pre-existing assumptions, experience and class beliefs etc on both sides, and not all of these operate on a conscious level.

JJ2015, I hear you. People are in pain because of the undermining that goes on.

Beautifully put, B19!

btbnnyr - Thanks for posting this. Maybe this partially explains why some people (myself included) questioned their diagnosis. I absolutely don’t know myself “from the outside”.

A while back, I believe you (or perhaps it was someone else) mentioned that it was not uncommon for people to not recognize how they “come off”. Even if they had the opportunity to watch a video of themselves, they still would not recognize how they “come off”. I find this simply fascinating.

Anyhow, I suppose this is why I find these threads so fascinating. Because I learn so much about myself.

For the record, I do not hate self-diagnosers. That seems like a silly reason to hate or ridicule anyone.

I don't know any of the things you mentioned about positivist something.

I am talking about the difference between process of professional diagnosis vs self diagnosis of how traits are matched to diagnostic criteria, in one case criteria is used how they are not designed to be used.