Why is As/HFA seen to be more ret*d than bipolar ppl?

Post Reply New Topic

ret*d is just a term in itself, it is how you use it that makes it offensive. When I was growing up this word referred to individuals with mental retardation. Even doctors used the term. Then in the late 80s/90s people started using the word "ret*d" to insult others. Now it is commonly a negative word used much in the same offensive way that "gay" is used by teenagers to mean something negative.

When use properly there is no reason to be offended. The OP is not calling anyone a "ret*d". There is a genuine question here and we shouldn't get caught up in a word. I was called stuff like this as a kid too, just so you know. I am not being insensitive.

I was in High School in the mid 80s and early 90s, and I was called a ret*d, by my NT peers, just for passing by their field of vision, in the hallways of my school. Not very happy memories. I almost took my own life, before I found out, that I wasn't ret*d, at all, so there.

Actually, I can't even make sense of the OPs question.

Then I know just about as much as you in this respect. However....there are SUPPOSEDLY a few exceptions to this. While I seriously doubt an AS diagnosis would ever be legitimate for a person with an IQ <70 (providing the score was reliable of course), I have heard of a few people who've received an AS Dx with an IQ <85. But since 85 is the cutoff between average and borderline intellectual functioning, I guess a few with AS do have IQ's in that range.




Again...this is precisely what i've heard about it all. I just thought there MIGHT be some reliable info out there i've yet to uncover. I think some even consider Rett's syndrome an ASD right? Severe/Profound MR is usually present in Rett's according the bible...excuse me....the DSM-IV







Right..... and my own "self-care" skills are a bit difficult to understand. I have no problem driving, bathing, cooking, shopping, etc.... In other words....I can TECHNICALLY do all these things with little or no inferences from sensory, motor, attentional, social, etc...issues. For me.....it seems to be more a case of tremendous avolition. I just can't seem to motivate myself to do certain things like bathe, brush my teeth, eat right, exercise, etc....This seems to be the case even in periods of my life when I wasn't feeling depressed. Depression certainly exacerbates it all though and along with it comes the brutal anhedonia. All of these tasks which are definitely within one's rational self-interest and easily performed by most people seem Herculean to me. Simply put....I just can't STAND doing them psychologically speaking even though I know how to do them and even though I despise myself for not doing them. The tedium of all these daily self-care tasks just seems unbearable to me and I felt this way even as a child. In fact....i'm surprised i'm even still alive considering how much i've neglected my physical health over the years. There's just something inside me which detests all the mundane daily routines of life no matter how vital they are to one's health and overall well-being. I have also been Dx-ed with Schizotypal personality disorder. Since some psychologists consider SPD to be a mild form of schizophrenia, i've often wondered if I have "Simple Schizophrenia". I don't exhibit any of the "positive" signs of schizophrenia like hallucinations and so forth, but many of the "negative" symptoms are present. The anhedonia (at least when i'm feeling depressed), the avolition, the blunted, shallow, flat and empty emotional responses are all present in me. The "peculiarities" of grooming and behavior, lapses in hygiene, the overinvestment in odd and downright surreal ideas I can't even attempt to explain.....all of these are things i've been dealing with throughout my life. I realize some of these behaviors are common in people with ASD/NVLD. But in these cases, they seem to be more due to sensory, motor, attentional, executive functioning and social deficits rather than merely finding them intolerable on an emotional/psychological level. It might be easy enough to chalk all this up to mere laziness..... but i've been motivated to do many other things which require alot more physical, mental and emotional effort. When I was in college, I worked 30hrs per week while attending school full time. I'm not saying there's anything impressive about that, but I think most people would say it's alot more demanding than brushing one's teeth, eating healthy and getting an hour's worth of exercise in everyday.


I just make no sense...the easy things come hard....the harder things come comparatively easy

I don't really know what you mean, as I don't know any aliens...liked or unliked I can answer in the context of cognitively delayed, though. I've know the most about AS as I've just been diagnosed and have done a lot of reading on it, a fair amount about autism but I know many children/adolescents with it (mostly LFA, some HFA), and a handful of people diagnosed with/claimed to be diagnosed with bipolar disorder. As for cognitive performance, I think with the lower functioning autism the general public thinks "oh, they can't talk" or sees the child doing something strange like covering ears, rocking, or just displaying weird behaviors and thinks they are on a delayed cognitive level than a similar child. It's impossible to decipher how smart someone is in a short time span (passing an autistic child at the grocery store, etc) without being able to communicate with them. I worked in a summer camp with a variety of autistic kids and I couldn't get a picture of their cognitive level/problem solving skills at all. For aspergers, we have average or above average intelligence but 'impaired function in social skills.' So, we come off as strange. We may be very smart but not express our intelligence in a 'normal' fashion. As far as I know, there is no correlation between people with bipolar disorder having below average or above average intelligence. IMO, bipolar is a pretty well-known disorder; I don't think people really understand it, but people use the term in to refer to a moody person. It's also a condition that is often treated with medication, unlike AS. (We can take stuff for anxiety, of course...from my understanding bipolar patients have more advancements in medication options.)

I don't know too much about bipolar, but that's my insight. From everyday life, it seems that many more people have heard of Bipolar disorder and would be much less shocked to hear of someone with it. I have heard of a few people say they have it or claim to know someone who has it, but IMO they do not fit diagnostic criteria. I mentioned AS to friend one day (I was talking about the movie "Adam") and her immediate response was something about ret*d people. I think it's just a fairly new diagnosis and people still don't know what it is.

I think, really, that the AS IQ cutoff is very very arbitrary. There's no other reason not to diagnose AS in someone who has an IQ of, say, 50, if he's got all the AS traits and he learns to speak around the same time other people who got 50s learn it. As I mentioned, the adaptive skill problems tend to be pretty much universal and not all that much dependent on IQ. With this arbitrary cutoff between AS and autism for no good reason, and the way AS and autism are not different enough to justify separating, I'll be happier when we can just call it all autism and leave this confusion behind.

Rett's is categorized as an ASD, currently, but is being strongly considered for removal because it has a known genetic cause that the other autism spectrum disorders don't share. Rett's is like autism in the same way that Down syndrome is like developmental delay--Rett's is an overall syndrome that includes, along with other neurological problems, autism. But it's distinct from autism proper because it has a distinct course and has symptoms that autism does not have.

Hard and easy by whose standards? If you find it as hard to learn to prepare your meals every day as a typical person finds learning differential equations, and find learning differential equations as easy as other people find learning how to cook dinner, then that's a difference in cognitive style and learning to cook, for you, can be a major accomplishment. (I'm just picking cooking as an example here 'cause I suck at it. ) It is so very very common on the spectrum to find something easy that most people think is horribly difficult, while at the same time just being horrible at something other people don't even think about doing because it comes so naturally. We're just weird like that.

I'm sure that ret*d people would be delighted to know that their brain configuration is a reason for suicide.

because it's related to autism and the mainstream crowd are well, thick when it comes to knowing anything about autism.


I basically took it as: people think people with HFA/AS are ret*d because they are both on the autistic spectrum and many people ignorant to what autism really is think that people with it are ret*d.
Even people that seem a bit awkward and bad socially, or are lacking in areas that most people aren't are called ret*d, because oh I don't know being different is a bad thing to them.
I used to get called a ret*d all the time by my sister. Since learning of my dx she's stopped but her friends still throw the word around. It's now a part of slang to mean anything really.
I've also been called a moron for saying things that people disagree with or maybe I said something that seemed ignorant.

Don't you blame her for trying to take her life after being picked on. It doesn't matter what they called her being called something repetitively is enough for someone to feel miserable, especially if it is something said in a mocking way.

I don't blame her for that, but look at it this way. I'll just change a couple of words in the quote.



If someone had come in here and said that, everyone would be up in arms against them.

The way it was worded, it sounded very much like it was the thought of retardation, and not the bullying, that was the cause of the problems.
Even if she was ret*d, it wouldn't have made her any less of a person.

I think that if you have lived your whole life in a world where "ret*d" is considered to be intrinsically a horrible thing to be, rather than a word that's incorrectly used as an insult, you might have been expected to retort by saying you are not ret*d without even thinking about it. It's similar to being called "gay" as an insult... or a guy being called "a girl"...

People don't think about why they use them as insults. And their targets often don't think about why they feel insulted. It might be a cause for explaining to the person who reports being insulted that way, that being ret*d shouldn't be considered shameful--especially shameful enough to use as an insult. But it is not a cause to accuse them of prejudice... it's such a huge part of our culture that if you live in it your whole life you're bound to pick it up sooner or later.

Considering CockneyRebel calls the fictional depiction of Rain Man ret*d, and she doesn't want to be associated with him (I have a good memory), one can see where the context is coming from in regards to what she means by "ret*d".

I wouldn't. I've tried to kill myself over autistic symptoms.
I still stand by it's the fact that they are being teased and not the actual word.
I used to get called emo and that should hardly mattered but in the way I was constantly teased about it made me feel miserable.

My sister used to tease me by calling me 'nerd' and I hated but then thought it wasn't really that hurtful.

Just to clarify things: when I said "ret*d" I did not mean to insult anyone. If you look carefully, I did not accuse anyone of being "ret*d", I merely asked why they are PERCEIVED as "ret*d." I agree though my term wasn't the most politically correct, it is a common term that anyone can understand, and it expresses the contempt which a number of NTs feel for us. "ret*d" means below average, and we are below average in social skills. What I meant is why we are considered aliens who can't function like normal people , whereas bipolar people can.

CockneyRebel: Your schoolmates are mentally deficient for calling you "ret*d," considering you are literate. And if you think about it, I cannot be using "ret*d" to insult aspies/hfa's because I would then be insulting myself.

Callista, pumibel and pensieve: thanks for interpreting my words accurately. I really don't see why some people think I'm deliberately insulting them. I was merely imitating words from popular culture that everyone will have encountered.

On the diagnosis of AS: I wish to differ from Callista, though I agree that literacy would qualify an autistic as high functioning. A separate diagnosis is required a different teaching styles suit different people. For example, those who cannot read or write should be given elementary lessons taught differently, as advanced methods would confuse them. Some highly talented Aspies would be suppressed by education at their age level. If you think about it Aspies are like NT's minus the social instinct.

Horus: I really wonder something. Some of the ways you describe things sound like the way I would have described things before knowing about autism. I don't want to overstep by thinking I know exactly what's going on with a guy I've never met. So please take the following as a theory and nothing more:

If I had thought (before knowing about autism) that I found regular daily activities unbearable and couldn't motivate myself to do them to save my life...

What I'd really have meant was:

I find routine daily activities incredibly difficult to do. (The "not liking" is a manifestation of the difficulty pushing myself through the task, but I didn't know they were difficult so all I picked up on was my dislike). I have very severe autistic inertia (or initiation problems) which makes it difficult for me to initiate and continue this kind of task.

What I keep coming back to whenever I read your posts is that when you actually describe your skill distribution, you don't sound unusual at all for the autistic people I have known. Your set of skills and your emotional reactions to difficulties all sound like things I have heard of in dozens if not hundreds of people.

The main difference I see is that you haven't yet learned much about the mechanics of autism, so you describe things in ways that are derived from a lifetime of not knowing what is going on. And of not knowing how autism works. (Autism isn't just a collection of outward traits for most people. It's the intersection of various unusual ways of thinking and perceiving and responding to the world.

But when you see autistic people describing things, it's like you haven't yet mapped out in your head what they mean. So you don't seem to find the similarities between people using "autism language" and you using "Horus language". You haven't learned to translate either the words or the concepts behind them and so you keep looking around for what you're not seeing. When it seems like what you're not seeing is how autism works, rather than there being some unknown property in your brain that has yet to be discovered.

So I wonder if the answer for you is going to be learning the deeper mechanics of how autism works and learning how all the concepts fit together. Because when you describe all this thinking you're really weird, I keep thinking how many other people I know with this sort of combination of difficulties.

(I remember going through something very similar after learning I was autistic. It took me years to understand and come to terms with enough of it to understand how I worked and how that fit in with autism and why I was diagnosed in the first place. That's why I seriously wonder if that's the main issue for you. But take it or leave it.)

I think that the use of the R word needs to reconsidered.

It is OK to advance or ret*d the ignition on your car engine when you are tuning it up, but you should never call a person a ret*d. It is a word which carries a lot of nasty bagage now.