Aspergers assessment: scraps AS and goes for ADHD in 5 mins!

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I don't understand the bipolar part (there's no hyphen by the way).
And yes, I know they're on the same spectrum. And I know technically everyone is ont he same spectrum, even those pesky NTs that everyone says I am.
I actually think there's some truth in the fact females and males may more often have more differences in their presentation of it. I mean, depression shows up differently, and you do get depressed guys told they have anger problems or stress instead.

I really do think people only look at what they see. If AS is about behaviour only, then loads of annoyingly awkward people would have 'disorders'.
Even the fact that I like people is used against me. People are great because I like psychology obviously, they're loads of subjects of course I'm going to enjoy being around them and analysing them.
It doesn't mean I understand them. It means I analyse them again and again.

My aspie brother laughed at me for researching flirting with literature and in person using social experiments to try to understand it.
I think I understand one type of flirting but I've yet to attach it to a personality type. Which I think is an important factor in flirting types. As the rules of flirting seem to change, maybe it is down to the type of flirting. (There are other factors but I doubt you guys care.)

They were like this with my physical health and mood disorder, so I did expect it, but this is something so people seem to see as possible, that it does confuse you when people respond the way they do while they previously make such a big fuss about the same problems. I know I keep saying that, it's just I hate how they don't see they're making no sense and they act like I'm over analysing.
It's just they're under analysing!



Haha I'd quite like to sue.
Next time I'll bring all my letters because he didn't have a single relevant piece of paper.

Maybe you're both. I am; other members here are too.

I think it's a possibility. I just don't think he should have focused on it when we weren't there for that. It should have been something he brought up last but focused on the task at hand at first.
I have some traits, but even those aren't impacting on my life terribly for me to care anyway.

Bi-polar is different than what you're thinking. It's when a person has a sexual fetish for both Santa and Mrs. Claus.

Oh man, I can't keep adding all these diagnoses, there's too many now. =[

This is an ignorant statement. ADHD is an actual diagnosis and it cannot be caused by someone being stung by a bee in a lecture hall. It is caused by a set of neurological developmental delays - that is, parts of the brain do not develop as fast as they should, leading to impairments in self-regulation.

I agree with you, but I suspect I can guess what jacked is trying to say. That's because I do have my own problems with the assessment of ADHD and ADD - how can you decide what is an "appropriate" amount of attention without knowing what the person is thinking. The quote is from a psychologist's report on my son when he was in school - and this struck me because, as a writer, I can get ideas from almost anything. And if you don't understand the process I go through as a writer, in generating ideas, you would easily say I was paying an "inappropriate" amount of attention to this or that. Now, I probably do have ADHD - but getting hung up on what I pay attention to without understanding why is not a good way to convince me of that. Just as I was also inattentive in school because I was bored. I was reading Reader's Digest by the time I got into first grade.

As I say, I probably do have ADHD. But failing to consider the other factors which caused my distraction delayed my ability to understand and accept this. There are other reasons for distraction. Simple boredom, being a writer, no doubt many others. So many kids are labelled ADD just because they cause problems in school - without considering other possible reasons - that there is good reason to suspect a certain number of diagnoses are not reliable. In my own case, I was never diagnosed, because I got out before ADD or ADHD was well known. But if the other, legitimate reasons I was distracted had been addressed - if the school system had faced the fact they could not do even a halfway decent job of teaching me, and if people had admitted it was perfectly reasonable for a writer to pursue whatever things triggered ideas, I might have started thinking sooner about the other issues I have with attention.

Number one would be right, unless you're lecturing about your interest.

Number two could be right. Most likely, a person with AS wouldn't show any emotion, or better, "appropriate" emotion, in the presence of others.

I think this has more to do with not knowing what these things mean than the diagnostician being vague and non-specific.



There's no evidence of systematic overdiagnosis of ADHD. This is largely a cultural myth stemming from the idea that everyone has the problems that ADHD is characterized by and by villainizing the medications. There are also widespread incorrect beliefs about and a lack of understanding of what sort of behavior tends to merit a diagnosis of ADHD. One thing that psychiatrists learn, for example, is what developmentally appropriate behavior is for children. Children who have ADHD do not have developmentally appropriate behavior, and this is what trips a lot of people up. They think "all kids like to run around, why diagnose ADHD for it?" And the answer is because you have six year olds running around and behaving like four year olds rather than six year olds, to name a possible example.

I understand the suspicion. I have a lot of suspicions about various aspects of diagnosis and treatment myself. However, I think that the information is actually out there and can be researched if one is skeptical and wants to know what is actually going on. My own research of available information tends to indicate that ADHD is widely underdiagnosed and undermedicated, and that treatment and diagnosis are actually complicated because so many people perpetuate the idea that it is not a valid diagnosis, or that diagnostic methods are unreliable when they are not truly that unreliable. They are, by definition, judgment calls and they are far from perfect. They are also far from being so unreliable as to be useless.

Sorry - I wasn't even attempting to say it was either under or over diagnosed. That's really a separate issue as far as what I'm trying to say, which is that certain kinds of problems tend to lead to a diagnosis no matter what the cause of these problems. There may be others, whose struggles are not as obvious, who are not diagnosed and should be. But that doesn't change the fact that a kid who is disruptive in school is likely at this point to get the ADD or ADHD label - I am absolutely certain I would have wound up with it if it had been more known when I was in school. Teachers were always sending letters home to my parents. Now, as I've said, I probably do have it. But, the problems in school did not stem from ADHD. When they left me alone, I sat quietly and read books. (They complained about that, too.) Those problems were simply due to the fact they expected me to sit there quietly while they were going over things I already knew. And a diagnosis of ADHD, even if accurate, would have only served to validate their sense that I was the problem, when in fact their system was the problem, in expecting a kid who was years above grade level to endure that kind of boredom. (In fourth grade, one of my better teachers had an idea - she gave me a book I wasn't likely to have ever seen before - then talked to me about it, without giving me any clue what she was doing. Then, she explained to my mother the book had been a college textbook, and I had read it and comprehended it with a speed that shocked my teacher. She did try her best, but the system just wouldn't let her do anything really effective for me - although at least she let me read quietly in a corner after that, which worked out pretty well for both of us. If only my other teachers had had that much sense.)

I don't think that's the case. I think it may be the case that teachers might suggest ADHD as a possibility, but children don't just go in to see a psychiatrist or neuropsychiatrist and get "Disruptive? ADHD." The evaluations are more thorough than that. There are many reasons for being disruptive, and competent practitioners know to rule those out, or check for them in combination with each other (such as ADHD and conduct disorder).

Reminds me of a guy who saw my brother. My brother is BAP (broader autism phenotype). He currently has depression and social anxiety, but this was before he developed those issues - he was just a bit quirky back then. (Intense interests, stims but has great social skills.)

Anyway, this guy was convinced my brother had ADHD. He used the fact that my brother showed interference on the Stroop task (which is true of all NTs) as evidence of ADHD (ADHD do show greater interference, but he didn't pay attention to the degree). When my brother didn't have trouble sustaining attention on a boring task for the normal amount of time, this guy decided to keep the task going for an extra hour, at which point most kids would have trouble focusing. He also claimed that answering 'toast' to 'what does a toaster toast?' is a sign of ADHD.

I wish my parents had brought me along to this assessment. With my intense interest in psychology, I'd have ripped his logic to pieces.

I was crying. because I knew this would happen and did all I could to prevent it. So when he stopped me 10 minutes in I was annoyed and tired.
Knowing someone isn't happy because they are crying doesn't tell me that they're clearly NT. Personally. =/

I think the first could have been right, but I don't think it 'tells' him much, it just suggests.
He literally listened to me for around 10 minutes, with an interruption in the middle of that, then told me to shut up about it. I don't think I can trust most of his reasoning's because he didn't pay enough attention so it sounded very superficial.

It isn't always the case, certainly. I'm not saying that. And I agree competent practitioners know how to rule other causes out. The trouble is, in any field, not everyone is competent. And there is a systemic problem as well. While one possible answer to "Why is this particular child being disruptive in class?" is "The system is failing them." - the system will not accept that answer. They are "professionals", so they insist the problem must lie with the child. Even competent practitioners surely know this - in fact, they are more likely to be aware of it than incompetent ones. So how do they respond? I assume in different ways, depending on the exact situation and their own opinion.

We both seem to agree that ADD and ADHD are misunderstood. The trouble is, misunderstanding is more complex than always producing a single result. I'm absolutely sure you're right that the fear of over diagnosing ADD and ADHD often leads to a failure to make such a diagnosis even when it is warranted. But it is possible for that problem to co-exist with other problems. In fact, I read one article a while back (I think it was in the New York Times, which would mean it is archived behind a paywall now) about a specific doctor who admitted to knowingly diagnosing kids with ADD and prescribing medication for them even if he had no reason to think they had it. His rationale was that this was a poor area, these kids were struggling, and this was the one thing he could do which had the greatest chance of helping them. Now, that specific example says nothing about the overall rate of inaccurate diagnoses (in which I would include the failure to diagnose someone who should have been diagnosed). It simply illustrates that when an issue isn't well understood, things can go wrong in many ways.

The original post which started our side discussion was very badly phrased, and I doubt the poster understands ADD or ADHD at all. But my point was that a part of this failure to understand is the consequence of a larger failure to understand by many people, which muddies the waters. I don't think - overall - that ADD and ADHD are "overdiagnosed", but I do believe that there are a few obvious cases of faulty diagnoses that then help to drive the misunderstandings, and, in turn, lead to under diagnosis in reaction.

Then, the fact that many medications which are prescribed for ADD and ADHD have been shown to offer no long term improvement, but only a temporary boost (and the fact that those who become dependent on these medications do worsen when taken off them, because of that dependence, misleads many into believing they were providing some benefit) is another complicating factor. Every single incident that creates confusion helps to set up a bad situation all around. The overall issues are important, but so are each one of the individual misunderstandings which contribute to those overall issues, directly or indirectly.

For what it's worth, I was evaluated once, as a child, by someone who was not a competent practitioner at all. He didn't even have a degree, he was just someone who volunteered as a "school counselor" because of some vague religious training. And he was involved because my second grade principal got it into her head that I was the new incarnation of Satan, or something close to it. She insisted I could read at a normal distance, even though various eye doctors have since confirmed I was born legally blind. And she sent me to this "counselor". Who, being an utter idiot, made up his mind I was a sociopath (because instead of reading the fluffy bunny stories my "peers" were reading, I was reading sea stories, which included many accounts of shipwrecks, which was an obviously "ghoulish" interest for a second grader). Fortunately, his status meant he didn't have the power to do much to affect my life long term, but he still upset and scared me and my parents. (Now, keep in mind this was the 1960s. On the one hand, no one had heard of Aspergers, so a kid obsessed with sailing ships and the sea would not have been an obvious Aspie, just a weirdo. On the other, everyone was freaking out and assuming everyone who acted a bit differently must either be on drugs or something equally awful.) That was not the only time an utter misunderstanding did real damage, although it was the worst. But, in my experience, any individual misunderstanding of what is going on in a specific person's mind is hugely damaging. And the real problem is, we need to work toward a reality where, as much as possible, the real, underlying causes are accurately identified in every single case. To my mind, getting hung up on "under diagnosis" or "over diagnosis" is somewhat of a red herring - the real question is, how do we get every diagnosis to be as accurate as possible. Because the person who is misunderstood is also hurt, every time, no matter which way the misunderstanding goes. And that was the core of my point.

It is in the sense that it's on the DSM IV, I don't mean to say we don't have it at all. So please don't mistake my meaning, If so sorry I wrote it wrong.

I was told I had ADD, because in 1980 anyone could say you have it and Hans Asperger's work was ignored. Officially today a teacher may not say you have add because it is a diagnosis so they took that away from schools too.

But if you and I went to a party every night for a week, and had to go to english class to learn how to diagram sentences.
doesn't matter what we have in our heads we would have ADD for sure.

I just meant to say that it is more of a trait, like the beginning of the journey to see what's holding us back or in ADHD leaping us forward.
And that is the way that the Neuro-scientist that studied me in 84 explained it to me, As a precurser to a larger issue. So of course you have it but why. and why does the diagnosis stop there? What causes the ADD or ADHD, is it social anxiety? is it Low Intelligence? High Intelligence? hearing problem? hate the teacher? Bong hit in the boys room?

As for bipolar (no hyphen) the way I have asperger's tends to make me seem like I don't care and a know it all, and that really pisses of the 3 bipolar people I know. But it might not piss off everyone with bipolar. I happened to noticed a pattern there and it was brought to my attention by one of them that only her Autistic cousin pissed her off like I did. Coincidence? maybe, maybe not...