Personal opinion on aspergers

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If anyone's interested I've started a new thread called : Starting Football team soccer team if your american

This threads died oh well!

Asperger's comorbid with:

Nonverbal learning difference
Schizoid personality disorder
Schizophrenia

Sleep difficulty
Eating and bowel movement difficulty
Sensory processing disorder
Seizure

Coming from a family of geeky scientists and engineers but also mental illnesses and suicides: these traits provide both risks and benefits. How they balance in each individual depends on countless internal and external factors. Overall, outside view and outside-of-the-box creativity are probably valuable enough for societes to outweight the risks, so the genes are still here.

In my fourth month of diagnosis, I consider it a part of a way of being. I suppose one could say it forms part of a personality and that is shared among ASD folks, but there is much more of the personality that is not shared. My ASD-like BFF and I are both deep thinkers, justice-oriented, etc. But I am hypersensitive and extroverted (with EF problems) and she is hyposensitive and introverted (without EF problems). Very different personalities and yet a shared part. I do feel I am more "myself" with my ND friends, than with my NT friends. Consider this: I relate to an NT friend who has a personality similar to mine (giving, extroverted, sensitive), but also to her husband who is ASD like (intellectual, socially awkward -by NT standards). I actually was friends with her husband first, but where as all other wives resent me (or something), she embraced me and she and I are friends now.

And as far as being a disability --- as Magma said it has it's pros and cons and my experience is that in my culture it's been more difficult than not. I feel my pros are appreciated by some but more often my differences or cons are noticed and criticized or I am ostracized. I am the typical "spiky" ability person, with high level ability in one area and average ability in the other (which is a relative disability, not an absolute one). It causes frustrations b/c I cannot understand others or communicate well relative to the whirlwind in my head.

I've always looked upon it as a mental illness.

Diagnostically, aspergers is a flavor of autism and so best described as a disability. The DSM-5 and ICD-11 both describe autism as a neurodevelopmental condition. not an acquired mental health condition like say depression or a personality disorder, like say Borderline PD.

It is a disability but it has always affected my emotions and cognitive thinking more than anything else. I'm not saying it's a mental illness for everyone else, but it just feels that way for me. My brother also has Asperger's and he's always been affected emotionally too. It's like a mental illness we were born with and is incurable.

But I'm just as entitled to have an opinion as the OP is.

Hello Ihavestandardsjust. Welcome to W.P., my totally unqualified opinion is that perhaps it is neither a disability nor a personality type per se. It is a neurobiological disorder (disorder defined as falling outside the standard deviation) and is quite natural. However, in the modern world it is disabling, and as it modifies our personalities somewhat, then it isn't a personality type but a strong influence on the personality.

I have "high functioning" autism or so the psych told me, but let me make this clear--just about everything I do is based on autism in one way or another; the way I move, what I wear, my surroundings in the house--it's all rooted in stuff autistic people do.

Autism/Asperger's is a spectrum disorder. No two people are alike, but most people with ASDs have some difficulty with social interactions, communication and executive function.

hmmmmmm........ a reversion to a different type of evolvement of mankind .... possibly a
evolution step .. Something societies have aversions to is changes . backwards forwards ..?
adapting to environmental changes ? Truley this tendency towards self destruction of the Planet and its contents by self absorbed self serving entities of all types over a great period of time .
Could very possibly be bound to have reprocussions . Just sort of being a ice age or complete
catastrophy. Hunter gather groups that might see the need to work together efficaously .
(please pardon my advanced spelling mistakes .... ) .intregal violence yeilds integral destruction ?

Asperger's is no longer a diagnosis is in the US. But I suppose, since it is no longer an actual diagnosis, it could probably be used to describe a personality type. The danger in that is that if people think that it is a personality type, people who were diagnosed with Asperger's before 2013 might end up losing any help and services that they are getting because people won't believe that they need them. You don't get help and services for personality types. And I would hate for people to argue with me and to tell me that I only have a personality type. If I had been diagnosed one or two years prior to when I was, I would have been given an Asperger's diagnosis. Fortunately I was diagnosed under the ASD umbrella and got an ASD level 3 diagnosis. But because on the surface, I mistakenly appear like a level one, people will often tell me I "just have Asperger's" and they don't take my needs seriously. This is incredibly dangerous for me and in some ways not getting the services and help that I need can be deadly for me. So personally, I don't like the idea of thinking that Asperger's is just a personality type. I know too many people in real life who have the Asperger's diagnosis and their struggles are real and they need real help. They don't just have awkward personalities.