if you are an aspie you are not autistic

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Perhaps, but she’d have to be pretty bad at the math/spatial component to offset her obvious linguistic abilities and get an 83 on anyone’s scale. Also her logic functions would be so low as to preclude, or at a minimum severely challenge, her from composing a coherent simple sentence, let alone the ones she wrote with an average of over 16 words per sentence (of which nearly 5 on average were polysyllabic). Additionally her post, while brief, is rhetorically sophisticated.

I was bad at math, and I certainly did better. Still, I don't trust tests in general. Only brittany can say, but she may have been tired, sick, etc.... Also she may have been nervous on a timed test.

Still, Brittany, I agree with the others. Get retested The IQ they gave you DOES sound low. If you test low again, try to find out where, and see if you can improve it. Math, Verbal, and Spatial CAN be improved, and they and experience can help reasoning. If nothing else, it will be one less thing to get upset about. You probably will be one or more standard deviations above. Most here, at least those that mentioned it, seem to be closer to 2.

YIKES! You are really examining peoples writing styles. Are you doing a study for a book or something?

BTW Please don't hold these simple short sentences against me. I certainly don't want to be circumlocutious.

Einstein had an IQ of "only" 160? That is well past the threshhold of genius (140) and is certainly high enough for me to believe that he was capable of all he did- especially as he was so focused on his physics work... he seems to have had some narrow, intense interests there.
Looking over these posts, it's clear that the medical profession still has not established very uniform criteria for diagnosing various ASDs and distinguishing between them. Hopefully DSM-V will make a bit clearer these distinctions so that we'll have a bit less confusion. In the meantime... we know we're a bit "different" and we know that some of us may need special help in some way or another (and others may do just fine on their own). So just go ahead and take whatever label suits your own needs best. For me the most useful part of knowing that I'm AS is simply that I now better understand my own behavior, and why I tend to have such difficulty interacting with other people. So it doesn't really matter if I call it Autism, Asperger's, or HFA. I would probably tell people "autism" simply because no one knows what AS is.

I didn't mean to imply it was low. I even called him smart.

I simply meant it wasn't THAT far off from some here.

I might also have spoken of how commercial airliners in the US are generally only allowed to do mach .8 above land. That isn't fast, but it is also slower than the jet fighters. Have you guys ever heard a jet fighter take off? Those little planes sound louder than some of the bigger airliners, and just dissappear. You have to look up in the air to do a double take. But .8 isn't slow either. I WISH my car could go that fast!

Obviously I am having a little fun here. Relax.

My diagnosing doctor told me Aspergers is a form of autism and that I am autistic because I have Aspergers.

However I know one child who is diagnosed autistic and I had an adult neighbor who was autistic. This being low spectrum Auties and not Aspies. I can't say I related to them at all other than with the child we both have the sensitivities to light, noise, textures, etc. However the kid would just grunt, squeal and squeak and he repeatedly threw things across the room hitting people. The older Autie would repeatedly burp and fart to get attention and would play with himself and say nasty things over and over. So I can't say in that regards that I think I am autistic because even on a bad day I act better than they do and most importantly I KNOW not to act that way.

I think also because of those very differences is why Aspergers generally is not considered a disability by the govt.

The whole way people are defined on the spectrum is just wrong anyway. Auties are always looked at as low functioning; however there are many examples of Auties with genius level math skills or unbelievable musical talents that rival NT's.

Mental retardation is also wrongly defined. I heard a lady on the NPR who was labeled mentally ret*d and she responded to questions like a normal person and did not slur her speech. I mean she sounded normal to me. Some of her interests and viewpoints sounded a little Aspie. Yet she was labeled a ret*d and she was actually quite brilliant and more at ease during the radio interview than I would have been.

Asperger himself - who coined the AS term, or at least is responsible for its existence today - saw it as a form of autism. I don't understand why so many people are still trying to deny it.

AC

You can be denied health care for being autistic you know.

Something even more bizarre... Kanner and Asperger, working independently of each other, both coined variations of the same term, which was "autism". I suppose it's a matter of definition -- and is the habit of medical types to question what people have said before.

Personally I reckon it's two types of the same thing.

AC,

Ticker did a good job of explaining it in her last two posts. The first saying HER doctor said it was autism, yet her experience belied that. The second post said she found people lable autistic, and even ret*d that didn't appear so.

Frankly, I don't think I would openly say to coworkers, etc... that I am autistic.

It IS funny. The chances of being MR and NT are probably greater than they are with autism. An LFA COULD be later found to be quite intelligent. Some here claim to bare that out. But most early autistics were STUPID, because the smarter ones were not found to be autistic. That meant that MR and autism became inexorably linked.

BTW it is ALSO worth noting that idiot savant was renamed autistic savant, because it probably doesn't happen outside of autism, and not all have profound problems.

I did not have speech delay either but I was diagnosed HFA. I recently asked my psychologist was I Asperger's, that being the same as HFA. She said no, I am lower functioning than that and so I am just autistic, no need to add another label onto it.

Last time I was tested for IQ, the score was 87, maybe that influences me being diagnosed as plain autistic.

there are NTs who see it as an insult to the stereotypical autistic [a mentally ret*d LFAer] that someone with aspergers-who has normal to above normal intelligence and can speak,read and write can be classed as autistic.
many people who work in support/care think people cannot be autistic unless they're mentally ret*d,they think the kanners autists who live on their own,work and have been through mainstream education do not exist-what would they do if they met Temple Grandin?

am do not think aspergers is autism for all aspergans.
some are just like high functioning NTs but with social problems and obsessions,they are not autistic,other aspergans are just like higher functioning kanners autistics without speech delay.

they need to change the stereotype of autism before doing anything about aspergers first,as it is what is affecting aspergans-whether they need support and they are told they are not autistic and too intelligent,or they do not need support and are seen as mentally ret*d [as some people see anyone associated with autism].

This isn't far off from me. I HAVE historically taken things a bit more literally, answered rhetorical questions, had a difference in humor/expression, etc....

But I COULD be like Sonny in "I.Robot", in the warehouse scene, and appear like everyone else to a degree. Of course, like him, something always seems to give me away, and I willl never TRULY fit in.

Apparently, even that reference above is an AS symptom! That I remember it so vividly, and use it to express a point. Sometimes, when asked a "simple" question, I will expound on it SO much that the listener ends up zoning out, and asking the question, and I just repeat a small part of what I said, and they are happy. Sometimes, they come back asking more questions that I already answered with my long answer! You can't win!

I am the kind where a psychiatrist may think was a hypochondriac, etc... Of course, I am finding more and more that this didn't develop over time. Heck, I went to a psychologist, before I went to a psychiatrist. SHE thought it was my fathers fault because he wasn't around. THAT is crazy. My father wouldn't have helped at all.

Still, I guess it depends on what symptoms you think an autistic should have, and how you describe them. It also depends on how many of those a person with AS MUST have.

Brittany,

Maybe you were tested on a day when you were anxious or otherwise feeling lousy. I remember being given an I.Q. test in college. While I did well in the vocabulary and general knowledge sections and did generally above average on the Verbal section, I did horrible in the Performance portion, completely tanking on the Block Design portion. The evaluator said I was in the average range. Considering I had one complete failure, I think my overall intelligence is higher than she said. On verbally based tests, I have received scores between 120-150.

It just seems too random how those doing the diagnosing just throw around the terms Aspergers, HFA, Autism, PDD, PDD-NOS. The seem to assign the terms all willy-nilly. You can take one patient and put him in front of two different doctors in the same town from the same medical school and get two different diagnosis.

In my town some idiot is telling people who have multiple personality disorder and bi-polar that those are forms of autism and that they are autistic. Ahem, I beg your pardon?

Then again it is a difficult diagnosis to make. In my own instance, my friends I had told about my diagnosis say "no honey, you're just a little shy", "you're just different, weird, eccentric, etc" & "no you aren't autistic, those autistic people are stupid". Yet two doctors diagnosed me as Aspergers and one also added in PTSD. From childhood I was given dyslexic diagnosis and a unknown developmental problem which now would probably be called PDD. (There wasn't a term for it when I was a baby.) One of my doctors says I am "badly Aspergers" whatever that means... yet my friends, including an friend who is RN, say I'm normal. Though my doctor did say I've learned "to fake it good". So it would seem I am an Aspie. But then I meet other Aspies in person and I'm not like them much at all. So the terms are just all losing meaning when there is no standardization.