Is self-diagnosing accurate?

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We self diagnose about lots of things, and have insider knowledge.

Seeing yourself in relation to everyone, has more points of reference than one outsider spending an hour to place a stranger somewhere in the mix.

Those here with official paperwork are all very different.

I think as we go through life we may discover on our own we are left handed, without professional help.

I think it can be. Or maybe it's self fullfilling. I don't know, but they don't know either.

They know we act a certain way and we know we act a certain way, but each psych can label us differently.

One may say INDEED and another say, maybe maybe not. It all depends and that is why it is so unreliable util they get a gene test.

It all depends who is doing the diagnosing. I found myself to be more accurate than two thirds of all consulted psychiatrists.

No professional is qualified to judge whether or not any patient has AS unless that professional has particular (post qualification) ASD-specific training, and experience with ASDs on which to draw. It is a specialist field that generalists have no business doing anything other than referring patients on to those with clinical levels of expertise in ASD-specific assessment and diagnosis.

"Diagnoses" from those who lack clinical levels of expertise seem intuitively less likely to be accurate than self-diagnosis, and apparently ASDs is one of those things it's still considered perfectly respectable to discriminate against by employing speculative and non-clinical stereotypes/personal opinions as a basis for clinical decision making.

Fancy if a doctor refused to accept you were female because "girls cannot be good at maths" or that you were a male because "real men never cry"? This would be obviously unacceptable, but failure to match the non-qualified, non-clinical stereotypes held by a doctor about AS is for some reason considered a perfectly acceptable and clinically sound basis for clinical decision making by the doctors concerned, and judging by the lack of any action to stop this kind of prejudice, acceptable to the medical establishments and society at large.

I feel that a diagnosis can do nothing but good for someone with Asperger's or autism.

For one, there are so many people who are not close to being on the spectrum, but still have poor social skills or are "just different". When you go for a diagnosis, they don't just ask "Do you have obsessive interests? Is it hard for you to make friends?" and then slap a DX on you and you're done with. The truth is, a lot of NT's meet some of the social deficits but are not close enough in the other areas to be diagnosed. There are certain disorders that more specifically address social skills, but words like "autism" and "Asperger's Syndrome" there is more to.

I was diagnosed with high-functioning autism when I was in middle school. "High-functioning" as far as social skills compared to most other people my doctor diagnosed, but I met the criteria as far as pretty much everything else from poor self-help skills to a strong need for routine. My grandma (who worked with autistics) and my mom had associated quite a few of my behaviors, especially my profound gift with numbers from an extremely early age, as autistic. By the time I was 12 or 13, my mom didn't want to wait any longer. The professional child physciatrist who diagnosed me, and this took 3 days worth of testing sessions. He asked me hundreds of questions about so many different topics, evaluated my speech, evaluated my thought processing/"mental skills", ways of learning, he even gave me tests I thought had nothing to do with AS, such as grip tests and timed writing. He had in-depth conversations with my mom about my behavior, speech and fine motor developments since my early childhood.

Yes, there are a lot of "doctors" out there, especially the US, who should be fired. But, there are also enough licensed physciatrists and social workers who know the spectrum inside-out and have diagnosed a lot of people with a high-functioning ASD. When you are at work or school, or a lot of other places in the world, the difference between handing them a medical document that was written by a professional, or saying you think you have a condition that they have not heard of, it makes a huge difference and you won't regret it.