Wrong Asperger's Self-Diagnosis

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Well, I'm going to let them know ahead of time, so they can more accurately make a diagnosis. After all, if I truly have AS, then "acting like an NT" is theoretically impossible, no? If that's so, then if I successfully act like one, then I must be NT.



Well, I wouldn't say "faking your personality" is what I'm going after. I'm more going after, more or less, the common sense things like trying to be nicer, more considerate and extroverted. Those are harmless (Actually, quite beneficial!) changes that no one disapproves of, regardless of how awful their intrinsic personality is.



The outcome won't necessarily be as good as it is for "someone who's natural at it", but it'll still be better than otherwise if one were to neglect trying to their hardest to be the best person they can be.

How do you know that? Have you kept tabs on, say 20 self-dx'ed people for what they report they've looked at? And then figured what percentage of self-dx'ed people on the site that they represent in order to determine that most don't do enough research?

This reminds me of the other (usually) ubiquitous claim, that most of the people on this site are self-diagnosed. The last poll I saw on the subject reported that 1/3 were self-dx'ed and 2/3 were officially-dx'ed.

I suspect this is similarly a case of projecting pre-conceptions on top of actual reality. Emotions seem to run really high for some around these issues.

As far as questioning Baron-Cohen's test, maybe. However, he is a professional research scientist, and would presumably know how to do a proper statistical analysis for his test. If the test is so bad, I'd think he wouldn't bother publishing it (let alone with his name on it).

Okay, so your stance is:

Most people who take the AQ and score 32+ get a false positive and are thus not actually autistic, but those with really high AQ scores have really awful social lives because they have Asperger's.

Which leaves me wondering what you are actually getting at.



Fair enough. But I still do not accept your assertion that people are just diagnosing themselves based on an AQ score and a sucky social life. What I have seen - in interacting with people here - is that it takes many of them a lot of evidence well beyond a screening quiz and having social troubles to conclude that they might be autistic. They talk about sensory integration difficulties, cognition difficulties, stimming, interests, repetitive things in general. Everything that goes into a diagnosis.

I am not saying that no one ever does this. When the AQ hit the internet a lot of people took the quiz and started asking if they were autistic, but my experience has been that when people score in the autistic range, they tend to deny it means anything unless they have a particular reason to explore the possibility.

Er, sorry to contradict you, but have you done any research at all? These are personality traits, not Aspergers characteristics. Asperger's is where your entire brain is wired differently, and it effects every aspect of your life. Personally, I'm a social person, I'm sometimes extremely introverted and sometimes extremely extroverted, and I'm loud. I love interacting with other people. Does this mean I don't have Aspergers? No. I have an official diagnosis by a highly qualified expert from 10 years ago.

Aspergers means you take what people say literally, you struggle to read body language, and you may or may not have difficulty picking up on sarcasm for this reason. For example, my friends are constantly frustrated with me because they say things that are meant to be obviously joking or sarcastic, and I take them literally, and may even feel upset or hurt by things they've said as a joke. In a group of people, if a joke is told I am nearly always the last person to get it, sometimes bursting out laughing minutes after everyone else. Furthermore, due to my difficult with verbal tone and body language, I've often hurt peoples feelings badly without intending to, and having no idea what I'd done until several days later somebody says something and I am completely shocked - because to me it came out of the blue.

Aspergers means you tend to understand the world via a rigid set of rules and routines, and if those rules or routines are broken this is extremely upsetting for you. For example - I have a very specific meal regime; I tend to eat the same thing for breakfast and lunch, and I alternate between two different dinners. If I can't have my normal breakfast; half a cup of gluten free museli consisting of a quarter cup of rice bran, an 8th of a cup of flakes, and an 8th of a cup of mixed dried fruit and flakes, with natural yoghurt and either 4 chopped prunes and 1 piece of chopped crystallized ginger or one chopped apple, I feel my anxiety levels rising.

Aspergers means you perseverate on topics such as a particular special interest like mathematical equation dot-the-dots (my current focus) that may be relatively brief or long term, and you talk about this interest consistently until other people get so pissed off at you they tell you to shut up. You may have a negative obsession, such as fear of gaining weight, stuck in your head, and you can't stop the continuous circling thoughts about it even when you hate how it makes you feel (this obsession lasted for a year with me, I obsessed about it constantly, every day).

Aspergers means you may have sensory issues - such as over sensitivity to lights and noise, or certain fabrics - for example, whenever I touch or stroke velvet I feel nauseous as though I am going to throw up.

I could go on, but I'll stop here. I'm sorry if I was too heavy handed, or too verbal, but I felt upset at what you said, because it's very ignorant which is not your fault but people shouldn't be given misleading information. I've seen other people post similar opinions on WP to what you are saying, and it worries me. Aspergers is not a personality type, it's a serious neurological condition that effects me in every aspect of my life. I'm not saying it's all bad - in my opinion it comes with great strengths and great weaknesses.

BTW, when I was diagnosed the psychiatrist said I was mild.

I can't speak for others, but for myself I can say that it's not self diagnosis that worries me (quite the contrary - I believe the majority of us are self diagnosed, even those of us who have a professional diagnosis), but people spreading false information about what Aspergers is, as I discussed above.

I'm getting at those with high AQ scores will naturally tend to have sucky social lives regardless if they actually have aspergers, because the "really high scorers"(Think 45+) have the worst amount of social dysfunctioning and there's going to be continuous distribution from the socialites with low AQ scores and the aspergers people with really high AQ scores. So, the sucky social life is not an indication of aspergers among "high scorers"(30-35) even though many use that as a primary piece of evidence for having aspergers.



Many are simple in their approach of determining whether or not they have aspergers. Of course, many are a bit more comprehensive, as you've explained.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that clicking on the profile button returns a page that contains the diagnostic status of "Aspergers - Undiagnosed" more than twice as often as "Aspergers - Diagnosed". I became painfully aware of that reality when sifting through the test results in the "Set of scientific tests" thread in order to cull scores for actually diagnosed aspies.



No, his test and its research results are fine. It's the lazy, possibly biased writers on Wikipedia and gullible Wikipedian readers that results in misinformation that circulates around the internet more often than a heroin syringe among the homeless.

Read my answer in the other thread. I linked wikipedia because it links to the research. I explicitly said so in the post you replied to, and yet you somehow completely missed that point.

Anyway, I'll just go back to my original point:

People who self-diagnose themselves with Asperger's Syndrome typically do so because they are experiencing distress and trying to find an explanation. One of the many last things they need is someone on the internet who has literally none of the facts about these people at their disposal to question them and tell them they must obviously be mistaken. Or even imply that "most" are mistaken, without naming names.

Ok, I just clicked on the profiles of the last 13 posters in this thread. The results are:

professionally diagnosed: 6
self-ex'ed: 4
not sure: 3

That's not a 2:1 ratio between self dx'ed and prof. dx'ed. It is actually the 33%-66% breakdown of self- to professionally- diagnosed people in that poll I mentioned, which you ignored. You're guess doesn't seem to be accurate.

False explanations are inadequate.



False implication. I haven't been doing that ... recently... and you know it.



It's statistically inevitable, and I've already explained why.

Also, I've uploaded the actual distribution curve that some people have been too lazy to check out themselves. Also, in particular, pay careful attention to the usage of the "False positive rate" language, as I've explained in the other thread.

Last edited by swbluto on 04 May 2011, 12:55 am, edited 1 time in total.

That's a potentially biased sample. What if professionally diagnosed individuals are more likely to answer this thread because they feel personally affected by it? Do the "Set of scientific tests" thread to see what I mean. Make sure you do all 20+ pages like I did.

You're not qualified to judge them as false.

They may not be qualified to make an official diagnosis, but they're not making one. They are more qualified to look at their own experiences than you are.



You suggested the majority of self-diagnoses here are false. What you mean is you didn't call anyone out by name.



Because you have said that you believe the primary factors in self-diagnosis are "I scored high on the AQ" and "I have a crappy social life."

Also, it probably couldn't hurt to familiarize yourself with the high rate of underdiagnosis in adults of a particular age range, due to the lack of an available diagnosis:

http://www.iancommunity.org/cs/articles ... r_syndrome

I know this is true for me, I've been having a lot of problems and after a fair amount of reading I realized that nothing else "fits" like AS. I could be wrong, and I'd like to get officially diagnosed someday, but until then I'm going to go with AS.

for what it's worth, my AQ score was 48.

After that moment of frustration, I remembered that a close friend of mine, who studies medicine, told me that her Professor of Psychiatry were teaching them about Asperger's Syndrome and that he was an amazing Psychiatrist. I contacted him and I've been seeing him since then, and I've been properly evaluated. He is, indeed, an amazing professional! Got my diagnosis today: I do have Asperger's Syndrome!
After this bad time I went through, I want people to understand and have more respect for self-diagnosed aspies!

Thank you for the update. Sounds like things really turned around from that bad experience.