"Autism Self-Diagnosis Is Not Special Snowflake Syndrome"

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How does being perpetually lost in the world appear 'trendy'?



Should my diagnosis confirm something other than Asperger's, then I would come back to open the discussion on how somethings can overlap and then discuss how or why Asperger's was not diagnosed.



Unfortunately, the flip side is that the Autistic can become the Bully in this way:
It is part of the mimicry skills, and they are mimicking the social acceptance of the 'top dog'.

And, an Autistic can be thought of as the bully because of the lack of social skills and ability to know when too far is too far. This did happen to me once.
I cannot deal with the male bonding rituals of dominance. I perceive threats when it is not. Had some kids when I was visiting a relative. The details are not important, the result is. They were doing the male bonding thing and I felt threatened. I hauled off and whopped one of the kids. He and his friend were scared, crying and ran home. Next thing I know I'm being questioned about it. The pervasive question was about the 'kidding' I was receiving. They could not understand the level of threat I perceived. So, not a good time there.


And, that reiterates this point in a slightly different way:

I used to talk to a person online back when I was 17-18 and things were find for a while but when he learned about AS through me, he started to obsess about it and and I would give him information to read about it and the more he obsessed about it, the worse he got and we stopped getting along and then my feelings no longer mattered and he didn't care how he made me feel and I tried to cut off contact with him but he started to harass me and then going "I have Asperger's" as an excuse to dismiss how I feel and to justify his behavior. I didn't buy it because he wasn't like this when we started talking. He would play the victim and has gaslight me and I didn't know the term for it then but I knew that is what he was doing. he would say I was mean to him but yet still want to talk to me and continued harassing me saying I was being mean to him because I was ignoring him or blocking him and he had a lot of screen names and always creating them to harass me because he just wouldn't let me go. I did start to get mean to him intentionally as a way to scare him off and to leave me alone but none of that worked so I started to humiliate him in my AIM profile by calling him out to get him to leave me alone. I even sent my online buddies to sic him to get him to bug off, that didn't work. So one day I created a new screen name to ditch him and then the AIM service allowed their users to link their usernames so I did that and I had all his screen names on my list so I could see when he is on so I could go invisible. I remember he told me "f**k you" when i was telling him why I refused to talk to him on both services and refuse to tell him my new screen name so that was the last straw and I went commando and would block him every time he would IM me and I was always invisible whenever he was online while I would be visible on the other list. He was tough to get rid of and he eventually gave up and would only IM me every other two years. One time I decided to give him another chance because he wanted to talk to me so when I IM him when he got on, he was like 'I don;t think i want to talk" and I asked him why and he said "you had been so mean to me over the years" and I said "okies and blocked him again. I was relieved even though what he did made no sense. He sad he wanted to talk again and then said he didn't want to talk when I messaged him. I realize now he was a narcissistic and that was his mental issue. What I read about it describes his behavior and I never knew what it was he was doing, I knew he had mental issues but I didn't know what they were. Now I know. But yet he had decided he was an aspie and managed to get diagnosed with it years later. I will always doubt he is aspie and I don't care what "symptoms" he has, they could be all fake for all I know. The way he acted and treated me, forget it I am not buying it. Plus lot of people had the same issues with him I had.

This was only one person I knew with it. It is like Munchausen some of the narcissists do. I suspect my ex boyfriend was also one of them too. For years I thought he was aspie because he said he was and he claimed he got tested for it but tings never added up for it but I thought it must be true because he had above normal hearing and didn't like tags in clothes. Now after learning about convert narcissism, it all makes sense now so I had also learned he was one and he probably hid behind labels to get away with his abuse so I wouldn't pick up on it and it made me think I had to toughen up and he wasn't doing it on purpose and I had let myself get hurt by him. I no longer identify him as an aspie because I don't want to contribute to the stigma and stereotype that we are all abusers and will tear apart your self esteem and I don't want to be the bad guy or an ass just because of my negative experience which as why I always left out Asperger's whenever I would talk about it. I didn't want to deal with any victim blaming or being told how evil I am for being hurt by him or how he treated me and being accused of being insensitive just because he had "Asperger's." Look at how we talk about those women on Ass Partners and accusing them of being narcissists. I never doubted they were abused and I do think their men were just narcissists and they are blaming it on AS and some of them have even admitted they don;t care if they had it or not, they will just keep using AS as a scapegoat, what, I can't even. That makes no sense.

Upon re-reading this, I felt the need to clarify that this happened when I was a child. I hope that was not perceived as me, as an adult, doing such a thing......

Whatta doof, eh?

Many years ago I attended my first undergraduate psychology lecture, under the title of Introduction to Psychology. I remember the first statement the lecturer made: "psychology is not what many of you may think it is; modern psychology is about the study and observation of learning and behaviour, and how centrally how learning affects behaviour; it is about what can be observed, and only behaviour can be observed. Laws have been developed to explain how the environment influences how any one person behaves, to demonstrate that people behave the way they do because of conditioned responses to the environment, even though most people regard their behaviours are internally determined choices". What was missing from that lecture was the statement that should have been there: "according to behaviourists; there are many psychologists who completely reject the mechanistic and reductionist ideas of behaviourism", and there are a minority of psychologists who reject the assertion that positivist science adapted to experimental academic psychology can ever hope to unravel the intricate workings of the human mind and its influence on behaviour".

The diagnosis of autism currently relies on the external positivist observation of a subjective selection of traits that are nominated ascientifically and changed from time to time by the committee that reconfigures each edition of the DSM. The assumption is made that the signal behaviours chose for observation arise from neurology. But there are real problems in this:

1) If psychology is the study of learning, how can it accurately be applied to behaviours stemming from innate neurology? The DSM committee has no answer to this, other than implied (and unscientific) one of "because we say it is".

2) Can autistic behaviours be learned? If you have grown up with aspergers parents, can you learn those behaviours by social learning and constant exposure, even if you don't have the neurological software consistent with ASD? IF learning is the paramount consideration in psychology, are psychologists fit to diagnose ASDs at all?

3) As the theories of autism as biased because of their reliance on over-sampling on young males and children, why are they generalised to adult females without examination of validity and reliability? Why has the DSM committee been so silent on this?

4) Where are the studies examining accuracy of diagnosis using control groups in double blind designs? Psychiatrists and psychologists assert that they are scientists, but have chosen criteria based on opinion, and the opinion constantly changes.

So diagnosis is riddled with underlying fishhooks, and these are swept under the carpet in favour of the myth of professional objectivity. 100% objectivity is never possible: it is affected by culture, rank, bias, experience; if psychology is the study of learning, then psychologists too have absorbed mainly non-scientific learning throughout their lives.

The assertion has been made in this thread (without any evidence) that the self-diagnosed are harming the formally diagnosed, presumably because "normal people" look at the self-diagnosed (not that the self-diagnosed tend to go around announcing publicly that they are on the spectrum anyway, but that's another issue) and judge them harshly in a way that adversely affects the "really diagnosed". The problem in this kind of global and targeted assertion should be obvious: for the sake of consistency, the disgruntled who are claiming that non-autistic people falsely viewing themselves as on the spectrum fail to see that a similar harm then must be being done to them by people who have been falsely diagnosed as autistic by professionals..

These 'false believers' would seem far more likely tell 'normal' people, because a professional said they were autistic. So according to the haters of self diagnosis, the wrongly diagnosed must be doing even more "damage" to the standing of the rightly diagnosed. There is only a deafening silence on this, because logic doesn't drive the anti-self-diagnosers attacks; other factors drive it, and observable characteristics which seem to be part of that seem to be: youth, life dissatisfaction, generalised resentment and possibly a need to release stored anger by displacing it onto a subgroup seen as less powerful and therefore easy targets for a pecking order assertion of dominance.

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Last edited by Jensen on 14 Nov 2015, 5:09 pm, edited 2 times in total.

No it won't, I think, because the hatred is not driven by the language or lexicology used, it's driven by a much deeper, emotionally driven resentment and seemingly other personal factors also. Young angry males seem to predominate and if the language was what was bothering them so much, then they would have cited it in their repetitive threads and complaints often.

There is a lot to discuss in your comment, but I first wanted to address this question as it grabbed my attention initially:

From what I understand of the neurology of autism, as a relatively well-informed lay-person, what you call "autistic behaviours" are the result of a burst of neural growth and hyper-connection that happens in autistic brains between the ages of about 2-6 years. The reason that there is such a wide variety of "symptoms" in ASDs is because this burst of growth and connectedness (when initial neural "superhighways" are constructed) occurs throughout the entire brain. It leads to an individual pattern of hyper-connectedness between some brain areas and hypo-connectedness between other areas. This is why some autistics have various types of synaesthesia and some don't, some have severe sensory issues and some don't, some are very verbal and some are non-verbal, etc. The "autistic behaviours" we end up with are adaptive responses to our individual pattern of hyper- and hypo-connectedness. The way that parts of the brain connect and communicate with one another in NT brains is relatively uniform and creates a pattern recognisable while a person is performing tasks inside an fMRI machine; autistic brains, on the other hand, have recognisable divergent and atypical patterns of connectedness which is bound to have notable effects on development and behaviour. I found this article on the subject really interesting and informative:

ZME Science: No two autistic brains are alike – each has unique connections

Wow...That is so interesting. I am in contact with a group that is doing research. This was one of the things they said they wanted the patients they accept to do. That and other electrode thingies while wearing the skull cap I guess.

I'm all for it! Like I said, one way or another, I want to find out what is really going on.

Well, that and if I get accepted, I get to be a cyborg for a short bit!!

."The reason that there is such a wide variety of "symptoms" in ASDs is because this burst of growth and connectedness (when initial neural "superhighways" are constructed) occurs throughout the entire brain" (Wilburforce).

That goes to the heart of the issues of confounding variables in autistic diagnosis. The symptom variety in real life is wide, the symptom criteria in clinical practice is extremely narrow, so the criterion factors for clinical diagnosis rely on a very small, cherrypicked set of criteria. Suppose you meet all the not-cherrypicked criteria and barely register on the cherrypicked criteria. Are you then not autistic?

I have had an MRI before for a neurological study (for bipolar disorder), but not an fMRI which is significantly different (and potentially more informative about brain function specifically as well as brain structure). I would be thrilled to participate in a study like the one mentioned in the article. It would be fascinating.

It is quite literally true--on a neuro-physiological level--that when you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person. Our neurological wiring is indeed unique, from one autistic to the next, varying from each other in a way and to a degree that neurotypicals generally do not vary from each other. In that sense, we actually are "special snowflakes".

How do you sign up to these studies anyway? I wanna see my brain

I read the article. The uniformity of the NT brain is intriguing. It could help rule things out though at the very least and provide a starting point.

And, in my case rule in or out the possibility.

For instance, if the fMRI is conclusively on the NT type of functioning, it could point to something that is masking as ASD.

I have no idea what that could be, but will be interesting to find out.

Thanks for providing the link

In my case, complete serendipity.

Very good points. However, since most people are socialized to believe that the word of a professional is infallible (unless one puts some research/thought into the matter), this will usually never even be a consideration. "A doctor said so" tends to equal "must be true."

Thanks for those points about issues with diagnosing AS that the "professionals" tend to ignore...it would be nice to see them raised and addressed "professionally."

#2 sounds like the whole refrigerator mom thing

#3 must work otherwise there'd be 100% males 0% females. And it worked for me and that's all my experience.