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-Did you go to a mental health pro/ doctor asking them to evaluate you for Asperger's OR did the doctor identify you had it before you knew/suspected it?
i was suspected to be autistic from a very young age.
as a baby, i did not respond to my parents facial expressions, and i did not cry except when i was hungry or discontent. i never cried for company or attention.
i was limp to hold and many people dropped me because i did not provide the muscular assistance by tensing my muscles to aid them in holding me. (i still can not "dance" with anyone)
i did not babble or follow anyone with my eyes.
if they waved an object around, i did not follow it with my eyes.
i was taken to a doctor who did some tests and said that i probably had autism, but i was too young to diagnose (6 months). it was established that i had no brain malignancies or other life threatening cranial conditions, so the urgency for explanation receded to a normal level.
i was diagnosed with standard autism at 3 years old.
i paid no attention at all to other people or their attempts to communicate with me, and i learned nothing from them and did not speak.
i was found not to be significantly mentally ret*d because i was able to open puzzle boxes to retrieve something i wanted that i saw inside them.
i also did not exhibit gross motor incoordination.
at primary (elementary) school i was in special learning classes (OL (i do not know what that stands for)), but i was given the curriculum that was standard for my chronological age in mathematics and science and geography. i was learning at a normal level, but i was grossly inadequate with respect to co operative communication with peers or teachers.
due to the fact that i did not pay attention in any way to what i was told, it became more and more difficult to keep me in a mainstream school even though i was in special education classes. i did not obey any command i was given and i did what i pleased, and if i was obstructed i became hostile. the teachers and therapists devised a way to keep me under some form of precarious control. it was fortunate for me that i was interested in solving puzzles and remembering data, so they fed me copious amounts of school work that i liked to do.
i was not able to be taught by them how to do the mathematics for example, so they provided me with questions and answers to those questions until i worked out my own way of obtaining the answers to questions by deduction.
then they just gave me the questions, and i liked to solve them in the same manner of deduction that i found by comparing the earlier questions to the answers.
in this way i survived in the mainstream (albeit special ed) until year 7.
in year 7, i had to go to high school, and i was completely swamped by the requirements of being obedient and flexible. i was also made a mockery of by other children and my retaliatory response meant that i could no longer stay in a normal school.
i was moved to an adolescent psychiatric unit where i was schooled by academic nurses. i boarded there for a few years, and i was used as a study specimen for the formation of the definition of "asperger syndrome" when the condition was being defined for the DSM.
my psychiatrist was a specialist who was researching autism, and she had a few students that also sat in on my daily consultations and took notes and compiled ideas to investigate further.
my iq was found to be above average, yet my level of connection to the world was severely deficient, and my psychiatrist developed many scenarios to test me in.
i very much enjoyed my consultations every day at 4pm (except weekends). it was then that i learned how to describe accurately how i was thinking. i wanted very much for them to write the correct observations of me, so i refined my descriptive style to a point where i could clearly tell them how i thought. they were all so attentive to every word i said and i felt like i was important.
after a a few years, there was a community backlash against my school/hospital (rivendell adolescent unit) after a media story, because it was a stately mansion that was owned by the governor of NSW in 1882 (thomas walker estate), and it was a national heritage building with watchtowers and a cathedral and it was huge and opulent on 100 acres of land with gardens and stables etc, but only had 19 disabled kids resident in it. i was diagnosed only as HFA at that point because it was before 1994.
my doctor said i was asperger, but i could not be diagnosed at that time.
so i had to go back to mainstream schools when i was 16 and i went to 6 more normal schools because i was expelled from every one of them after a few months.
i was diagnosed in 1996 after i was caught drink driving 3 times in rapid succsession, and my solicitor read my medical records and asked that i get a formal diagnosis as it was possible to be officially diagnosed at that time.
i had 4 consultations with the psychiatrist and he spoke to my parents and sisters, and he had my school reports and my earlier reports from rivendell (which carried the most weight).
he showed me videos and put a laser scanner helmet on my head that shone a light into my eye to trace where i looked when watching the videos.
i also did the rorschach tests, and i was quite unimaginative i think.
one of my answers as to what i saw was that an ink bottle had fallen over next to a mirrored wall (it is all that i could think of), and the bottle had been removed.
i was given pictures of scenes where i had to describe what was going on.
one picture i remember was of a burning barn, and a man had his fingers in his hair while talking to a young boy outside the barn.
i was asked to provide a dialogue.
my most imaginative interpretation was "blast! if it is not bad enough that the barn is burning down, it seems that i also have nits!! !"
anyway, i was diagnosed as borderline HFA/AS, and due to the iq test, i was on the asperger side.
whatever i am too verbose and that is the end.
14 Feb 2010, 11:28 pm
