Am I more autistic/literal than you?
swbluto
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Gender: Male
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I seem to see multiple interpretations of what people say and I often seem to pick "the wrong one" in real life (And it tends to be the literal one). I speculated this was because I'm autistic but I seem to have this problem on the Autism forums, whereas most other posters don't seem to have this problem nearly as badly as I do. It doesn't seem to be individual words that I interpret literally, it seems to be the "whole sentence".
Does that mean I'm more autistic than most here?
But, I don't "stim" nor do I have sensory sensitivities, and my reading comprehension tested at the 90th percentile when I was younger and I thought most people with autism (Especially the more literal among us) score poorly on reading interpretation. So, I just can't make sense of these discrepancies.
Is it schizophrenic in origin or could it possibly be caused by memory problems?
Example:
I wrote:
They wrote:
I took the "I'm not sure about most of what you said" part to mean "I didn't understand most of what you wrote" but, after much reflection, I realized she probably meant "I'm not sure what could be the cause of most of what you wrote".
Does anybody have this kind of problem?
Verdandi
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You're going to drive yourself to distraction trying to compare severity like that. You can't pick one thing that seems to be more severe than others and use that to judge the entirety of what you might be dealing with. Autism can cover so many features that you can be more severe in some ways and milder in others. Trying to nail down a specific severity is probably not going to happen, but you can stop and try to assess what impact your difficulties have and what kind of impairments they cause.
Like, I put a lot of effort into online communication, but I actually have a lot of failures a lot of the time - either someone misunderstands me and I get stuck trying to clarify or I misunderstand someone else, which is never fun when people suggest you are probably illiterate because you failed to infer their implicit meaning rather than their literal words, but seem to think they can hold you to their interpretations of what you wrote rather than listening to you. In real life, I can be even worse.
But while that causes stress, it doesn't cause me as much stress as adaptive skills problems or sensory sensitivities. It may be that I have severe social dysfunction, but if I do, I am largely unaware of it, and don't think about it much. Even when I try to pin down where it begins and ends, it's often too ephemeral to properly grasp.
Also, on the whiff of smoke (phantosmia) thing: I used to get that when I took ephedra to self-medicate my executive dysfunction issues. I found this bit on phantosmia: http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/QAA400682/P ... -Time.html
Some people will be more autistic than others in certain things and less autistic than them in other things. Like I can see other mild aspies like me and they can be less aspie than me in ways and more aspie than me in ways because every one of us is different. We each come with our own package. Heck it can even happen with a severe aspie too, I know one online and she seems less aspie than me when it comes to understanding people but she claims she has no TOM and she calls it analysis. I think she understands them better because she took psychology and she has probably read a lot more than I have.
There are alot of similarities between autism and schizophrenia.
Autism is a developmental disability so therefore you have it from birth (or it is apparent usually at an early age).
Schizophrenia on the other hand will develop from an otherwise normal person between approximately the ages of 16 - 35.
Theory of mind difficulties are present in both autistic and schizophrenic individuals however ToM ability will fluctuate in schizophrenia. During the acute phase of a schizophrenia episode ToM can be quite severely affected and during the non-actue phase ToM ability should return to normal.
Hallucinations are a relatively common feature of schizophrenia however are not part of autism (hallunications are not always present in people with schizophrenia).
It is good to reality test any hallucinations you think you are having - ask other people if they can smell smoke.
Depression is a common co-morbidity in both autism and schizophrenia.
If you suspect you are developing schizophrenia I strongly suggest you stop taking any drugs including smoking marijuana immediately (if you take drugs). Try to stay calm and see a psychologist or a psychiatrist to discuss the symptoms you are experiencing.
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