Might I have Aspergers?

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I ask because I have done the handflapping for as long as I remember and still do at the age of 24. Lately I noticed I tend to do it when writing a paper or when thinking about the roll I am on at work. I noticed I tend to do it when I am in a creative state (Since I was a little boy I always thought about video game designs in my head and hand flapped to my ideas).

School did come easy for me when I actually started trying, but that wasn't until my junior year of highschool. I've always been somewhat socially awkward and excellent at learning in class but have contributed those qualities to introvertism. I read more about the handflapping and it has me wondering if I was misdiagnosed at an early age (I was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 9).

I used to be made fun of in grade school for it but quickly learned not to do it in front of people. I now only do this privately or where people can't see and instead chalk it up to nervous energy.

Has anyone here ever met anyone who is addicted to handflapping and is not affected by aspergers in some way? I understand that everyone's experience is different and the intensity of this condition may vary from person to person. I'm just not sure if I should mention this to my doctor or not.

You would be better off to obtain an official diagnosis from a trained and licensed mental-health professional that to ask a the members of a social website. Unless of is is such a professional, and has examined you in person, there can be no way that any of us here could give you the diagnosis that you seem to want.

Welcome to Wrong Planet!

Well that's the thing. I'm not looking for a diagnosis per say. But based on your experiences, do you think I should see a doctor about this? I feel like treatment would consist of mainly limiting this to private activity, which I already do (and pace a crapload to compensate when I am at work lol). I'm already prescribed to Strattera for ADHD but that has not limited the urge to pace/hand flap, etc.

Yes, I think you would benefit from a doctor's advice.

Post your score.

http://www.rdos.net/eng/Aspie-quiz.php

Well, we are in the same boat, so maybe we can answer this question together. I am 57 and still do stimming of a similar kind to you. Well not exactly but the principle is the same. Maybe both you and I are NTs and this just goes to prove that NTs can be inveterate stimmers too. I have memories of hand flapping so much in early childhood that my wrists hurt. Later I moved on to waving threads of cotton and slices of paper. Then, until about 17 I used tissue paper cut into a tapered shape. As an adult I mostly play with water to achieve the same stimming effect. Whereas in childhood and adolescence I used to sit in my room consciously for lengthy stimming sessions, as an adult it is more that I find myself stimming when no-one is there but without planning it, just in passing as it were, for 10 minutes to half an hour during the day, several times a day. In the past I used to run through the streets as a form of stimming, trying to look as if I was just in a big hurry rather than stimming. I still pace around a lot at home as a kind of low-intensity stimming. Whenever I stim I always have visual images in my mind, although in childhood I preferred a physical picture of something because it made it more intense.

So, the question is, what does this show about one? I don't know. It never occurred to me to see a doctor about it although I did worry at about the age of 13 whether I was normal. Strangely enough I have just recently come to embrace stimming as part of who I am rather than something shameful to be ignored and that feels right and good.

I really don't know if it is a symptom of AS, but for my part I incline to think it indicates that I can't just see myself as an extreme introvert with obsessive interests. However, for it to be AS I think it takes a lot more symptoms. A lot.

Do you need to "cure" your hand-flapping? As long as it's in private it won't cause you social problems and if it comes naturally maybe you can just accept it. That's what I do.

I am interested to hear that someone else engages in these kind of activities without necessarily being on the spectrum, because I have always thought of it as "autistic" in some way.

If no NTs do what we do then we aren't NTs, but maybe NTs do it too.

(Hope you don't mind me pointing it out but per se is spelt "per se" and not "per say". It's Latin and Latin is one of my obsessions.)

i love to flap my hands and have done it since i was maybe six. i'm 45 and still do it. my mother told me as a child not to do it in public, so now i only do it when no one is watching.
yes, is sounds like you have it. but do you have a problem remembering faces, problems with motor skills, senses overload problems, seeing the small things but not real picture, etc?
try the aspie test online. just write in the search engine 'am i an aspie'?
i've never heard of an NT that flapps his hands. this is so characteristic of autism.

There are videos on YouTube of non-autistic young children doing it too. I don't know if non-autistic adults do it but if it's fun why shouldn't we suppose that some of the non-autistic kids who do it carry on doing it for the rest of their lives? Especially if they like being alone anyway. Unless we say that by definition if you do something like this you are autistic. I've always assumed it WAS autistic more or less by definition but that doesn't mean one necessarily has any other symptoms. Maybe one can have just this one symptom by itself, so that you would have one autistic trait without being autistic. That's more or less what I suppose. Maybe it would be quite nice to have this pleasurable autistic trait without the difficult ones too.

I've heard that 10% of non-autistic young children stim. I don't know how many of them grow out of it.

In a country of, say, 80 million that would be 8 million kids. If only one percent of those didn't grow out of it that would still be 80 thousand people. So even in the case of 1% the majority of adults who stim would be non-autistic. But "stimming" is such a vague concept . The kind of stuff I mean is the mega-concentrated totally absorbed hyper-focus stimming with visual images running through one's head, not absent-mindedly twiddling one's pencil because one's bored. I often feel misunderstood on this forum because there doesn't seem to be a word to single out what I mean and it's really something totally different to just rhythmical fidgeting.