special interest

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is having a special obsessive interest a requirement for aspergers diagnosis? as a young child and teenager i was obsessive about scientific experiments (used to spend whole days doing them) and general knowledge and fact collecting. but now (i am 29 yrs old) i don't really think i have an obsessive interest. what goes?

orion82, it's very characteristic, but not an absolute requirement. You could just be very not adept with social skills with many misinterpretations.

Good question. Can "oneself" be a special interest? It's like plugging a jack from the output into the headphone hole.

I've never had any real intensive special interests. I have always been into reading, and my daydream universes, and I like animals, but nothing else, really. My reading covers a wide range of topics, with mysteries and sci fi being the main ones, but I am into many other reading topics, too.

- Mysteries
- Sci fi
- History
- Historical fiction
- Humor
- Tech thrillers
- Science
- Some biographies
- War stories
- Westerns
- Animal stories
- Adventure stories

I may have missed a few. I did go through a phase when I was young, where I was into mythology, and horror stories, but I passed out of that phase after a few years.

I guess my interests are reading and my daydream universes.

thanks for the replies. sometimes i do miss having a special interest - something that will keep me busy in my free time. perhaps i should go and find one again!

My husband and child both have AS (he self-diagnosed, she was diagnosed 4 years sgo) and I would not say they have a "special obsessive" interest. I mean, my husband is a programmer. He loves what he does and he carries his computer with him all the time, but I would ot call it obsessive. He sometimes gets obsessed when he finds a problem he cannot solve and cannot let go until he solves it, but I think thats natural. I am NT (or so I think) and I get obsessed when I have something to do and I NEED to finish it. My daughter loves rocks, and when she goes somewhere she carries rocks home, but I would not say she is obsessed. She devotes little of her time (if at all) to her "interest".

No, asperger symptoms vary greatly on an individual basis.

For a diagnosis, you need to have a combination of a lot of different Asperger's traits. Just having one or two traits doesn't count, but if you have obsessive interests and a lot of other Asperger's traits, then you very well could get a diagnosis.