Sensory Processing Disorder Can Mimic Asperger's

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Besides basic sensory sensitivity, which is also a feature of autism/AS, SPD can include:

auditory processing problems can contribute to delayed speech and inability to "hear" tone of voice, which can probably lead to a monotone tone of voice because we learn to talk from what we hear around us. Mine cause me to play parts of songs and movies over and over again, which can be mistaken for a repetitive behavior, and looking away from people to concentrate better on what they are saying.

improperly sensing signals from the muscles can cause poor muscle tone and probably clumsiness as well

inability to process sights, smells, etc. from places can make them continue to seem new every time one goes there (anybody else experience this?), which can lead to an aversion to change

Here is a longer list. Notice how many symptoms are similar to autistic traits:
http://www.spdfoundation.net/about-sens ... /symptoms/

From the way you describe Sensory Processing Disorder, it sounds a lot like common problems with autism. I admit I don't know much about it, but it makes me wonder if there is a connection between them...

"Studies by the SPD Foundation suggest that more than three-quarters of children with autistic spectrum disorders have significant symptoms of Sensory Processing Disorder."

http://www.spdfoundation.net/about-sens ... disorders/

I've wondered for a long time if I am truly on the spectrum or if I have SPD, or both....I seem to have a really hard time relating to a lot of aspies on here and that makes me wonder....I know I have the sensory issues for sure .

If the two are related, it wouldn't surprise me at all. Sounds like they would be...

I've always wondered if the root cause of autism isn't cause from SPD. If you think about it. Are perception and comprehension of the world around us, comes from are senses, and if something is causing distortion to those signals before it hit's are brain. We may find are selves reacting to something in the wrong way and not realizing it. For those of us who have SPD's. You may have notice that you ether have too much stimulation or not enough, and it's hard to find the "sweet spot" for just the right amount of stimulation that we need. If we have too little stimulation. you become board and disconnect from the world around you. This might explain why we can't read social cues. If on the other hand, we have too much stimulation. You become panicked, daised, startled and confused. This might explain the reason for meltdowns and the observing NT's don't know why. This may also explain the reason why we self stimulate ("stimming") is because we are in direct control of how we stim. And just like a feedback loop. We can regulate just how much stimulation we need and keep it in that so-called "sweet spot". I think we also go into are own little fantasy world as a backup plan in case we are in an environment where stimming is considered taboo.

ASD and SPD share a large amount of symptoms indeed, but there are sufficient left that are exclusive to ASD: difficulty with sarcasm/figure of speach; not understanding facial expressions; different communication modes...

I most definately have SPD, but plenty of extra symptoms that make it undoubtable that the SPD is a symptom/co-morbid with ASD, in my case

Has anyone here been treated for SPD (aka Sensory Integration Disorder)? What type of treatment did you have and did it work?

Everything is super bright, complex and detailed, loud, smelly, and painful (touch/feeling, especially low frequency vibrations) to me compared to a normal person. Basically every sense I have is incredibly amplified which has caused me endless anxiety all my life. I didn't even know I wasn't normal until recently because to me it was just the way I had always been.

I need something to "dim" the world. Desensitization has not worked at all (in fact makes the anxiety worse), my body is already at its limits and is broken down. Depakote somewhat worked for me the first time I used it (for about 3 months) but after I took a break from it, it stopped working.

All the "disorders" are just arbitrary collections of overlapping symptoms.
The writers of the DSM are grasping at straws.

I noticed several years ago that the symptoms/characteristics of autism, SPD, and giftedness overlap to the point that they seem to be different facets of the same condition. I think of them as all being in the same deck of cards, and each person is dealt a different hand. The Intense World Theory seems to support this idea. I've noticed that cross-dominance/mixed laterality also shares a lot of the characteristics of the others. So we may be looking at a three-dimensional continuum as opposed to a spectrum. I have the characteristics of all four.

I agree wholeheartedly with the two prior comments by bookmaker and Pete1061. It's a profession's way of saying, "we know there is something there...but we can't actually define it & we don't really know what it is". For the most part the technique (x of y symptoms) works for the main set of cases, but it can fail miserably for the outliers. And AS seems to have a lot of outliers.

Years ago when Yahoo! groups was still usable and thriving there was a wonderful group called, "Shadow Syndrome Kids". It was populated with parents of children who had almost all the symptoms of autism but in the opinion of a psych or more often, pediatrician, did not qualify for a diagnosis. Often it was because the child was verbal. Or appeared to have adequate Theory of Mind when in fact they were just Aspies who could calculate what the correct answer should be. And sometimes the child would have been diagnosed with the individual issues - enough to trigger the diagnosis -but not autism itself.

Take the criteria for Autism. Remove anything that can exist on it's own and you will be left with an empty page. To further complicate matters, each such attribute exists on its own spectrum. Some tests implicitly acknowledge this by have a score for each symptom & if the sum is X, or more than Z of them are above Y, then the diagnosis is confirmed.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that we act as though autism is an independent *thing* when in fact its a *name*. It's a label to describe a collection of differences from typical that often go together.

So while yes, autism is SPD, it's also NVLD. And face blindness, and lack of theory of mind. And OCD. And in the bigger ANOVA, it's asexuals and agender people. It is all of these and more when (and this is crucial) you look at the population of autistic people as a whole, in aggregate.

All we can do about it is help each other. Teach our workarounds to one another and learn to enjoy life the best we can.

I don't know what you mean by this.

My apologies. I meant that since it is a collection of symptoms, more like what's technically called a syndrome, autism is all of those things when seen as an aggregate of all the people diagnosed. Not everyone has all of them, and the ones they have form their own unique "autistic fingerprint" as they differ in severity, impact, etc.

If you're saying the diagnostic labels are arbitrary, I completely agree.




Yeah, there's this barely researched concept called the broad autism phenotype (BAP), which is when people have all the personality traits associated with autism but don't actually have any kind of disorder or disability. It's more common in family members of autistic people than it is in the general population, which suggests that it is biologically associated with autism rather than being a coincidental similarity.

I'm starting to suspect a lot of these disorders have the same biological underlying cause, and whether you get autism versus ADHD/SPD/etc is largely a factor of whether you had a BAP-type personality. Too bad all the researchers want to fix your personality rather than the actual problems, arggh.



It seems like the vast majority of autistic people have some degree of sensory issues, BUT none of those are in the official diagnostic criteria for autism. The DSM5 at least added that "sensory issues" can be a cause of repetitive motor movements, but even then the repetitive motion is the actual symptom. If you have severe sensory issues but don't don't do much repetitive motor movements (either because you do another form of stimming, or because you are able to resist the urge to do repetitive motor stims at your parents' insistence), it doesn't even count as an autism symptom.

Is SPD in the DSM yet? If I remember right, it's not, which sucks. If you're someone with severe sensory issues, you're almost luckier to meet the diagnostic criteria of autism, since that might get you a little bit of treatment. :/

One thing I like about SPD (as a concept or available diagnosis) is that the SPD community pretty much considers stimming to be a treatment, whereas parents and researchers in the autism community consider stimming problem you need to be cured of, with no regards to the underlying sensory or emotional issues.



It seems there's sensory integration therapy, which you'd get from an occupational therapist, but I haven't been able to find anyone who offers such a thing or knows what I'm talking about. At least you can get a little bit out of self-help. Here is what helps me with hypersensitivity. Unfortunately, all my tactics are about avoiding or compensating for the problem, not actually getting rid of it.

I think it's not in the DSM because it's diagnosed by occupational therapists instead of mental health workers.

I though SPD is part of autism but you can have that alone and not have autism.