Did Elliot Rodger have Asperger's?

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Yeah, he had Asperger's. School principles and his mom said it. His behavior is very much like an aspie. Yeah, he was more socially aware than most but his other behaviors fit Asperger's, including his obsessional thinking, loneliness, and social avoidance. He was also horribly bullied, something the media are not talking about enough.

No it wasn't. People with AS almost never believe that they're far superior to everyone else by default like he obviously did. Usually it's the opposite.

These could describe many conditions. I read his manifesto, there was nothing I remember offhand about sensory issues. The key to social avoidance is why. Inability or something else. It seemed he was able to the few times he tried and had a decent amount of friends as a youngster.

As has been said this is all "armchair diagnosis". The important thing is that the media has pulled back, I still see the link being made in social media. This is causing an undetermined amount of damage.

I was fascinated by this one. I'm quite ashamed of it and it makes me worried as to why it fascinated me, but it's gotten so much discussion everywhere that I can't be the only one who was drawn into what lead to this brutal and pathetic slaughter of young people.

As a disclaimer, I agree with the common sense that such awful murders shouldn't be made into such huge stories, neither should the murderers' agendas, and in the media coverage I felt particularly sorry for the media's sharing of one of Rodger's associate's pictures, and the Instagrams of one lass whose beauty apparently tortured him. It didn't stop me checking out each one of those and that's the bleak thing, that these stories sell. I think these things can encourage wannabes. Previous school shootings certainly inspired Lanza's. I can't say I've studied any of these killings in the past though, and I'm not a criminologist of whatever.

But almost instantly hearing "Asperger's" alongside his name made me wonder. Is there in me a part that makes these teenagers and young men do what they do? Does the feeling brood or do these boys suddenly snap? I then read the horribly laboured manifesto, all his ridiculously bad life choices and the passions he had which almost entirely tied in with whatever would theoretically garner peer approval. You get such a gauge of how truly nasty he was that he genuinely seems less malign in those acted videos. My conclusion was that with the likes of Rodger it's definitely based on brooding and it's extensively premeditated. As it seems to have been with Lanza. I'm sure loads of studies have been done on this sort of thing but I haven't been intellectually honest enough to look at them. These attacks are a product of brooding and planning. It's like when I'm running over a dam wall and to my side is a 100m+ drop that would end me if madness suddenly overcame me and made me vault it, and I wondered if that was the same rationale as some shootings. Maybe it still is.


Going back to the ACTUAL TOPIC, I'll try listing aspergic/non-aspergic traits as they come to me:
Prone to meltdowns (well, tantrums whenever he didn't get his way or reminded himself of his loneliness)
Obsessions (ie. women and financial status post-puberty, which in all honesty lots of weird, non-AS men have in this world of ours, hardly niche obsessions)
Was a loner who hardly made social plans but lamented about being perpetually lonely (we've been there)
Wasn't studious or intellectually curious (I believe a lot of us spergs are)
Was sociopathic (many of us on here struggle to envisage how the other person in an interaction feels but this man really was blind to others' feelings)
Wouldn't feign interest in what he wasn't interested in (again similar to us, but he wouldn't suck a thing up?he really went above and beyond)
Highly narcissistic
Didn't seem to have rigid routines
No evidence of sensory issues


To me he lacks a few key autistic traits and with the ones he has he goes above and beyond with them, to a socio-/psychopathic way. And that's what I'm sure he was.

In his teenage years he had no friends. I had friends up until age 10 or so, but in a similar manner, as a teenager I had no friends and stopped trying to make friends.

Also, sensory issues were not a huge part of my Asperger's until in my 20's, as a teenager I was unaware of them. I also had much less stimming than most people on the spectrum.

Not everyone experiences Asperger's the same way. Some have a regression, sort of like in classic autism, as in my case- I lost functionality I had previously.

The total lack of empathy he felt- well, this was only after years of bullying. He wasn't diagnosed with Asperger's until he was 17, long after the damage was done. Bullying can cause a person to lose empathy and shut down. He had the exact same meltdowns, anger and frustration about social relationships, however, that I see in many young people with Asperger's. Clearly, he didn't have a clue how emotional reciprocity worked, another Aspergerian trait (if he were a true sociopath, he would not have preferred suicide and he would have been able to charm women easily).



I disagree. Society needs to be talking about social disabilities more, because so many people are hurting as the result of the lack of resources for people on the spectrum, I hope there is some good that comes from this tragedy.

That's just not true. Some people with Asperger's develop narcissism and a superiority complex to deal with bullying and disappointment. Tony Attwood's book even talks about this extensively.

As a young adult many of my attitudes were exactly like Rodger. I believed I was a superior person, and this shielded me from emotional pain. I was not as viscious as Rodger, but I also was not as bullied as he was.

As seen in many threads about Elliot Rodger the idea that he was diagnosed with Aspergers is disputed. Bullying does not cause Aspergers. It is a result of Aspergers traits and usually makes them worse. Yes he had some traits and yes it is possible he did not realize his sensory issues but the manifesto was written in his 20s and no mention was made. But overall based on the information I have read, including the manifesto he did not fulfill the triad. As I said it is all armchair diagnoses. We did not clinically or otherwise observe him.

Publicity about disabilities is a good thing overall. Linking disabilities with spree killers is harmful. I am very very very sorry the any publicity is better then no publicity point of view seems to be winning over our community. I believe it will have negative affects on the community as a whole and I am very sure some will be negatively affected. It do not understand why many in the the community seem to want to accept collateral damage for the so called greater good.

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 12 Jun 2014, 2:05 am, edited 2 times in total.

It's not an archmair diagnosis, his mother said he had Asperger's, she testified to it in her divorce settlement with Rodger's father.

I can understand not wanting to be assosciated with a heinous act but the fact is that even people with Asperger's can do very horrible things, the same as anyone else. Especially if they are bullied for a long period of time.

Nothing he wrote was indicative of psychosis. Just overly entitled racist misogynist dudeliness.

Psychosis is not an inherently violent condition, and someone who is psychotic is more likely to harm themselves than anyone else.

He was never diagnosed with AS. His family suspected he was on the spectrum, but it was never verified.



The concern is with the recent tendency to rush to associating spree killings and other violence directly with autism when no such association actually exists. Of course autistic people can be violent, but they are not necessarily autistic because they are violent.

What if spree killing really is more common in those with an ASD?

His mom is not a psychiatrist. I would like to see the diagnosis confirmed by an authoritative source. There is an actually psychologist hired by the father that said he wasn't.

yes this I am very curious about

I used to have a few chats about elliot rodger with a friend a couple of months ago.
I told her that with my background, or people with asperger who got bullied in general, i can pretty much relate to elliot rodger's story.

-Bullied, check
-Trying to fit in, check
-Movementskills lacking behind peers, check
-bad social communication, possible monotonic voice etc, check.
-Few friends between age 5~11, then suddenly becoming a loner as bad social skills become more apparant

People who look up the symptoms of asperger on wiki-idiota and have no indepth knowledge of autism like the media will quickly draw linesfrom there towards autism. I tend to agree with alot of people who have posted on wrong planet in the past that He was a narcissistic sociopath
-He felt superior, while people with autism generally feel inferior (or act superior in their 5 stages of grief period)
-He was actually delusional enough to believe it was his right to have sex with hundreds of woman.
-Believing he could take revenge on society by killing as many good looking 'alpha' males and as many hot blonde woman as possible on his rampage, simple because he never got to experience sex which was HIS RIGHT.
-Applying the ladder theory as the theory of everything.. LOL
-That incident where he fell down and broke a few bones just made me go... 'what was he thinking?"

Did he have autism? He certainly had some ingredients of autism boiling down in that soup of chaos inside his head.. but his obession with status and woman got him and many other innocent people killed. Which brings us down to the point that people with autism are not really dangerous.. psychopaths are

If he had been a regular person not associated with Hollywood, I'd say he had NPD.

But because his father is a director, and because occult ritual abuse and trauma based programming are prevalent in the entertainment industry, I suspect he actually had DID, and the narcissistic behavior was just one of his alters.

In most communities when someone does something wrong they try to seek ways for it not to happen again. On WrongPlanet as it seems elsewhere in the Autism community the modus operandi is to deny deny deny. Now being a female Aspie I've run into several men who felt enttled to me, who couldn't handle being told no or rejected by a woman. Why are we bickering over this instead of facing the reality women feel unsafe at Autism support groups?