Why Are Aspies Suspicious Everyone Is Lying About Autism?

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People may see fine but it doesn't mean they are nor does it mean they haven't had a difficult life. People learn to adjust, you are only seeing them briefly, not 24/7 so you wouldn't see their moments. Online you only see text, not them as a person so you can't really tell. Also you have no idea if someone is in therapy even though they seem fine.

Temple Grandin is an example of who had adjusted and she lives a normal life and acts very normal but yet she is still autistic. She has learn to adjust and given how old she is, she has had that many years of growing. Her life doesn't seem to be difficult she's lived and she seemed to have a normal childhood based on what she's written. She did have a wealthy family and her mom paid for private school where the classrooms were real small and she had a social circle of friends until puberty. She still had her "tantrums" and didn't get punished for them if they were caused by sensory. She was allowed to be autistic for one day but the rest of the time she was expected to be social and eat at the table with her family and use table manners. It's pretty easy to forget she had autism when she mentions all the normal stuff and learning social rules and testing her limits to see what she is allowed to do and to figure out the rules and getting her two bullies into trouble by lying to a teacher about who trashed her yard when in fact it was her and her friend that did it because they didn't like the teacher for some reason. All normal kid stuff.

The really funny bit is when you go from being self-diagnosed to properly diagnosed, and then what, did you just have personality transplant? It reminds me of the magical disappearance of autism at the age of 18

I think we have a hard time imagining doing something like that because we by definition have a lot of integrity. I think I would spontaneously combust if I were to do something like, say, join a bipolar club and fish for sympathy. Then I'd be fishing for sympathy for a fictional character, and that would hardly be heart-warming, would it?

Anyway I don't even know why fishing for sympathy on a blog or a forum is such a crime. I don't really feel offended by it.

I don't really agree with this. The reason for it is that I know people IRL who tick all the boxes, yet are well functioning and have escaped a lot of the drama. I've had much more trouble in my life, but then I asked for more from the world.

If I were to say why this person is so well adjusted, I'd mention a really positive family environment with a lot of acceptance and help; some lucky accidents in the social circle, and a general lack of emotional sensitivity. I think there is a huge difference between the emotionally flat autistics and the hyperempathic lot. Intelligence helps.

Also, the profile of sensitivities will define a person's life. My pet theory is that sound sensitivity and severe food issues are the worst; sounds are by their nature intrusive (and yes, I've been reading up on this stuff), and severely restricted eating can damage someone's health. Light sensitivity, which is my biggest problem, can be mitigated more easily without restricting one's social life.

I am very aware that a lot of people are worse off than me. I am also becoming aware that there are a lot of people out there who don't have the struggles I have, not by far.

Temple Grandin doesn't really do much for Autism Awareness, she makes people with Autism look strange. She isn't very relatable to the general public, therefore ineffective for marketing.

To answer the original question: I think only a minority of aspies are suspicious that there are vast numbers of folks lying about being aspie/autie.

Once in a blue moon you see some troubled soul on WP raging about how "most of you here on WP are fakers!", or "why doesnt Alex use real aspies in his videos?" because they think that just because someone can be poised in front of a camera that they cant be an aspie, or mention having a job, or a spouse, in a post ( and the complainer doesnt have a job or a spouse) .

But the minority who do that kind of ranting do so because they dont realize that autism is a spectrum, and also they dont know whats below the tip of the iceberg in the life of someone who seems more successful than they are in some narrow part of life. They dont know the difficulties that these folks they envy may have gone through.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 09 Aug 2016, 5:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I think some of you believe it's the "disease of the month" because you forget that you are egocentric and think other people care about your issues more than they really do. Basically in one way or another you think you're "the person of the month".

There is an issue of self-diagnosis in general, go read the symptoms of any number of conditions many much less vague than the all encompassing Autism spectrum and then see how many things you've diagnosed yourself with. It's confirmation bias, it's hypochondria, I don't know. I think there is also a difference between those that self-diagnose because of lack of means to get real one(as would be the case with many of the older posters) and those that self-diagnose and apparently don't need a real DX, some people really don't seem like they have anything in common. The whole idea of a spectrum is disturbing since that would mean everybody is on it to some varying degree, that is not a distinction that needs to be made and I think deprives attention away from the people with real issues and those with a label. We all know there is a severe end but what about the opposite?

Sorry I think I hit the quote button on the wrong post, it was supposed to be a response to someone who was saying you could never know you have Asperger's by reading things online.

Wait, that was the right quote, I guess the way you worded it seemed to have a different meaning. Was it supposed to be a sarcastic post?

Because there are lots of idiots on the internet such as ones who make youtube videos that diagnose themselves, and they make lists of famous people with autism or Asperger's who were never tested for the condition.

I have never seen it as the disease of the month but I have read articles from as far back as the '90's from proffessionals saying in one way or another it is a fad diagnosis.

The theory is that the fakers do two things
1. Make the outside world think Autism is a fake or fad disease.
2. Since the fake self dx'rs are entitled brats who are not impaired most people will think of "real autistics" as also special snowflakes.

According to the theory because of these misconceptions caused by the wanabees those whom are "real autistics" will be judged as using thier label to get benifits they do not deserve, as using thier fad disease as a crutch and to make excuses and so on. The impairments and struggles of "real autistcs" will not get understood and believed.

My take is that the misperceptions of widespread fakery is causing the suspicion of autistics by autisics as noted by the title of the thread, is causing some NT's to judge us as noted above, and may be causing under and misdiagnosis.

And there are lots of Aspies who talk about drawing attention for Autism Awareness, then don't understand things such as marketing in a way to make the cause appealing to the general public, ie... finding famous people to come out of the closet and in turn give the average person a reason to care about Autism. I guess some people use logic to reason and some use emotion.

Hell, yeah! I keep feeling confused about this. Perhaps it's different in the US, but where I live, most people have no opinion about autism. The only times I've heard people discuss it is when they actually have to deal with a person with autism. Otherwise it doesn't register.

There is a bit of a debate going on about overdiagnosis of ADHD, particularly as it is becoming known that a lot of ADHD-like symptoms can be caused by trauma. In any case, numbers of ADHD diagnoses vastly outnumber ASD diagnoses, so there is probably some cause for concern.

One thing one has to keep in mind is the role of the media. They like to make a huge affair about some medical diagnosis or other, then a lot of people freak out and think they have it, and then the media start attacking the same people they've been manipulating for being hysterical and imagining things. I have to avoid gluten because of GI issues, and I've been watching the Gluten Free rollercoaster for a few years. It really is a circus, and the losers are the general public, who are being divided into camps of "gluten is dangerous" and "everybody is imagining it".

I follow the blog of a doctor who is herself diagnosed with celiac. She is really good at posting links to new and relevant research. In her last post, she mentioned a really interesting experience she had. She joined a discussion forum for doctors. At some point they started discussing the topic of patients who have a wide array of vague symptoms. She said the majority of doctors believed that these symptoms were of psychological origin, and would send those patients on to psychologists for stress management, prescribe calming medications, mindfulness, that sort of thing. In the end she felt obliged to share her experience, having tried all the psychological crap for years without getting any results, and then going on to get tested for celiac. She said she eventually made contact with other doctors who suffered from chronic and misunderstood diseases. See www.thepatientceliac.com.

The interesting thing is the number of negative comments she received after posting. One would think that a group of doctors with bona fide medical diagnoses would perhaps be able to open other doctors' minds to the possibility that there is something that they don't know - but that seems not to be the case. People are emotional. Sometimes the reluctance to dig deeper is really just laziness and a need to feel superior.

People with mild ASD will run into this mindset a lot, because they are the same as these "crazy" patients - having a bunch of seemingly unrelated issues that not only seem to be stress related, but actually are - just not in the way the doctors think. Also, since ASD people have more autoimmune diseases than the general public, there can be a double whammy, since a lot of autoimmune diseases have vague and seemingly unrelated symptoms. On top of that there is the gender issue of women being underdiagnosed and having more autoimmune diseases than males.

I know I attributed my sensitivities to physical illness. It was only when I got well and the sensitivities didn't go away that I started looking for answers.

I suspect that some kids have mistakenly been dx'ed with autism, but that it is hardly a large number. And that a lot of the resistance comes from lack of empathy, not from any scientific rigorousness. Because when you recognize a problem, you have to help, right? If you don't recognize, then you don't have to help.

These topics touch a deep wound in many of us.

Mother Teresa said it best

"Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty."

To AdamLain -- no I wasn't being sarcastic in that post at all, in fact I was responding not to you but to another member, and having a brief conversation with him as he is often one of the people who treat others with the kid of suspicion your original post is asking about. He was giving his reasons why he is suspicious, I responded to him, and in my post I quoted sentences and terms he had used in order to make my own points -- and my own points are the opposite view to his, namely that I can't see why people would fake this and I haven't noticed an awful lot of the type of fakers on WP that that other member I was responding to has seen.

To clarify where I stand on all this:

I too, like you, notice that a lot of aspies are suspicious that everyone is lying about autism (thus I sympathize with your posting this thread)

I too feel this suspicion is not a nice thing to run across.

I tend to notice it seems like the suspicious people who think others are fakers base this suspicion on flimsy assumptions, such as mentioned not far up-thread: things like, that someone "seems" unimpaired just from the way they post, etc, or simply that they think it's a fad of the week/year/decade.

I wasn't being sarcastic, I was responding to someone who is themselves often sarcastic and was quoting some things that person talked about.