I'm Not An Aspie. I Lied During My Assessment.

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I admit I mainly want to use this thread to share my own story that upsets me, but I think it might help you as well.

I sometimes feel like I exaggerated during my diagnosis as well, but subconsciously, since I was pretty obsessed with gaining info about it. Look up "medical students' disease" - pretty sure it's a common thing. Nowadays I'm trying to be compassionate, fair to everyone, especially people I work with etc. I started to feel to be too high-functioning to be considered even mild Aspie. I talked that over and over again with the psychologist that was a part of the diagnostic team and she claimed she'd considered everything I said to her after DX.

So, I'm 29 now and everything seems to be good, I'm not afraid of meeting new people, talking in foreign language to them, going abroad on a long airplane trip etc. I don't even suffer sensory stuff that much (except I bite my t-shirts to the point of destruction and crack joints too much, even the feet ones ). Not anywhere near those "real stereotypical person with ASD"-problems. Also, I managed to work from home and earn money from digital stuff I sell (indie video games).

Yet, during an one-week trip in with people from industry I work in, someone commented that I'm not so social and lack empathy (and that I should probably talk to some psychologist). Those people didn't really like my sense of humor and some annoying guy reminded me the last day about that with annoying jokes ("raise your hand when you're joking, so we know it"). I accused someone of not giving me any respect and that person told me about other people who didn't give me any respect... and I had no idea they didn't. I though I'll explode and make stuff even worse, fortunately, I managed not to.

So, it was like a punch in my nose after I started feeling too confident. I'm pretty sure I'm not quite normal, but if it's really ASD, it's very mild. It's easy to forget about that stuff if you just work from home, including managing your own little projects. Also, people from my own team are weirdos/tolerant themselves, so well... Guess I'll just book the sleep place myself next time.

So, just talk to your diagnostic team about your feelings about the diagnosis. If it turns out to be not the ASD case, don't fret about it, just ask them for further directions and help. If they're any good, they won't just ignore you. If you're feeling/treated like a weirdo and it affected your whole life, then I'd say something certainly is there and, eventually, it's up to you to find the best way to deal with it. Good psychologist and their labels are supposed to help you deal with your problem, but the main work is still on your side.

Must confess I've had occasional doubts about whether I was entirely straight during my autism assessment.

I had a strong motive to make sure the DX was positive - my employer was trying to force me into doing a kind of work that everybody hated doing, it rode roughshod over our rights to leave at the allotted time and to take days off when we wanted to, it involved being under the command of a complete jerk of a supervisor, and it involved performing largely menial tasks instead of the higher-status science work we had originally been hired to do. The staff weren't organised enough or strong enough to fight back. A diagnosis of disability was the safest option I could see. And some of my responses to the assessment weren't absolutely correct.

But my "incorrect" responses were never blatant lies, they were well within spec for the NT world, they were just slightly stretched here and there. Mostly they were pretty straight. One of the biggest "lies" was that I said I was a creature of routine, which isn't 100% true, I sometimes get bored with the same old stuff and break out of it to do something different.

When presented with the Aspie-Quiz as a pre-screen, I should ideally have refused to answer most of the questions, because there was no box for "yes and no," they're so reductionist that I can get any result I want without exactly lying, but instead I probably erred on the side of giving Aspie-type answers. Had I failed the AQ, there would have been no grounds for doing the full assessment.

I think it's (ironically) my autistic pathological honesty and perfectionism that made me suspect myself of cheating. I'm no more a cheating NT than Ned Flanders is a cheating immoral atheist. My diagnostician watched me carefully during the DX, and my long answers accurately covered most of the nuances that the AQ test wouldn't let me explain. She also asked my (then) wife about my behaviour. So many things about me began to make sense once I saw myself as an Aspie. And now I'm retired, I no longer have any need to pretend anything. I don't get any disability adjustments or benefits. I could sit here and brag about how I fooled everybody and ripped off my employer so I could have an easier life. But all I did was to bias the DX result a tiny bit, the result was essentially correct, my Aspie traits really have played havoc with my life in many ways. Compared with the way employers (and benefits officials) so often pretend the disabled are not disabled at all, any sin I committed was negligible. I'm not guilty, and IMO neither is the OP.

PS: My apologies, OP, for expressing my earlier suspicions of you trolling. It did rather look that way for a while, but your subsequent post(s) have cleared that up. I'm still not clear what your motive could have been for these lies you accused yourself of.

Well, let's define a difference between "lying" and "confirmation bias."

You feel that you don't regularly say things to offend people. I feel the same way. GUESS WHAT? I regularly offend people if I'm not careful.

I have no INTENT to offend others...indeed I get distressed if I find that I have offended someone else. The question, on it's face, is misleading. They should ask if you often say things that offend others whether you intended to do so or not. That's a more revealing question because people with Autism/AS do things that hurt others not realizing they are hurtful or offensive.

Likewise, "confirmation bias" is when you do things or adhere to sources that produce a desired outcome or validate an already embraced dogma.

My community college had computer-based tests to indicate what job fields were best for a student undecided on which way to go. It was garbage for a singular flaw....

If a student already had decided what kind of job they wanted, or what type of life they wanted, they could easily craft their answers to produce the desired outcome.

It's the same reason why many people are discriminated against in these "hiring tests" where there is supposed to be no wrong answers. The exam profiles your personality, and being honest may show things the employer wants to avoid. Lying doesn't always help because the test is designed to catch potential liars...however, most of us learned to deal with the hiring process by giving the correct answers and not the true answers.

So, I'd call you out if you deliberately plotted and schemed to lie your way into getting a formal diagnosis for a condition you really don't have.

If you think you were dishonest because the question was poorly crafted and you "filled in the gaps" and felt the "false" answer was more correct, that's one thing. If you were too invested in the belief that you had to be on the spectrum, you might have "lied" to ensure your pre-conceived self-image would be retained. These are understandable as if one was to undergo a formal diagnosis, finding out you are NOT something but not being told what you ARE is very frustrating. I have many "issues" I cope with...all relatable to Autism. If I was to be told I'm not autistic (even by a liberal interpretation), I would want my diagnostician to give me solid answers on what, instead, I am. Otherwise, I'm lost in a fog knowing I have issues but no idea of what is wrong or how to cope with them.

@Magz: I've never learned to read people's emotions. I just do. By the way, I scored really poorly on the Systemising Quotient Test, as some questions don't apply to me at all.

Did you take the Mind's Eye test? I did. Passed it, with flying colours. I took the CAM Face-Voice Battery Test and passed both parts with flying colours.

It helps to have a mum, who, when me and brother were children, flew off the handle and a dad, who was sarcastic.

I did the Cam Face-Voice Battery Test and I scored: Faces: 88.0% Voices: 94.0% - average 91%. in 4.5 seconds.

The average score for females with ASD is 68.9% in 11.1 seconds. Faces: 70.0% Voices: 67.8%. I know when someone looks appalled, condescending, appealing, grave, etc.

Ergo, if Aspies can't read emotions, (other than the basic ones), does it mean I'm not autistic?

There are different ways of reading emotions. NT's generally rely on facial expressions, and this may not be how AS people read them.

I am very good at detecting emotional content. Being on the spectrum, I can't perform this in NT ways. One of the main sources of information is subtle changes in tone of voice, volume changes, emphasis changes, word use and other sub variables.

Fact is, many AS people do things in AS ways, to get to the same ends, and NT awareness of this fact is primitive as yet.
NTs make an error of reasoning in that if we don't do things their way, they wrongly assume we can't do it at all.

I scored very high in the "reading emotions in the face" test because I learnt the formula for it.
Autistics can compensate very well.

Yes, some can and do. The deeper issue is that NTs don't question the myth they have made and apply to all of us.

I've just re-taken the RITVO Test and my total score was 150. In July, 2015 my total score was 156. Go figure!!

http://www.aspietests.org/