Self-diagnosis

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Can Aspergers (or anything on the Autistic spectrum for that matter) be diagnosed by the self?

I've often been told this, and been branded a hypochondriac. What do you guys think?

I believe one can, as nobody knows you better than you.

Short answer no. Long answer yes.

The person who knows you best is you, and if you did your research and made iquries regarding your personality, and the hand seems to fit the glove, then in all likely hood you have AS.

However, people such as government, school, or work officals mandate that such problems be DX'ed by a liscensed and board certifed psychologist before they are willing to take a claim that you have AS seriously and provide accordingly to your needs.

However, with ASD'ers, there is no clear line dividing those who have it and those who do not. So one psychologists opinion is just as subjective as the next.

Case in point, I got DX'ed with ADHD from a psychologist who was specificly looking for ADHD. If he had pried a little deeper he would have seen the signs of PDD instead and I might have gotten a proper DX 15 years ago.

One could also say that if you researched it with that much enthusiasm, it could be a sign as well... I know I did!

If the person is looking at themselves clearly, they may know better than anyone else whether they are autistic or not. This doesn't carry any official weight but it is often accurate provided they actually know what autism is and enough about themselves.

I would have found it difficult at one point because I did not know how radically my outward appearance to NTs contrasted with my inward reality. I thought that I was being social when I was not, I thought I was interacting with others when I was not, and so forth. I could not understand outward descriptions of autism as being like me, but if I read something by an autistic person I could understand it. It took me a long time to find out that I look different from the outside, and then it started to make sense. This was all after I was diagnosed officially, it took me a long time to understand and believe it.

A person who understands more what they look like can be more accurate in some ways.

I think that autism (well, by definition, I guess) is a disorder that has so much more going on in the mind than externally that it almost has to be self diagnosed to some degree - especially for higher functioning people . . .

I know everyone is very surprised when I tell them I have pretty major dissassociation, limited emotions, and several sences that turn on and off . . . because I have learned to hide these things - it is only because my bipolar got so bad that I couldn't hide them that anyone even thought about AS for me . . .
So I think that there has to be some self dignosis for adults, at least, before a formal diagnosis is saught out . . .

But I had the same experience of not realizing how wierd I was until I started reading Temple Grandin's books and other books by autistic authors and thinking 'you mean other people DON'T think that way? How strange!'

My reading of autistic authors (which has turned into a full-bore perseveration) nearly always yielded a lot of familiarity in some regard or another no matter who it was, in a way that books by non-autistic authors rarely do.

The external descriptions are what confuse me the most. They start with descriptions of behavior from a non-autistic point of view, then they compound that by adding in motivations that non-autistic people believe autistic people have for the autistic behavior that non-autistic people don't understand. And so forth. And even knowing what my body looks like it's doing is difficult, let alone all that other stuff.

I also had this experience in the past year, which has perhaps convinced me more than anything else that I must be a Spectrumite of some flavor. Before I started reading narratives by autistics / aspies, I'd never in my life encountered a description of reality and thought that closely matched my own. I was especially taken aback by much of "Thinking in Pictures": I was actually saying "Yes! Exactly!" aloud while reading the book! I always thought of myself as a "weirdo", someone who had decent intellect but low social maturity and sensory issues -- little did I know that there were others who shared this sort of perception.

In answer to the initial question posed in this subject, I think that it is certainly possible to self-diagnose in the "I know what I am!" sense, but not in the legal sense. I have been very, very careful all along to check myself for agendas other than self-discovery, to perform differential diagnosis on myself, etc. Even now I second-guess myself all the time. This is one of the reasons I'm seeking a professional DX: I want to stop the second-guessing because really, at this point, I don't see how I can be anything BUT an Aspie -- but I'd like to have it on paper. The problem is that many professionals have next-to-no experience with AS adults -- my current psychatrist suggested that I was "too considerate" to have AS! I don't think that being completely oblivious is a required prerequisite for Aspiehood. [/quote]

For me, the second-guessing didn't stop with my professional dx. In fact it started long after my professional dx, which is one reason I consider self-dx more valid in a way: It's the one where you make sense of it to yourself.

Really, though, the longer I've known about autism as more than a word being used about me, the more that I have understood that it's really the only category they've got that I fit in (to explain certain things -- I do fit in other categories more or less), and that I fit it too well in too many ways and constantly for it to be something else.



In fact whether a person is considerate or not can happen with or without autism. What's different in autism is the person may not show their consideration (if they are considerate) the same way non-autistic people would.

I have a better view of my Aspergers simply because I'm with myself all the time. I see (mostly) everything I do. And I was the first to unofficially diagnose myself as well. I have also been my best advocate in seeking confirmation of this, too.

This isn't really a Yes or No question...

In some cases, yes AS can be self diagnosed, but in others no it can't... And even sometimes it can't be that well diagnosed professionally.

GA

On one hand hypochondria is a problem, on the other hand, I wouldn't trust the so called professionals, different ones will make different diagnoses. Psychiatry is very unscienfitic. Someone once said that the psychiatrist will decide whats wrong with you in the first 5 minutes of meeting you and spend the rest of their time trying to prove that diagnosis to themselves ('m sure I read it in a psychology book).

I think really that an official diagnosis is often just a confirmation of what you already know.

I can relate to a lot of things on this post, including but not limited to my first-person understanding of autistic authors' work. The very title "Thinking in Pictures" contributed to my self-diagnosis.
I do agree that only I know what is going on in my mind--although my mother and aunt are still trying to convince me that I do not have an autistic spectrum condition. When I read about the terrible problems Aspies have, I begin to doubt my judgement, but in general, the more I learn about the autistic mindset, the fewer symptoms of neurotypicality I am able to identify in myself. Some of the differences I began to notice when I read about neurotypical psychology and thought that it was complete excrement compared to what I had noticed about myself, and other differences came up when reading these forums and other Asperger's materials, and I saw that other people did the things nobody knew I did.

It really hurts my feelings that my mother does not agree with my self-diagnosis. She spends more time with me than any other human being--except for myself, the one who should know this stuff. When I first told my mother that I had Asperger's Syndrome, she told me it was not possible because "You notice too much." (She had always complained that I never noticed the same things others did, for example, that a boy in a restaurant was admiring my cellular encasement, when I was unaware of the existence of said boy. I did notice the light angles and the patterns on the table, hahaha.) My mother still insists that I am "fine" or at least "fine around me."

Go not to the elves for advice for they will say both no and yes.

On the one hand with our current technologies it is impossible to really understand brain conditions. It wouldnt be a very oddball thing for someone to have a brain which works entirely different from the norm and appear just as normal as usual. We got some simularities which we use to classify it, but in the end it is a weak inductive argument.

So based on that, it is ONLY the self which may diagnose it. Only you can know or believe that you have it based on the symptoms you describe. Yet still there is the problem of the hawthorn effect - which doesnt exactly apply here - but basically, the fact that you are interested in finding out if you have aspergers will alter your normal thinking which changes what is observed and the results may be different from how you think normally.