Severity confusion

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I consider myself moderate-functioning Asperger's, because the severities of my respective symptoms vary so widely. For instance, I have no problem with abstract thinking or emotional self-awareness, moderate problems with rigidity, casual relationships, and fluid speech, and ungodly problems with long-term friendships and compulsive behavior. It averages to the middle.

My father and my shrink characterize me as extremely high-functioning. This is understandable, as they have never observed me in the wild. My classmates are convinced that my case is severe. This is understandable, as I frighten them with my terrifying Uniqueness Rays. Only my mother and my teachers get this remotely right (and surely the teachers, who really don't know me that well, are making lucky guesses on the basis of my schoolwork). It's like you can never know another person, especially not one with autism. Sometimes a wreck of a severe autistic will learn to type or sign and reveal themselves to be quite intelligent. It is disheartening how little man can know sometimes. Our gigantic, seething, Homo Sapiens brains can understand quantum physics, but cannot understand themselves. Humbling.

Autism severity gages are a conceptual nightmare on the level of deconstruction and IKEA furniture assembly instructions; they bewilder the most intelligent of us. All ideas that anyone has concerning the severity of a case of Asperger's are shaky, even my own. I'm not one for knee-jerk relativism, but I'm with Kant on this one.

Submit your thoughts. I would like to apologize for this post. I'm a philosophical person full of chocolate and Melville on the computer in the middle of the night. These things happen.

welcome to wrong planet,

My functioning is all over the place too. Mostly I'm high-functioning, and yet I wouldn't be able to hold down a job - all the social interaction would send me into a mental breakdown. I can fake being NT pretty well most of the time, but people are uncomfortable around me without knowing why. I have some Asperger's traits really strongly and some not at all. In addition to that, some of my Asperger's traits are really strong some of the time and barely noticeable at other times.

MissPickwickian,

NOW if only you can convince Daniel of that!

I am the SAME way! Class mates considered me strange, school officials varied all over the map, and my mother just considered me smart and shy. She KNEW I didn't lie about such things, and try never to lie, but thinks I am kidding, or just hate her with some symptoms. She INSISTS that I hug her, for example, though I hate it.

There is only so much a person can know about another person's brain, and having a college degree does little to change that fact. I think words are intended to communicate ideas, rather than
judge values.

Of course, but Daniel isn't in this discussion yet.

I am extremely high functioning in most things, my main issues are my ADD/Executive System Dysfunction, and my anxiety. The former cripples my ability to hold a menial service industry job in order to make a living while going to college (I require a job coach to help me stay on task and help me not to make social screw-ups on the job) and the latter makes it difficult for me to interact in the community. It's kind of sad, I'm like a walking encyclopedia but I have no common sense. I'd do fine in a career in Academia, it's just getting there that is the problem.

Beware, I live.

OP: you'll find that all facets of the disorder affect people in different ways and severities, so generic labels like high-functioning and low-functioning don't apply in reality, except for the most sweeping of generalizations. We'll all be impaired in each point we must meet to be diagnosed, but the severity of such can vary wildly from one person to the next.

Your shrink may be comparing you to other patients, and what you can and cannot achieve compared to them; I'd trust his judgement over that of your peers and school teachers who most likely know naught of ASDs.

Granted, my shrink was telling me of another autistic individual he sees (classic autism) who is far worse than me for he cannot make friends, but he works. Not a good example for my psychic to use at the time.

How you "appear" has a large say on how others perceive you, no matter what you can or cannot achieve; a professor "aspie" who cannot stop flapping his hands as he writes his axioms out with jittery chalk, rocking as he recites gravitational dynamics to the astounded audience will appear more "severe" than the good looking dude with classic autism who is effectively housebound, but doesn't overtly "stim".

Actually, even good shrinks tend to see what you can do in their office, and really not understand how much more difficult things can be outside of it. I know a woman who was diagnosed autistic by one such shrink.

Said shrink, despite claiming such understanding, did not understand the true extent of her difficulties with everyday life until they attended a social event together, and watched her do things like run around inspecting all the electrical outlets (so that she would not get too overloaded), be completely unable to figure out how to stand in line for food, and end up shutting down partway through the day and becoming unable to speak, look at anyone, or move much.

It is extremely common for autistic people's abilities in non-office situations to be either overestimated or underestimated based on how closely the autistic person is or is not able to "look normal" in an office situation. It is a common and huge complaint of both parents and autistic people.

And it happens for other people, too. For instance, I once watched a documentary by a man with what is otherwise considered quite severe Tourette's, who nonetheless ended up without a diagnosis throughout most of his childhood because he was able to suppress most of his tics for however long he was around a doctor. However, when in more ordinary situations, his tics were extremely frequent and difficult to control, and often got him in trouble.

Similarly, I used to be able to control large parts of my stimming in public, and then even when I began to be less able to do so, I was still able to do so in the less-chaotic situation of being alone with a doctor, or alone with a doctor plus my parents (they became more obvious the more chaotic or prolonged you made the situation, because I'm pretty sure they're among other things my body's way of regulating overload). And my tics were something that for a long time, unless I was extremely overloaded, mostly happened either when alone, or else when I thought I was alone (and that last scenario terrified me when it occurred -- I had gotten a lot of crap for them at a younger age and, since they were mild, was able often to suppress them to avoid getting yelled at or teased; I still do the bulk of my ticcing alone and even if a little of it started escaping around people, it remained more easily controlled than stimming).

On the other hand, when it came to things like absence seizures, it was professionals that noticed them first, because outside their offices everyone thought those just meant I was "thinking deeply about something" or "distracted for a minute" (and I was of course unable to notice them at all), but they knew what to look for and therefore noticed them and then alerted my parents what to look for. Then suddenly with what to look for pointed out, my parents could think of previous times when they'd happened.

So, it generally takes a very good shrink to be able to understand the extent to which certain things may be either more obvious or less obvious than usual in their office. They exist, but it's still not true of most. Also, I've noticed that in the autism world some professionals base their idea of functioning more on a person's ability to appear normal, rather than a person's ability at practical tasks.

For instance: I know an autistic woman who can appear almost normal in some situations, but whose job abilities remain restricted to a limited field of work and with extensive work supports, and who can't take care of herself at all; and I know an autistic man her exact age who can't appear normal in any situation at all, and who does a lot of incredibly socially intrusive things (like compulsively grabbing people's stuff) that make him look totally unaware of anything to some people, and who has obvious speech problems, but who has a job, and his own place, and has almost no trouble with self-care or any of that stuff.

If a professional were to see them only in their office, they would almost undoubtedly predict him to be the one who had trouble with work, self-care, etc., and say he could never live on his own. And they would judge her as totally capable of all of those things. And they might claim that this was "after careful comparison to a large number of patients who have the condition," but really all they're doing is comparing a very tiny amount of their skills to each other.

Similarly, I once saw an autism professional in a certain situation (I was already diagnosed but was asking for practical help from this person). I was having extreme academic difficulties, was only able to speak for a small portion of the day, had uncontrollable stimming in most environments, almost no self-care skills, severe self-injury, and had alienated nearly everyone around me socially.

However, when I first walked into her office, it was during one of my fluent periods, I was sitting stiffly rather than stimming, and I was neatly dressed. She concluded after about two minutes of conversation with her alone that I had no academic or speech difficulties, no unusual movements, no trouble with self-injury, and that my social skills were the only thing that stood out to her as really bad. That just happened to be the case for those particular two minutes of the day.

The rest of my time with her (over a longer time period) was spent in various states of extreme frustration when she couldn't understand why it was that I could speak to her alone but not to her plus two other people, began having far more difficulty in a larger room with more objects in it, overloaded to the point of meltdowns on a regular basis, and required someone familiar to interpret the reasons for my reactions to her (she thought that if this person stopped talking, I would be able to tell her all the same things, which I was not, so she then concluded that since I, personally, wasn't saying anything, then all the things my interpreter was saying were all in her head and had nothing to do with my thoughts, even when I was able to give brief typed answers that confirmed that the interpreter was in fact speaking my thoughts). And she never did understand the full extent of difficulties I was having outside of her office, even if other people who were around me most of the day told her what they were.

So from my own experience with a variety of professionals, it is extremely common for them to make inaccurate judgments about a person's abilities outside of their offices, whether that person happens to be autistic or not, and it is also extremely common for them to not even be able to incorporate new information they learn after a set time at the beginning of the first appointment. It would very much surprise me if the only factor in the mis-estimating of this person's abilities were that the professional in question happened to know a huge range of people and had some kind of magical powers to judge their abilities by comparison, even when most of the abilities in question aren't being shown in the office. I've seen too much overestimation and underestimation by five-minute impressions of professionals, to believe that it's just their superior judgment from knowing a wide range of people with a condition. (Especially when, as in the case of many professionals, it's a condition that I actually know more people with, and in more depth, and in more situations outside offices, than they do. Because most psychiatric professionals don't solely see autistic clients, meaning that most of their experience may be with mood problems or something else, and they may only have had a few autistic patients, or at least only a few where they knew the patient was autistic. Whereas many autistic people have met a large amount of other autistic people in support groups or other settings where there tend to be a lot of us, and might be actually familiar with a larger number of autistic people and in more depth than the doctor is (depending on the doctor).)

I hear you, and my mother and I have both felt this frustration in relation to me (I didn't know how common it is); I'm not too bad in a professional and mechanical setting (which I've always chalked up to the speech therapy I had when young, it was a good experience for me), and I can hold a somewhat lucid conversation about a set topic I'm familiar with (i.e., me). When outside of such, I'm effectively unable to interact socially at all to the point of only utilizing basic expressive and receptive language (the latter most times).

However (my point still stands), peers aren't that great of a source, especially if it's a non-autistic school (they're probably the worst source for many of us with an ASD, but that's a different tangent of destroying the different mind due to social dynamics); teachers in my experience have been completely useless, and bordering on negligent in many situations.

Anyway, your post, the OP's, and others around this board show that generic functioning labels aren't accurate at all as there's just too many points that are affected in ASDs (even Asperger's and autism as labels too), and each point varies from person to person (from impaired in the least to the appearance of non-functional).

Ms. P:
Don't ever apologize for a post like that again. You're right about a lot of things, and other people are wrong. However, you've got a rough road. Don't ever let that stop you. Anything that is worth doing is hard. And that includes living as an Aspie in a world of NTs. There isn't too much understanding in the world right now....(read again, the first few pages of "A Tale of Two Cities," the part where he says "And they were convinced that things were as they ought to be, had always been that way, and would ever be so." I'm sorry, I don't have it in front of me right now, so that's probably a total misquote. But it's nearly right. So go to school, take from it what you can, and move on.

I had a friend exactly like you many years ago. I'm not going to mention her name, but today, at our age (we are not young) she is quite a famous philosopher, of a kind, and a Very popular professor, though her field is not literature. But we both remember each other when we were 16. You'll get there. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other, and disregarding the people who say "you're out of step." Maybe THEY are out of step.

Btdt