Does this bother you? It bothers me...

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Does it bother you when a person in your family is diagnosed with having a mental condition and nobody seems to feel sympathy for them? But when a person in your family is diagnosed with having some sort of physical problem, everyone seems to be crying and trying to help the person who is struggling? I can't list a single person in my family who truly sympathizes for me, but I have loads of family members who sympathize for people in my family who have WAY less severe problems (physical) in contrast to aspergers. A lot of people feel that if a problem is mental, it cannot be proven because "they can't see the problem". I feel that this is a load of BS, and I want it to stop. Does anybody feel the same way as me?



BTW, to all you people who don't consider AS as being a mental condition it IS. Anything that makes you feel different mentally in contrast to a "normal" person makes it a mental condition.

Doesn't bother me. I don't want people feeling sorry for me. There's nothing wrong with Aspies, we're just different.

Yes, it bothers me...

At the same time, tho, I try not to call attention to my AS, because I don't want to be treated like I have a "condition."

I have noticed this in NTs, but I just never thought to be bothered by it. There is so much I just don't understand about being NT that one more thing is just that: one more.

Pops

Don't get me wrong. I don't want people to feel sympathy for me personally. I just want people to realize that a mental condition can be just as, or, in most cases, even more severe than a physical problem.

For some reason, a lot of people seem to have the mentality that psychological conditions can be shaken off if the person suffering from them has enough will power. My dad was like that with me before I got diagnosed with AS. It's not fair, and I wish people were more understanding.

I think our world has a severe shortage of compassion in general, so yes, this and the like bothers me. On a personal level, I much prefer people know as little as possible about me and leave me to myself. I find humans exhausting. I definitely don't want their pity masked as sympathy. What I would like is to see people grasp, as you said, that psychological illnesses can be just as if not more challenging than physical problems.

Aspergers is considered as being a mental condition right?

Its more of a development disorder than anything.

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder.

Technically, I think it's neurological.


But you've got to realise that they don't have the capacity to understand your limitations. Here's a good way of looking at it. I have a grandson who is fifteen months old, and not quite verbal. He is picking up words like gangbusters, but not to the point where he can use them to express himself beyond saying a noun that he wants or calling someone by name.

And yet all of us will try to talk to him. And when he doesn't understand us because he doesn't have the capacity yet we try again, like that's going to work. As he gets older, we will expect him to have control over his emotions that we did not have at his age, and punish him (which is necessary for learning of course) and get mad at him (which is, objectively, stupid and counterproductive). When he becomes a teenager, we will get mad at him when he acts like we did as teenagers, and for the same reasons.

And yet, we do not get mad at a short person for not being able to reach the top shelf. This is because we can SEE and immediately grasp the reality of their limitation. But when people talk to us, they see a person who is not stupid, and don't understand.

And it's not just them. My daughter has a lot of the same problems I do (I suspect she is also aspie, even though she's not genetically mine), and I get frustrated when she does the same things I do.

"Parity" between treatment for conditions of body & "mind" also issue w/ insurance coverage.

People tend to more often blame person with brain differences*-seen only in behavior, not visibly, as in a physical difference. We can't see each other's backstory/context for "invisible disability". Many possible reasons for a single type of display or expression, and that info. isn't available to strangers (nor to those who dismiss the provided explanation).
* (be it "mental illness" brain chemistry or developmental/neurological brain structure-or an injury, whether early or late in life).

Doesn't really happen in our family. There's one person with an autoimmune problem and that's pretty much it. But pretty much everyone has their own mental problem.

It's just that physical problems are external and easily noticed. You can easily pick out someone in the street who has a broken leg because they'll have crutches and their leg will be in a white cast. You can't so easily pick out someone with a mental or neurological condition unless you know them first. I know family members should be aware of any mental or neurological conditions that their relatives have but I guess that, because they don't often manifest themselves externally, it might not seem as important to them.

Perhaps also, most people are less well equipped with dealing with relatives with mental or neurological conditions than, say, relatives with a leg in a plaster cast. I guess that comes from general ignorance.

It doesn't bother me that nobody cares as such. But my family aren't at all understanding. They never have been. I'm currently in the process of getting officially diagnosed by my university, but my sister doesn't believe there's anything wrong with me. She says that i'm just different, and i'm saying it's Asperger's to get attention.
My mother is different. She was the one who first started researching what was "wrong" with me, but now she regrets telling me. She thinks i'm changing the way I act to appear more different than I actually am, that I made more emotional gestures to her as a child.

In a way this is true. I do act less emotional than I did when I was younger, and sometimes it is on purpose. But as a child I was constantly in a daze. I never really considered what I was and was not supposed to do, and i did things that others considered really unusual, like running around the playground making noises on my own whilst playing games in my head, making faces just to test what faces I could make (and believing nobody would see me doing it), insisting the teacher should let us out of the lesson after five minutes because the clock was usually wrong and someone had corrected it, so it read the time it usually did when the teacher let us go. And interrupting people ALOT.

In secondary school, something just snapped. I guess the constant bullying made me feel I couldn't trust anything I was doing, so I started actively concentrating to suppress my normal behavior, no matter how normal it seemed to me at the time.

Yeah, it bothers me. I don't want sympathy, I just want people to stop lecturing me about how I should change things about me that I cannot change. Like in another thread about sensitivity to voices, every time somebody who is talking to me starts in on how I should do this, or not do that, I start getting a major headache just from their voice and the old, tired words they are using. I have trouble even acting polite when the people are well meaning.