Interesting article about "four core subtypes" of autism

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If I am truly autistic, I should belong to moderate challenges subtype or social-behavioral subtype. I had no developmental delay. I have no low IQ. My IQ is average to high. I have other profile than many other persons diagnosed with PDD or ASD - no prosopagnosia, no sensory overloads (as I think), no need to cover ears or eyes by hand due to sensory stimuli, no shutdowns, no "hangouts". I crave sensory comfort, I definitely dislike tactile unpleasant sensations, I am rather a picky eater with quite low variation of eaten meals.

I'm definitely Asperger's with quirks. I seemed to move up to to Asperger's with social deficits during adolescence, then returned back to Asperger's with quirks.

^^^ Another complication is intelligence (IQ).
My daughter also has ADHD so she never had the patience to sit through a WISC–IV as a non-verbal 5 yr old but the part of the test she did complete put her in the > 70 range (72) but enough for the psychologist to classify her as ID. She later learned to speak but her auditory phobias meant it was impossible to develop friendships with her peers in primary school.

Problem with these "neat" 4 x psychological classifications is she memorised JK Rowling's Philosopher's Stone word for word, can remember everything she ever did and give my the date and time, knows every model of commercial car, plane or train ever built, memorised plane/bus/train/tram timetables can be given a task in tech college and finish it in record time so she can finish and walk out of college catch a train and wander around like "Dora the explorer" (father like daughter).

However, being a savant isn't much use when you have phobias and remedial social skills. Point is. she (and others) don't fit into neat little clusters.

I was never savant at anything and my intelligence wasn't too spiky. How intelligent I was was an illusion, because when you have a diagnosis of some developmental disorder you're expected to be behind developmentally too, intelligence-wise and regarding self-help skills, but because I wasn't developmentally delayed and developed self-help skills at appropriate ages and everything, adults called me "intelligent", even though intellectually I wasn't above my peers, in fact I struggled in school and wasn't very knowledgeable about anything. I had casual interests like all children do but not autistic style, and the casual interests I had were what my peers were into. So whatever was trendy in the playground (such as swapping Pokémon cards) I found myself being into as well, and I began collecting Pokémon cards and swapping them in the playground. I didn't really get heavily into Pokémon though, but I did like getting my mother to buy me Pokémon toys to play with at home. So it wasn't really out of the ordinary for a 9-year-old child.

What made me different from the average child was my challenging behaviour, although I masked it a lot at school. But at home I had severe emotional dysregulation and was the sort of child that would constantly scream and cry "IT'S NOT FAIR!" and "I DON'T WANT TO!" and "WHY ME?" and "I'M BORED!" and other catchphrases that aren't uncommon in children but I expressed them more excessively than the average child, and I don't necessarily mean I constantly used those words but my reactions suggested those words a lot.

Things got worse when puberty hit though, as in I got more challenging, because I became stubborn and socially isolated and took a long time to outgrow some of the behaviours I exhibited as a child, such as temper tantrums and being too clingy with my mother.
I didn't do too badly socially at school but when puberty hit I suddenly fell behind my peers emotionally and socially and it showed more. Common interests became uninteresting to me, such as fashion and make-up. Because I had no interest in all that at like 13 and just wanted to be a boy instead, other girls didn't like being around me any more, and they told me I was a lesbian or too boyish and stuff. But I just found being a teenage girl so hard and I had to go at it alone and figure everything out on my own because nobody liked me any more.
I think if I had of just made more effort to be liked I think I would have fitted in better, so it was my fault too. I was just too stubborn and wouldn't go clothes shopping whenever my mother offered to take me, and I was just happy wearing my brother's hand-me-downs and having my hair scooped back in a ponytail.
No wonder I couldn't fit in.

I'd probably have been 1.5. As previously said, I had a stepwise decline in coping/functioning well in a world geared for neurotypicals. I've been described as a 'genius' and separately as a 'sub 90 IQ type'. Neither of which are true. Genius requires more than just a very high IQ. I'd describe my brain as a high quality orchestra conducted by a drunken, and third rate, conductor. I can be as vain as the next person, and in that light have posted scores on the World genius directory and the World genius registry. Is that any better or worse than telling people your chess rating,or the high level you've reached on a video game?

I very definitely have the adaptive functioning < IQ thing going on. I don't know whether the schizophrenia/schizoaffective worsens it,or not.

I don't have "social awkwardness" -- I have an ego syntonic social apathy.

Itself, in a clinical sense, a social issue, and is considered to be worse than being socially awkward.

It just happened to be, well, not prone to socially environmentally induced mental illness that's for certain.



And I cannot relate to the ever too many autistic accounts of ego dystonic thoughts around socialization issues.
Loneliness, hung up around rejection, and social anxiety... I didn't experienced any of that. To some, it meant "I'm too autistic" in a sense that I'm more blind than them.

Except I'm not that socially oblivious and unaware, nor am that unfeeling either.
I just don't care.


So yeah -- I fit the "does not desire friends" stereotype, amongst other things like being asexual.
Nonverbal tho? I wish. I'm more like anti-verbal in a sense it's stereotypically visual oriented stereotype kind.


So yeah.
I get zero doubts about me being autistic.
I'm just a full blown autistic who can pass for an aspie.

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The only autism stereotype I exhibit was being a shut-in during my early adult years.

^^^ Do you mean internal sensory overload?

I'm a subgroup. You're a subgroup. Everyone is a subgroup. We all have something that is going to throw an attempt to categorize us into complete disarray. Go ahead - change the sorting criteria, the categories, the whole damn DSM - and when the dust settles, we're no better off than we were before. Like I tell anyone who suspects their kid is on the spectrum - a label or a diagnosis means nothing unless it brings in resources.