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Lace-Bane
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19 Nov 2010, 4:33 pm

My psychologist who I've been seeing for roughly 2 years told me I have AS earlier this year. I talk to her about quite a bit now so she would know best I think.

Anyway why I'm confused is that I was recently evaluated at a place for autistic people to get help. The evaluator said that she would have put me in the category of having AS but given the records of my childhood which my parents recently dug up I actually don't fit AS and that I fit in a category of PDD-NOS (something about my difficulties in school during early childhood and having troubles with learning speech I think). She however said I am high functioning also. I never brought up having speech difficulties or troubles in school with my psychologist because I don't remember my childhood so I didn't even know until my parents pulled a bunch of documents out of a dusty old box :?

Where would this put me? I mean she said to look for groups with people having AS to talk to because I would fit in with that category of people (Which I've already done and I feel I belong here)... but she said I had something else. Is she referring to me having HFA over AS?

I think I plan on showing my Psychologist the documents my parents found so I can get her insight but I don't see her for another 3 days and now I'm obsessing over it for some reason :(



FluffyDog
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19 Nov 2010, 4:48 pm

I think you brought up a very important point yourself: that you feel like you belong here. The exact diagnosis may or may not be important when it comes to experts giving help to you, but the most important thing is that you are a person who feels and thinks in a certain way. If you think of yourself as an Aspie, I don't think you should stop doing so just because someone put an HFA or any other label on your case file. Rather than worrying about this, I think you ought to go on with finding your individual path to follow through life and to work on the things that trouble you. :)


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Callista
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19 Nov 2010, 4:53 pm

She's just saying you don't fit the Asperger's box entirely. That's very common; over half the Spectrum is PDD-NOS. PDD-NOS is also called "atypical autism" and can be very close to Asperger's. In your case, the only difference is that you had that early-childhood speech delay which is now no longer present. It looks like you were probably diagnosable with classic autism as a child, and then when the speech delay resolved, lost that one criterion, dumping you into the PDD-NOS category. There's not much difference between classic autism and Asperger's anyway, so it's not like this is a major issue. Actually, I would be willing to say that most cases of Asperger's are actually better diagnosed as classic autism or PDD-NOS. It's just so very uncommon to have a combination of significant impairment, social impairment, and odd/restricted activities/interests, which doesn't involve either speech delay, communication impairment, or problems with self-help skills. Asperger's, as written, is an extremely narrow category, and it's not surprising that your psych would note that technically you fall outside that narrow range. It's not a big deal, except if it changes your access to various services; in that case, ask the psychologist to just put on your record whichever diagnosis gets you what you need, whether that's PDD-NOS, regular autism, or Asperger's.


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