How did you find out about Aspergers?

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I first heard of Aspergers in 1993 when I worked for a community re-entry program for neuorcognitively impared adults. My client’s mother had him diagnosed at Pitt (?) before it was a “diagnoses”. He was 19 and finishing high school in the community college. She was trying to get him reclassified from ED to NI, which doesn’t exist in New Jersey. I thought he was the coolest guy in the world and didn’t quite know what was wrong with him. He had talents, obsessed over his hairline and was a genius at predicting number one hits with obscure bandsbig future in Hollywood) Once he turned 21, he was released from his IEP and we became friends. My friends thought he was weird at fist, but he did fit in. We eventually found out we had other friends in common. His mother was a loon and his 2 brothers and sisters moved very far away. Eventually his mother stuck him with one of his brothers, who dumped him off at the Y, where he hung himself. Such a waste of life.

The next time I came across Aspergers I was doing Autism research at work (I work in a sponsored research office). When I came across Aspergers I decided to read up since back in 1994 there was no internet and nothing in the library. As I read the boring diagnostic criteria, some support websites, etc, I came across a Google Books excerpt and my jaw dropped. It described my bf to a t. Rigid, social anxiety, obsessions, ocd tendencies, hoarding, odd voice, odd walk, naive, no comprehension of how his words and actions effected others, minimal eye contact, vague memories of things from the month before, no childhood, high school or college friends (college that he only made it through because of harsh parents), tons of unfinished household projects, caring more about possessions than people, his employees calling him a social ret*d, no spontaneous need to share activities and thoughts, routines and lists, a huge need to be alone, and not in separate rooms but me not around, odd ticks, delay in reaction, sensitive to the touch but odd at touching, so many things. My jaw dropped and I started crying at my desk. For years I just went with the flow, letting him have his way, adapting to his ways. All out of pure love. He is so manly and so childlike all at once, so sweet, so funny, so handsome, so tasteful, so my views of life, politics, etc., but so inflexible in thinking. He does things/activities to show love, but not the “normal” things like affection and kind words.

Oh, tangent. No one in the NT world knows about Aspergers. I am relatively educated (2 master’s degrees), read a lot of current news and have a psych degree from 1989. Aspergers needs to be known. It would do the NT world a favor on patience when dealing with someone who has opposite brain syndrome. Imagine a world where an NT knew because it took you five seconds longer to respond that you were just processing. Imagine lack of eye contact and odd posture not being a sign of lying. Imagine speaking out of turn and not being scorned, but redirected KINDLY. Imagine being at a job where they understood inflexibility and only assigned you things you excel at. Imagine being able to express a direct and honest opinion and not being expected to follow polite rules and NTs understanding. It’s the way some people are.

Imagine as well a world of AS accepting NTs for not following their rules as well. Just harmony. Why are we inundated with drug awareness, sex awareness, physically handicapped awareness, old people awareness, cultural sensitivity, and so much more and not this? It’s a waste to have a population of normal people who use different parts of their brain to process information and not understand, know, or appreciate it. We need a public awareness campaign. Duh, they do it for teens dumping babies, only a few a year, why not for AS who we encounter more than we know???

A little over a year ago, I was in the presence of my NT wife and her best friend (also NT),
when I made a rude out-of-left-field comment that made my wife cry. The details of what
I said aren't important; what is important is that her friend used to work as a teacher for
autistic children, and she mentioned that my comment added to her general thought
that I might have AS. For the next few months we used it as a punchline for my occasional
odd behavior, until my wife found out about my extensive use of pornography, chat rooms,
and attempts to find women to cheat with.

This led me to a therapist who specialized in addictions, and after a few sessions, he
said that he believed I was on the spectrum, although at a higher-functioning level
than most of the other AS people he had treated. From there, I went to a psychologist to
get a clinical diagnosis (such as it is), and $150 later, there it was: AS, potentially coupled
with social anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, and general anxiety.

32 years old, never diagnosed but haven't got much doubt, despite my glaring lack of a psychology degree. How do I know?

Saw a character with Asperger's on a TV show, and although the character as shown had nothing in common with me I was curious about the name (I do a little medical research as a hobby.) Looked it up, read the description, felt like someone had slapped me. I corelated with 9 out of 10 of the traits listed when I was adolescent, teen & 20's; my judgement on how I behaved as a preadolescent child is not objective enough to use as data and I don't have anyone I could use as a reliable objective source of information about my behavior compared to other children. I did more research (I'm good at it). It was like someone was describing my life a couple years ago, how my brain worked. Everything. I kind of spazzed out, had trouble believing that I was part of a group - it felt like I was horning in on someone else's medical condition. Like those people who pretend to be amputees when they're not. Took a while to work it out in my head, come around to the idea. It's like, wouldn't I know? If it were something other people had too, if I was anywhere near being classified as high functioning Autistic, isn't that something someone would have said something about? How could nobody notice? So a reactionary part of me told myself no, no way, but logic is my friend and most of how I function, and logic said "you match the criteria, diagnosis or not you match."

And really, people did notice, all the time - it's part of why life sucked so absolutely and utterly in High School - people noticed all the time, they just didn't have a nice scientific name for it. The nice words were "naieve" and "innocent". The less nice words were "geek", "nerd", "looser", "egghead", and a few others; social isolation is the fate of all those who don't know how to keep up as a teen, and I ended up in the usual social sub-pool of those willing to accept a little "crazy" or "awkward" at the lunch table. I was socially backwards even there, though, and my small pool of friends tended to protect my lack of knowledge about social situations instead of helping me understand; I didn't have the words to explain, then, that ignorance is not precious to the ignorant and the thing you don't know about can definitely hurt you.

I didn't pick up enough skill at coping in social situations to come across as normal even at first contact until I was well into my 20's and had traveled away from home a bit. Fortunately, for a little while after HS a lot of the initial reaction to my utter lack of social skill was seen as cute, due to my being young, female and on the "cuddly" side of the weight spectrum while working in a male-dominated job. Unfortunately, "cute" does not stick past first blush of acquaintence, and it was another decade before I worked out how to make the "I'm normal" impression last past a couple hours. These days when I try to, I can keep my mouth shut, listen actively, make polite conversation on almost any topic, dress appropriately, and give the right public emotional response when it's called for in 98% of the situations I encounter on a day to day basis. Then at home I have it all set up, almost nobody comes over except the couple people who know how weird I am and like me anyways, and I can relax. I'm even married to a very nice guy who knows exactly how nuts I am - and still loves me.

This is the first time I've ever self-identified as someone with Asperger's, here in this post in this group.


As an adult who has focused most of her life on learning to comprehend and blend, I no longer fit the traits as described; but learned behaviors are not the same as instinct and I still (though increasingly rarely) get caught out by things an "NT" would automatically know how to deal with now and again.

The major irony for me was that on the day we covered it in class (I'm a music therapy grad student), I also went to see my psychiatrist and he suggested it as a possible dx. Oy. And then I researched it and I was like holy cheese, that's my life written out in diagnostic terms. Heh.

Ummm...I am not diagnosed, but there has always been something off about me..blah blah blah..won't go into it because I already have...it could be a number of factors that contribute to the way that I am...and not AS....but even though I am a math ret*d, i do come from a family of engineers some of who have exhibited autsitic traits, and when i was little, I think that someone musta thought I was because that word seemed to hover around my head at an early age, but I don't know where it came from exactly....(i think my grandfather was really concerned about the way I would turn out...his brother was something like ocd/autistic...he sorta was too)

Anywhoo I was/am moderator of several different tribes....on this multi-faceted forum thingy called "tribe.net" annnnd the names of my tribes were stuff like
"tribe for the socially inept"
"dropped on the head as a child" (I was)
'the social anxiety tribe"
"Adults who don't drive cars"
and so on...

I think it was in the "Dropped on the Head as a Child" tribe that soembody brought up that she had always attributed the symptoms I listed as being more related to the Autistic spectrum than anything else....so naturally the shiftless internet addict that I am, I looked it up and went through a few brief phases of AS obsession....then talked myself out of it.. humiliated myself in the Aspie tribe over there....(that helped)...

..then eventually got hooked to WP
...would like to find out whether or not I really have AS just so I could get closeure and maybe one day not be so addicted/fixated.....yada yada yada.....

the internet in general is a beast that feeds off my creative energy

One of my mom's old boyfriends, to whom she still often talks, dates a girl with Asperger's. I've never met her, but my mom told me that she had it and I didn't know what it was at the time. She told me what it was and I was like "That sounds awful!"

Turns out I was very misinformed. Or, rather, I was only given a description of a very extreme case. Eventually, I somehow stumbled across some information myself and I realized that it does sound like the way I am. My mom refuses to acknowledge the possibility, though, because she thinks that that extreme case is the only way Aperger's can manifest itself.

It'd be nice to find out if I really do have Asperger's, but without the support of my mom I don't think I'll be able to get accurate information about my childhood. Of course, even with her support, she can barely remember what she did two hours ago, let alone what happened nineteen years ago (No exaggeration).

I think whatever I just said made sense.

I was watching the documentary about autism on the Rain Man DVD with my then-boyfriend. He said that the things that were being described sounded a lot like me and referred to me as autistic from then on.

I heard about AS a couple of years later. I'm an obsessive reader and often read the newspapers/magazines that come with them from cover to cover. One of the magazines had a 'problem page' in which a letter was printed from someone with concerns about their daughter who seemed similar to myself. The answer was that they should look up Asperger's Syndrome. So I looked it up and started to learn about it.

There was an autistic child on an episode of "House MD" and Asperger's was mentioned so i looked it up on wikipedia and was practically reading about myself.

The kid was a bit more low-functioning, if I recall....the doctors joked amongst themselves about Aspergers

What season/episode was that? I'm still on the second season somewhere.

The school-shrink told my mother I might have Asperger's, and my mother mentioned it to me. I then checked it up myself. Sounds plausible enough.

Yeah, Dr Wilson thought Dr House might have it.

Season 3 Episode 4 - Lines In The Sand

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger%27s

I wonder, since it has heavily expanded since I was last there, how many wiki editors are on the spectrum? Probably more than countable.

I was always told I had HFA, or PDD, with an ungodly amount of ADHD. My parents don't go further to edumacate themselves, they just assume I am brilliant but with problems over their heads. My psychiatrist just gives pills and keeps looking at a big dollar sign over my head.

Yea I found out by.....


stumbling across an old audio tape.

labeled "Aspergers Syndrome re josh"

mm... very interesting eh.





Yea it was a recording of a interview with my parents and Tony attwood. MM... Aparently my mother was going to tell me i had aspergers. waiting for the right time lol mmmm...
So yea he said "I was very odd" lol almost like he cant work me out ha well I like to think that. mm haha..

.... So yea that was exciting. I had never heard of label before the TAPE.
Found out 4 months ago

I met some friends of a friend who, apparently, later said they thought I may be and aspie. Up to that point I wasn't really aware of what it meant but after a bit of research I could understand where the comment came from.

Wasn't diagnosed with anything in my childhood, though that's when my difference and difficulties were most pronounced. At one stage, my mother tried to get me to see a psychologist, but I refused. The thought of 'talking' to someone was out of the question to me, at that time. Started drinking in my teens as a means of coping and that brought its very own set of problems. Diagnosed in my twenties with bi-polar, but I think the psychiatrist was off - she had only a half hour interview with me. Besides, the dramatic mood swings went away when I stopped drinking in my late 20s. Being sober brought me back to the characteristics of my childhood. I became, once again, that awkward little girl. Stumbled upon a definition of Aspergers about 4 years ago on the internet and felt alarmed at the resemblance to my own personality. Didn't do anything about it, though. Not sure what made me look it up again recently, but found this site this time and feel that an identification is useful because it allows me to see myself more clearly and adapt more easily without feeling quite so isolated and misunderstood. Both of my parents have aspie-like traits, although I haven't told them about it. Not sure that a label would be useful to them at this stage (they are now in their 70s). My father is an engineer, as is my mother's brother. My mother has a lot of the sensory issues related to AS. Most of the time I pass as "normal" though I still have a complex hand stim thing that tends to go crazy when I'm stressed, even in business meetings. I do this sort of movement thing with one hand through the bottom of my long hair (hard to describe), and when the other hand is occupied holding a pen or a book, it mirrors it. Its been exactly the same movement since I was a young child. My mother says it started when she took my security blanket away when I was a baby. I started reading long before I started school, way ahead of my peers. I also have a face picking OCD. I sound like a bundle of joy, don't I ? And clearly, I am quite comfortable talking about myself (own world obsessed).

worked in a neuro lab.

picked up random literature article on autism/AS

knew

have received some comments from students and co coworkers/teachers about my behaviors that they had noticed as odd, at least


more often than not, people would say im just quiet