Aspergers

Ranicand wrote: »

Having the condition and not knowing it for most of my life has been a nightmare.

For those that don't know Aspergers is best describe as high functioning Autism.
Many people with the condition do not get diagnosed until they are adults or middle aged.

It causes black and white thinking something is right or wrong gray areas are a bit tricky.

The condition is masked by normal or above normal IQ.

Sensory overload is another problem noises lights and lot's of movement like crowds or traffic can be very stressful.

Two questions how important is body language eye contact?

Also do you know anybody with the condition and how do they come across.

I have found this useful.
http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~alistair/survival/index.html

I was watching The Undateables last night on Channel 4 and a girl on it had it

drunkmonkey wrote: »

Causes Irishness by the sounds of it, carry on and keep calm your perfectly normal.

Not sure standard AH type answers will be helpful to the OP, who has asked reasonable questions about real problems... Perhaps a little seriousness on this one?

Op, if I were you I'd post again in another forum. After hoursians might be helpful, but they may just annoy you.

I think they recently declared that Aspergers didn't exist.

So, eh, yeah.

Doc Ruby wrote: »

I think they recently declared that Aspergers didn't exist.

So, eh, yeah.

Not really. They just reclassified it under another name. For the people who were properly diagnosed it won't make any difference. And it shouldn't make any difference for doctors who are capable of making good diagnoses in the future.

endacl wrote: »

Perhaps a little seriousness on this one?

He's having a hard time accepting he's Irish, hold on and I get my Violin and we'll knock together a tune.

drunkmonkey wrote: »

He's having a hard time accepting he's Irish, hold on and I get my Violin and we'll knock together a tune.

Cute.

OP you are in the wrong forum here.

Your post deserves a better response than this inane drivel. Mods please move thread

I was diagnosed with AS at age 10 or 11. Diagnosis severely upset my parents and indeed myself.
As I grew up, it became apparently ridiculously quickly that the diagnosis was total bull, and that in fact I exhibited almost no symptoms of AS at all. I soon forgot about it, in fact. For example, a lot of girls have told me that my persistent eye contact is actually unusual in that I have no problem maintaining eye contact for long periods of time, and apparently this makes me appear massively confident when talking to people.
Years later I asked my mum about it out of curiosity and she told me that a psychologist I'd gone to for my general hyperactivity (another thing - the fact that small boys are bags of energy and don't like sitting still is apparently now meant to come as a surprise ) had diagnosed AS based on my total evasiveness to her questions, my failing to answer anything with a direct or straight answer and my general refusal to engage with her at all.
I had to laugh when my mum told me this. One of the things I'm blessed with is an extremely detailed and vivid "incidental" memory - I can think back to specific incidents, events, conversations etc that happened years ago and remember them play by play, with almost total accuracy. My friends are often shocked by how much random crap I remember from our childhoods which have long since vanished from most memories.
I remembered being taken to this psychologist and remembered all my conversations with her, and to cut a long story short, I had decided almost immediately not to co-operate with her. I found it intensely creepy that a complete stranger was asking me intimate details about my life and poking her nose in, and after all isn't not talking to strangers one of the things most children are taught until they reach their teen years and can handle such things? I was also acutely aware that I was being "studied" like a lab specimen - who the hell takes notes while having a conversation with you about your life? So basically, I had made a conscious decision that over my dead body would I allow this creepy stranger to study my life. I shut her out and refused to give any meaningful answers to any of her questions. Apparently this led her to believe that I genuinely hadn't understood what she was asking me, and that this appalling level of communication skill obviously meant I had something like AS.

Having been through all this, I now regard the entire field of child psychology with deep suspicion. It absolutely terrifies me how narrow the definition of "normal" has become - it must be virtually impossible not to be diagnosed with a syndrome or disorder these days - and given my experience, I have to ask how many misdiagnoses are made based on the fact that most kids (or adults, indeed!) don't like being interrogated by strangers about their innermost thoughts. The ADHD thing I mentioned is another of my pet hates - since when is the fact that little boys don't generally like to sit still for hours and would prefer to do something active meant to be surprising? The human race has been this way since its very inception - we wouldn't have survived otherwise, after all.

Anyone who's been diagnosed with AS, I urge you to take the following survey:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html

I scored 19. The average is 18 for people without AS, those who have AS usually score in excess of 32.
OP, if you find AS makes your life difficult then I truly feel for you, but if you don't mind my asking, what age were you diagnosed at? And is it at all possible that the diagnosis itself became a self fulfilling prophecy by labelling you?
Even if it is, I believe things like shyness with regard to eye contact can be overcome. If you meet a girl with hypnotic eyes or example you won't be able to tear your gaze away from them for too long

For the psychiatric profession to give people a label because of "black and white thinking" is the height of hypocrisy and irony - personally I can't think of any group more guilty of it.