DemonKia
Posts: 5521
Joined: 10/13/2007
From: Chico, Nor-Cali
Status: offline
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Thanks, Aswad, for contributing.
Actually, I've been around aspies for years. I'm something of an aspie magnet, was long before I started thinking, hey, maybe this is what's up with me. &, yup, I feel far more comfortable being around aspies & other high-functioning autie types than I do around neurotypicals. & I've even been hanging around socially with some people who've had professional interactions with autism, & they seem to think I fit . . . . .
I'm reluctant to post my history here in any detail, mostly because I don't do well with all the concern trolling, et al, but I spent the year I was 15 in a psychiatric institution. Locked down, the whole bit. Before medication had taken over psych, so none of that, but twice weekly individual therapy & daily group & occupational therapy & special ed school, the whole kit & kaboodle. No idea what diagnosis they gave my parents, they never told me, & frankly I didn't really wanna know way back then. My mom started taking me to therapy when I was 11, & she never knew I tried to kill myself that year . .. . (I've always, & I mean always, felt like an alien from another planet or a time traveler from the future or some such.)
So, not exactly the picture of mental health.
Oh. & yeah, I've taken several of the AS tests that are online, on the various aspie sites, & I scored well into the ASD end of the spectra . . . . . The stuff about being female & aspie was the kicker for me, the cherry on top of the sundae . . . . .
quote:
ORIGINAL: Aswad
quote:
ORIGINAL: DemonKia
I ring 90% of the aspie 'bells'.
I would be wary of getting married to a diagnosis before you check that it's the right bells that are ringing. As an adult, there is a fairly simple test which gives you something to go on. Go to a meeting of highly functioning aspies. If you feel out of place, it is fairly likely that you are normal with a twist of lemon instead. If you feel like you've finally met other humans, it is fairly likely that you are an aspie. A response in between is a solid contraindication against self-diagnosis.
Also, please bear in mind that while the symptoms may be less conspicuous in girls (at an epidemological level, at least), there is also a gender component to this anomaly. In my experience, it's not a very subtle condition, even in girls, when you know what to look for. Some upbringings can result in some of the same mental and personality trait anomalies that are seen in aspies, for that matter. Hence, my recommendation to seek out people who do know what to look for (it isn't nearly as easy to explain as to recognize; see "tacit knowledge").
Some of the traits normal people commonly look for are also very biased.
For instance, the notion of obsession with nonfunctional rituals is absurd, given how almost no interactions with normal people will work unless the collection of nonfunctional rituals they have inherited are carefully tended to. Experiments with normal children show that they will, unlike animals, copy the useless aspects of what their parents do just as much as the useful aspects (e.g. show them how to open a puzzle box, but throw in a pointless component like rubbing the box in some way, and children of a certain age will duplicate that component when opening the box, every time).
Most "diagnostic" criterion detect the presence of cultural, cognitive and linguistic idiosyncracies, and the consequences of being idiosyncratic, not the condition itself. Similarly, most of the comorbid conditions are logical consequences of the experience of growing up in an intolerant society while having such idiosyncratic traits.
Incidentally, depression is mostly a secondary condition, not comorbid.
And it's related to payback from effort, not strictly situational.
Health,
al-Aswad.
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RE: Female & Aspie - 
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