Me, too. I have one in my bathroom that will drive me nuts unless I have the TV or radio on to drown out the sound. It’s an annoyance; not a syndrome (for me).
Your OP question,yes.
I have several friends in speech pathology working in as many school districts.When they get together and talk shop I try to follow to the best of my layman’s ability.
Aspergers seems to be the prevalent thing,replacing ADD/ADHD in the limelight.
I share John T’s view in that wonderfully succinct comment.
I have many signs of autism, and was once tested for being “retarded.” My IQ at the time was 143! I abhore being touched, I don’t make eye contact, I have speech difficulties, and I am very obsessive. I could happily live without other people in my life.
Funny enough – the reason I ended up in the “gifted” program was due to my teacher at the time (Mrs. Catalano, by the by…I hear she ended up in an institution after a failed suicide attempt…one can only hope the rumour was true) decided that I was “retarded” and had me tested. My mother had already tested all her kids, so knew my IQ and let them test me so she could laugh at the teacher. It was actually quite hilarious. I was in 4th grade at the time and I hated that teacher, she had me sitting in on the meeting and hadn’t bothered to read the report before showing it to my mother. Seriously, if you are going to gleefully announce “Mrs. So-and-So, your daughter is mentally retarded” please at least verify it before Mrs. So-and-So points to the report and says “since when is anything over 150 ‘retarded’?” </hijack>
one of my sons is Autistic, the other diagnosed with Aspergers. While there is indeed a spectrum, you KNOW when you’re dealing with Autism. Autism breaks your heart.
The stuff a little down the range on the spectrum can still be a real impairment to fully functioning in society - I’ve seen Asperger’s kids who will surely have a hard time ahead of them. But beyond a certain point it’s just putting a name on something that doesn’t need it. I have hard time recognizing faces, and, as my ex would gladly point out, several other quirks that could put me on the spectrum. But I have no trouble holding down a job, have a great social life - and generally function well in society. Putting a lable on me like “mild Aspergers” or “some Autistic tendencies” is useless, and I’m worried that when everybody is a little autistic, Autism really doesn’t mean that much anymore. And it needs to mean something.
For a tortured analogy: Clumsiness is not a “mild cerebral palsy”
That’s an excellent analogy. It’s gotten to the point where there are very few people in my life who aren’t diagnosed with some sort of mental/emotional/social problem. You’re right – the words are becoming meaningless. And when people self-diagnose, I want to just grab 'em by the shoulders and shake 'em.
As a child, the fact that I didn’t choose to play with the other children, preferring to read; had no friends, and didn’t feel the need for any; and had certain behaviours others found annoying, such as remembering a large number of trivial facts and sharing them at the least provocation, resulted in my being brought to see a psychiatrist and given a series of tests. I was also brought to see a few other counsellors and such. I found out later in life that these were for Aspergers’.
I am not convinced that I have Aspergers’. I think that I’m just somewhat impervious to social norms, both the useful ones (being able to remember faces, being able to easily detect when one is about to start annoying someone, knowing how to respond in a large variety of situations by instinct, knowing when one is being manipulated) and the less usefull ones (I suffered next to no turmoil when I discovered my sexual orientation, my gender identity and presentation are atypical for cisgender men, and I am extremely unapt to make generalizations about groups of people).
In the case of the useful social norms, they’re things I’ve been successfully working on since I reached adolescence, came out, and began to have a social circle.
One of the reasons I don’t think of myself as having Aspergers’, besides the very low severity, is having read Temple Grandin’s book Thinking in Pictures, which goes into detail about her inward thought processes as a person with Aspergers’, and I didn’t recognize myself in them at all.
To the extent that I am on the spectrum, it must be due to some different underlying phenomenon. I don’t find it any more useful to think of myself as “having very mild Aspergers’ syndrome” than as simply and straightforwardly “being somewhat impervious to social norms.” It’s just a part of my personality, as other people have lots of different aspects of theirs that fit together in sometimes helpful, sometimes unhelpful ways.
Right! You’re a guy that’s under the “average” line on some things, above it on others, and dead center on others. I fail to see how quiet bookworms who prefer solitary time can be considered to be anything but slightly different.
Are you my twin brother?
Okay, maybe not. 
:: nods ::
See, now I read that book, and I was startled by knowing what she meant! I kept thinking, “I know what that’s like, just… not nearly as much.” The visual thinking, the being calmed by pressure, the having to consciously decipher social cues.
I don’t think I have Aspergers, because I’ve been able to learn my way towards greater social facility. Are not these conditions things you are stuck with? My counsellor did describe me as having a ‘tendency’ in that direction, but barring a formal diagnosis of it (positive or negative), I can’t say for sure.
Myself, no. My eldest child has since the age of 3 been given about sixteen different dx’s at various times. Almost every professional he has seen begins with a default setting of PDD-NOS but that actual diagnosis has never been given. His language and verbal communication are undeniably, inescapably other. Oddly, and probably in compensation, his ability to interpret nonverbal signals is so accurate as to make peope uneasily consider the possibility of psychic powers. This ability masked for a long time the true extent of his difficulty dealing with spoken language – at the last round of testing, the person administering the test looked at him oddly, then walked around behind a screen thingie and asked the next questions. When she discussed the results with us, she opined that he was partially drawing the answers from her body language prior to that.
I was only surprised (and impressed) that she noticed, most adults do not notice that he does that. Children do, though. I never have been able to figure out how he does so well socially – I had been led to expect that he would be to some extent outcast or excluded because of his problems with language – but he always has done well socially and is, at eight, more popular than I ever dreamed of being in my life.
I think PDD-NOS and “the spectrum” are indeed tomorrow’s ADD/ADHD – heck, last I hear, a number of people were opining that ADD might fall on “the spectrum”. It’s a pretty spread out spectrum it seems to me. It would not surprise me at all if he is given that diagnosis at some point.
Honestly, for us, it isn’t a label we are seeking, it’s a ticket. A child who cannot string together a complete sentence at the age of five and who still answers the wrong question*at the age of seven has need of some help at school. And you can’t get that help without a diagnosis code. That’s how the system works.
I do have a number of, er, neurological oddities myself, and with five professional and semi-pro musicians, two engineers and one physicist in the past two generations we are not without some experience in dealing with peculiar folks in the family. The thing is, until fairly recently, nothing could be done to help folks who had certain kinds of neurologically based peculiarities except for waiting and hoping it would all work out. The advent of ABT and then Floortime and so on changed all that so now there is a tendency to over-diagnose in order to get the kids some help as soon as is possible.
- He will answer why something was done when asked how it was done for example. He knows the difference between why and how but does not always respond to the question asked.
I’m kind of the same way.
Of course, while autism-type conditions fall along a huge spectrum, “normal” falls along a much huger spectrum. There’s probably some overlap, too. It’s not a steady-state thing.
I do wonder about my middle kid sometimes, though. He is very picky about what he wears, sometimes kind of zones out when he’s supposed to be playing baseball or something, and is sensitive to noises, etc.
But he’s pretty social and has lots of friends, is bright and has no trouble in school or relationships. eh…
Has your child ever seen a neurologist or a neuropsych? A neuropsych in the US and a neurologist here in Holland have, at least up until now, had the most useful things to say about Eldest. I find that “low level” experts, like speech therapists, tend to just say there are signs which warrant further examination; and “mid level” experts like psychologists tend to just stick 'em in any box which looks like it might fit.
Or possibly I just had good luck with neuros.
When somebody tries to self-diagnose themselves with ADHD or Aspergers or something my typical counter argument of “You’re not <…>, you’re just an asshole” works fairly well. It seems people have an expectation of some sort of special treatment or even attention simply because somebody slapped a label on an aspect of their persona. I think people forget that besides a label they also need something to complain about.
It’s abnormal psychology, not accounting. There isn’t exactly government established “autism brackets”. You know, where any eye contact you don’t make in the first bracket is counted towards humility. The second bracket is taxed as shyness. The third as aspergers and the fourth and largest one as autism. Remember, to have a syndrome worth labeling you should by any standard be able to show dysfunction, impairment and deviance related to that syndrome.
Or we can just give up and assume everybody is their own little unique blend of psychiatric conditions. It could be fun. "Hi, I’m a suffered of the Type IVa Cyclothymic Attention Deficit and Passive Aggressive Narcissistic Groman Personality and Fatigue Disorder. It’s a struggle every day. "
I’ve wondered a few times. My brother is, and my third grade teacher wanted me to be tested for it because I was listless and inattentive in class. I think most of my problems stem from my lack of self esteem now, though.
Marienee, it’s possible that I may just have poor luck with psychiatrists. We have been to three. The first one was a bloody lunatic. The second one, very keen on fixing everything with drugs, the third could pass as a normal human being. All just my opinion of course, but all people who I’ve told the whole story to agree with my lunatic dx for the first one at least. The second doctor has his fan club. I mean with more complicated kids you do sometimes need drugs.
The lunatic did have a good point though. She told me that it really didn’t matter what my son had exactly, what mattered more is that he needed help at school. So the label we should put on him to get his “more help at school” ticket is whatever is in vogue at the time. What are school boards paying the most attention to right now? Autism, so that’s what we’ll call it.
I was kind of annoyed at her for telling me that, because at that time, I was hoping there was a name for the behavior we were seeing, and a solution to make things better. A way to help him. I wanted to have an expert actually tell me what he had and how to fix it. In hindsight, maybe she’s right. I think people who “have mild Autism” have been with us all along. They were just called quirky or odd or whatever. Having a diagnosis for my son has been nothing but helpful though. If I had it to do again, I’d get him diagnosed sooner. It has been a great help in dealing with school. I mean, really, you get a label whether it’s official or not. I’m afraid that if he didn’t have Autism, he might just be labeled Asshole. I know the kid though, and I know he tries really hard to blend in. Nobody chooses to be that different if they can help it, IMHO.
I also understand that you can have that disability information removed from your school record and just go into adult life with no label attached if that’s what you choose. If my son were to choose today, I know that’s what he’d do. We’ll have to wait and see what he decides when the time comes.
And I know what you mean, Groman. I have been in a room with a group of kids that are all supposed to be Autistic, and there’s nothing that seems the same about each of them. They could all be just as easily be labeled <whatever the kid’s name is> syndrome and it would be just as helpful. That’s not to say they don’t have some issues that they need help with, but how can all of it be autism?
After Dweezil was diagnosed with autism, Typo Knig and I did the usual websurfing and reading about the topic. Reading the definitions, we saw many, many parallels between the various issues described, and our own social cluelessness, inability to read others’ expressions, face blindness (I have trouble recognizing faces unless it’s someone I know well), ability to get absorbed in stuff that bores others silly… Though our challenges are obviously subclinical as in they don’t impede our ability to function in society, the reading we did set off a lot of “Aha!” signals in our brains. It explains a lot about both of us.
Eldest is seven and I have been on this road since he was three. I hoped for a very long time that there was a name for it, too, because that would imply some clear kind of approach. I have now accepted that there is not and we are going to have to make this up as we go along. You know, like all the parents do, only more so.
I have not yet reached the point of your lunatic shrink and here is why: it’s important to get the ticket for the right bus. If I am going to Utrecht, a ticket to Breda is acceptable to me since it’s sort of in the same direction. But If I am going to Paris, that’s not a good start. I can still get to Paris but it’s going to take a lot longer.
I think, to be fair, that a lot of the neurobiological conditions look a lot like each other because it’s the same system going haywire, and midlevel experts (like shrinks) generally don’t have the training to look any deeper than the Big Signs. An ear infection is an ear infection, and if an antibiotic doesn’t work it might have been caused by a virus. In Eldest’s case, problems with sematics and pragmatics of language are common in people on the spectrum; but problems with sematics and pragmatics can also be caused by other things. Diagnosis is not helped by the fact that half the expert world wants to argue that sematic pragmatic disorder is on the spectrum and half wants to argue that it is by definition not. For us, you also have to add in the fact that we moved countries only to discover that the definition of what is expected from a child is different, what gets to be a disability is different, the way of classifying them is different, everything is different.
My recollection from stateside is that diagnosis is private and cannot be disclosed by the school without your consent. Certain kinds of accomodation are not private if they involve changes to the requirements for graduatin but otherwise, they are, too. So at least as of the time I left, you didn’t chose to have it removed, you would have to choose to have it disclosed
I’ve often wondered whether or not I have Asperger’s. I have had trouble making friends over the years due to my inability to recognize social norms and non-verbal cues (as in, “hey, you’re annoying me, go away”). There are other things, such as my difficulty making eye contact (I have to make a conscious effort to look people in the eye, and it still makes me uncomfortable), my obsessions with stuff most other people don’t care about, physical discomfort with certain textures and sounds, and other little things which don’t seem like much on their own, but they add up to something, well, “not quite normal”. I have a job, I’ve had relationships and somehow managed to marry and raise a child, but I’ve always known I wasn’t like everybody else, and still am not. I asked my sister, the psychologist, whether I shouldn’t get tested for autism spectrum disorder/Asperger’s, and she discouraged it, and asked me whether being “labeled” might make a difference in my life at this point in time. I don’t know. I just want to know exactly what’s up with me so I don’t feel like such a weirdo anymore. 