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Are you on the autism spectrum...


Not_a_Number
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Autism  

78 members have voted

  1. 1. Are you on the autism spectrum?

    • Yes, I'm officially diagnosed as autistic.
      3
    • Yes, I've self-diagnosed myself as autistic.
      7
    • No, but I'm adjacent to it (broad autism phenotype.)
      22
    • No, and I'm nowhere near it.
      46


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3 hours ago, kand said:

For what it’s worth, my older two girls both seem at least autism adjacent, while my son doesn’t whatsoever. He’s the most neurotypical of my kids (youngest dd is too young for me to know, but she seems to me she’s very neurotypical as well). 

I am possibly worrying too much about this one 🙂 . It's also partially that I'm not absolutely sure I want a third kid, so lots of considerations wind up affecting me here. I have a sort of "unstable balance" with that question, where I change my mind day to day 😄 .

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1 hour ago, Pawz4me said:

I wonder how taking that quiz as middle aged adults (I'm assuming most of us are beyond the young adult years) affects the scoring. I'm decently good at making small talk now, but it's a skill that took me a very long time to learn so that I can pull it off at all, let alone w/o being very awkward. But it was very much a learned skill for me, as were many social skills. Not one bit of it came naturally. If I were being evaluated now I would present a LOT differently than I did in my early 20's.

Yeah, I definitely present differently than I did as a teen. On the other hand, I was also ridiculously badly socialized -- I didn't go to kindergarten, then my brilliant family sent me to school more than a year early, which really didn't result in me making friends, lol, then we immigrated when I was 11... there was a lot of upheaval and about 0 energy spent making sure that I had the requisite skills. 

I wound up having to teach myself a lot an older teen, but I do wonder how I would have done with at least a modicum of support. 

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I can be INTJ though I ride the boarder on the E/I.  I have come out E on certain days.  Actually I can ride the J/F line too at times.  

Anyway - my EQ score was 12.  I was surprised it was so low actually. We have GT and sensory stuff abounding over here.   I did have some social anxiety growing up. But I think being quirky GT in a religious elementary school environment where quirkiness was not at all valued was really hard for an overly sensitive kid.  I was a first gen female college student even though both my grandmothers were obviously GT/nerdy/highly intelligent.  Honestly, that led me to a road of homeschooling.  My teen/young adult are just WAY more self assured than I was at their ages.  

Interesting discussion!  

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I previously did the psych central test.  I scored 39.  (dd was 45? 48?)   

There's another one dd (formally diagnosed as an adult.)  and I both did, that was a graphic.  mine was actually narrower in some areas than hers.  (narrow means more inhibiting autistic traits.)

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2 hours ago, Pawz4me said:

I wonder how taking that quiz as middle aged adults (I'm assuming most of us are beyond the young adult years) affects the scoring. I'm decently good at making small talk now, but it's a skill that took me a very long time to learn so that I can pull it off at all, let alone w/o being very awkward. But it was very much a learned skill for me, as were many social skills. Not one bit of it came naturally. If I were being evaluated now I would present a LOT differently than I did in my early 20's.

I'm sure my score would have been higher if I'd done it in my twenties, let alone teens.

I used to be fascinated by spring doorstops, I would sit on the floor, and flick it back and forth over and over. I could easily (and did) do it for 15 minutes.  I was also obsessed with mirrors reflecting back at each other.  The "kid" bathroom when I was growing up, had a mirrored medicine cabinet at a 90 degree angle - so I'd play with those too.

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1 hour ago, Not_a_Number said:

I am possibly worrying too much about this one 🙂 . It's also partially that I'm not absolutely sure I want a third kid, so lots of considerations wind up affecting me here. I have a sort of "unstable balance" with that question, where I change my mind day to day 😄 .

One thing I learned regarding CPAD, (youngest was diagnosed with the type that is based in the corpus callosum.) - essential fatty acids.   Something that has been making its way out of our diets the last twenty + years.  boy babies require 3Xs as many as girls for its development, starting in the first trimester.   There is a lot of overlap between CAPD and ASD.
 

eta: dudeling has been formally diagnosed with ASD, CAPD, ADD, and anxiety. It's been my own reading that I've seen just how much overlap there is.  I was really mad when I read the info on CAPD (there are three distinct types.).

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8 hours ago, Not_a_Number said:

... or somewhere adjacent to it? 🙂 

I've been curious about this one! I know there are quite a few people on here who at least self-identify as being on the autism spectrum. And I know that there were a LOT of people who didn't like making phone calls when I asked, which made me wonder 😂. (You obviously don't have to be autistic to dislike phone calls, but I do feel like it's extra common in the adjacent-to-autism population.) 

I have an autistic friend who loves making phone calls. They've got me so well trained I hit "accept" when they call even when I'm trying to hang up on them. 😅

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I’m formally diagnosed, and I *pass* all the online quizzes.  They don’t capture all Autistic presentations equally well.  (But neither do the professionals, so what can you do?)

I suspect a lot of you all are Autistic too, which is great.  Intense interests make for a better forum.

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7 minutes ago, Lawyer&Mom said:

I’m formally diagnosed, and I *pass* all the online quizzes.  They don’t capture all Autistic presentations equally well.  (But neither do the professionals, so what can you do?)

I suspect a lot of you all are Autistic too, which is great.  Intense interests make for a better forum.

To be fair, it's TOTALLY possible to have intense interests without it being autism. My DH is no less intense than me, and he is definitely, absolutely, certainly not autistic -- he doesn't have ANY of the social traits. 

At the end of the day, I'm pretty sure I'm not diagnosable as autistic, either -- it's possible I'd have been diagnosable as a kid, but if I was, I was one of the 20% who really change around puberty. And I do remember my social awareness coming online somewhere around age 11 or 12. And I do have a kid with a ridiculous high EQ, so the genetics also suggest that I'm borderline and not fully autistic. 

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1 hour ago, Not_a_Number said:

b) that the teachers started relying on her to tell them why other kids were crying, because she always knew what was upsetting them, and could always articulate it (she's also very precociously verbal.) 

So for us, it's obviously a complicated set of traits that are all expressing separately. 

Yeah, my non-ASD kiddo is very emotional astute. The nursery workers at church failed to promote him to the "we're potty trained class" in a timely manner because he did this as well. They finally apologized and said he really needed to move up, but they were sorry to see him go. I don't know if he articulated why kids were upset, but he always calmed them down by presenting the solution they needed.

He has also always typed people automatically when he would read books with characters, such as his Lego Chima book that describes a bunch of the characters, lol! 

But he is a little awkward. I mean, he has ADHD, remediated APD, a connective tissue disorder that makes him look/move/feel differently, speech articulation issues, is gifted, and has kind of a low-occurrence personality. And he's a 13 y.o. boy. He presents as slightly NVLD to use an old diagnosis, but not spectrumy otherwise. He gravitates toward kids who are difficult to appreciate and then appreciates them. He makes friends readily wherever he goes. I think all of this will eventually work out to be a functional career if he can get organized (he's thinking of music therapy, which sounds like a really fantastic fit). Of all his issues, I think APD was the one made the most difficulty for him--he hears things on a time delay, which makes him seem slow. On the output side, his articulation issues made him sound slow, but yet, when he was in gifted enrichment classes for fun, he kept up just fine and had a great time.

So, yeah, not so easy to parse.

1 hour ago, FuzzyCatz said:

I can be INTJ though I ride the boarder on the E/I.  I have come out E on certain days.  Actually I can ride the J/F line too at times.  

Anyway - my EQ score was 12.  I was surprised it was so low actually. We have GT and sensory stuff abounding over here.   I did have some social anxiety growing up. But I think being quirky GT in a religious elementary school environment where quirkiness was not at all valued was really hard for an overly sensitive kid.  I was a first gen female college student even though both my grandmothers were obviously GT/nerdy/highly intelligent.  Honestly, that led me to a road of homeschooling.  My teen/young adult are just WAY more self assured than I was at their ages.  

Interesting discussion!  

Above and below--life experience makes a big difference, IMO. Also first gen female college student (any college student, not just female) from a tiny town in nowheresville who had never seen more than a handful of careers in her life--teachers, rescuers (police, fire, etc.), medical people, service workers, local politicians, blue-collar workers, secretaries, farmers (and more farmers, all dairy) bank tellers, ONE scientist that wasn't a teacher, etc. People worked hard and were smart, but my world was tiny.

And the examples set--some are not so great. Some are super wonderful, but not something you can attain, and you need things modeled differently. Really, I mother very, very differently than my mother, not because she was a bad mom, or because I am a bad mom, but because we are radically different humans. But my mom is one of those classic mom/grandma types that you could make into a family movie character. I can't do that, and that has nothing to do with my socialization abilities. I didn't know a single INTJ female (a boss, maybe, but she was INxJ, probably INFJ) until I'd been a mom for a decade or so. I've met a total of two now, lol! They both picked me out as INTJ and self-disclosed like, "I know your secret, and I share it" lol! 

1 hour ago, Not_a_Number said:

Yeah, I definitely present differently than I did as a teen. On the other hand, I was also ridiculously badly socialized -- I didn't go to kindergarten, then my brilliant family sent me to school more than a year early, which really didn't result in me making friends, lol, then we immigrated when I was 11... there was a lot of upheaval and about 0 energy spent making sure that I had the requisite skills. 

I wound up having to teach myself a lot an older teen, but I do wonder how I would have done with at least a modicum of support. 

46 minutes ago, gardenmom5 said:

One thing I learned regarding CPAD, (youngest was diagnosed with the type that is based in the corpus callosum.) - essential fatty acids.   Something that has been making its way out of our diets the last twenty + years.  boy babies require 3Xs as many as girls for its development, starting in the first trimester.   There is a lot of overlap between CAPD and ASD.
 

eta: dudeling has been formally diagnosed with ASD, CAPD, ADD, and anxiety. It's been my own reading that I've seen just how much overlap there is.  I was really mad when I read the info on CAPD (there are three distinct types.).

I have wondered about this. I took supplements with my kids (both boys), and one or the other had all the issues. I craved things like eggs the whole time. My second used up just about every store of fat I had on my body, but I gained very little weight (the only time in my life that my weight has been steady), and they were average-sized babies by weight--one was long and slight build, the other was long and thin, but that's due to his CTD. Between the two of them, they have all kinds of things that are related to delayed development of the CC.

 

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For the record, DD4's high EQ comes with both advantages and disadvantages 😂. She's an extremely manipulative little one -- since she easily senses how people will feel about what she says, she will often make statements that are meant to elicit emotions that bend things her way 😉 . She is also an easy and fluent liar, which is something we constantly talk about. 

I'm very glad she's not going to school, frankly, because kids with this kind of social savvy can easily turn cliquish or mean. I'm hoping we can teach her to use her powers for good and not evil! 

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7 minutes ago, kbutton said:

Really, I mother very, very differently than my mother, not because she was a bad mom, or because I am a bad mom, but because we are radically different humans. But my mom is one of those classic mom/grandma types that you could make into a family movie character. I can't do that, and that has nothing to do with my socialization abilities. I didn't know a single INTJ female (a boss, maybe, but she was INxJ, probably INFJ) until I'd been a mom for a decade or so. I've met a total of two now, lol! They both picked me out as INTJ and self-disclosed like, "I know your secret, and I share it" lol! 

Whereas my mom is a narcissist, lol. My grandma on my dad's side was doting and loving, but also VERY rigid -- she was the one who decided it was a good idea to send me to first grade very early, social difficulties be damned. 

So, imagine a childhood with zero scaffolding for social stuff, then add a heaping dose of guilt trips about the fact that some things didn't come easy to me... and presto, you've got my childhood and teenage years 😂.

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7 hours ago, kbutton said:

Less common personality on the Meyers-Briggs? Those of us in that category are probably well-represented here. I have read articles that accuse certain personality types as being always autistic, which is nuts. But as an INTJ, I can see why people would think a stressed out INTJ might be on the spectrum.

 

Yes, I am a INTJ but scored 15 on that test.  I do hyperfocus but that is also a trait in ADHD>  I don't have social anxiety normally,  I also think that COVID has made me want to go to a party much more than before.  As an introvert, I do not want non stop partying or social interactions.  But my most common interactions with people outside my family is business or social chit chat No problems with either. 

I also have a different sense of humor---I don't like slapstick, for example.  My dh sends cartoons to me on Facebook messenger all the time and normally I get the joke, often find it funny but sometimes have no idea what the joke is.

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The quiz seemed a bit broad.  I didn’t love that there was no neutral answers for many of the questions.  There didn’t seem to be much relating to sensory stuff on there at all except the one about hearing sounds.  Either way I tested where I expected on the edge of could be or couldn’t be.  A lot would depend on the day.  When I look at my kids I notice traits but when I compare them to kids I actually know with diagnosed autism they are miles away.  In one group activity we did with homeschoolers there was such a high percentage of kids with a disability that I think the instructor thought they all did.  After a couple of weeks she came and said to me “your daughter doesn’t actually have a disability does she?”.  
 

It’s also kind of hard to tease out other stuff.  How much social anxiety is inherent and how much is a side effect of being the kid that grew up as a religious minority and was always “the weird kid” at school?  

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6 hours ago, kand said:

For what it’s worth, my older two girls both seem at least autism adjacent, while my son doesn’t whatsoever. He’s the most neurotypical of my kids (youngest dd is too young for me to know, but she seems to me she’s very neurotypical as well). 
 

That AQ seems to me it would over diagnose austisitc traits in people just based on them being an introvert or having certain preferences (like preferring libraries to parties doesn’t make someone autistic). I took it and scored 14, which is about what I would expect. I don’t feel close to the spectrum. 

Yes, my score is only slighter higher than yours - I guess questions like the library one are to distinguish between 'just introvert and/or socially exhausted' and autistic traits.

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2 minutes ago, Ausmumof3 said:

It’s also kind of hard to tease out other stuff.  How much social anxiety is inherent and how much is a side effect of being the kid that grew up as a religious minority and was always “the weird kid” at school?  

Right. Or the kid who was sent to school more than a year early 😂. The corner cases are always a mixture of nature and nurture... 

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2 minutes ago, Ausmumof3 said:


 

It’s also kind of hard to tease out other stuff.  How much social anxiety is inherent and how much is a side effect of being the kid that grew up as a religious minority and was always “the weird kid” at school?  

Nature + nurture, baby. 

Anxiety is both a genetic propensity AND a learned behaviour. 

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8 minutes ago, Not_a_Number said:

Right. Or the kid who was sent to school more than a year early 😂. The corner cases are always a mixture of nature and nurture... 

lol or both... No one did the kind of analysis about whether kids would cope socially back then like they do now.   But then that gets into a whole other topic about schools and age segregation etc.

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Another INTJ who scored in the 20s (23) and thinks the score is all about the introversion and not about autism. I can remember professional types itching to decide my oldest was somewhere on the spectrum all the time; he had severe social anxiety (probably as least partially related to a fairly severe unilateral hearing loss that we didn't know about until he was 5). But after spending time with him and having me fill out all the questionnaires, no one ever got there. One person settled on "he's a puzzle, isn't he?" He certainly was. As a young adult, he's still super introverted and can struggle with new situations, but not nearly as much as he used to, and I think he'd be an in the 20s kind of person as well. 

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5 hours ago, EKS said:

I suspect that highly intelligent, introverted (especially INTJ) women are going to have traits that outwardly look like low level autism but if you look closer, you'll find that these folks lack the core social deficits.  

I got a 21 on the autism test.  There were a good number of items that I had trouble marking--things like "I enjoy socializing."  The actual answer is "It depends."  But that wasn't one of the choices, so in general, I went with the less antisocial choice which probably skewed my results low.  That said, I am certain that I don't have autism, though I do have a number of the traits--sensory sensitivity, introversion, tendency to hyperfocus, issues with eye contact, etc.

I’m an INTJ female. I got a 15 on the test. It was very hard to answer some of the questions as you said. As you said, I do enjoy socializing, but it depends on a lot of things. I adore being one-on-one with a friend or with a small group of quiet people for quiet conversation. Being at a party with a bunch of people that’s noisy with a billion activities going on? Not so much. Well...not now anyway. There were a few years where I did enjoy that, but only a few years. It came and went. The last time I went to a party like that (a New Year’s Day party), I just wanted to go home. But 10 years earlier, I was at the same party having the time of my life. 

4 hours ago, Pawz4me said:

I wonder how taking that quiz as middle aged adults (I'm assuming most of us are beyond the young adult years) affects the scoring. I'm decently good at making small talk now, but it's a skill that took me a very long time to learn so that I can pull it off at all, let alone w/o being very awkward. But it was very much a learned skill for me, as were many social skills. Not one bit of it came naturally. If I were being evaluated now I would present a LOT differently than I did in my early 20's.

This is a big one! I’m very, very different now. I used to overtalk all the time. I used to talk non-stop and fast all the time. But now, I listen more than I talk and I speak much more slowly. These are skills that I’ve either picked up without thinking about it or have deliberately worked on because I saw how obnoxious they could come across. Was the overtalking and non-stop, fast talking just being a hyper teenaged girl/20-something? Probably.

4 hours ago, prairiewindmomma said:

I scored a 12, and those 12 points were all introversion questions...I am INTJ and am nowhere near the spectrum.

Dh’s side of the family has strong autism genetics.

That’s how it was for me. Just because I don’t like small talk doesn’t mean I can’t do it. I’m bored by it, but not incapable of it.

4 hours ago, Katy said:

 

I’m INTJ, but I’m a friendly introvert. Maybe because I spent my childhood in the South, where it’s not really an acceptable option to be introverted. Social situations generally don’t stress me out but I don’t often enjoy them either. I’m happiest reading a book alone in nature.  I don’t generally have trouble making friends but I do have trouble finding people I want to be close friends with.  I’m surprised I scored a 6 because I’ve got autism on both sides of my family. My choices that were spectrum adjacent are all also likely intellectual rather than a social issue. I think this is all pretty interesting. 

Yes! I can put on my outgoing hat and find “friends” but I don’t find very many people that I want to be close friends with. I’ve gotten even pickier the older I’ve gotten. I used to only want to be friends with silly people who made a lot of jokes, but now I want deeper connections with people. So, I actually have avoided making shallow friendships lately. 

But this has changed throughout my life. As a kid, I didn’t have a clue how to make a friend, then in my 20s/30s it became easy to form light friendships, and now in my 40s, I am seeking deeper more meaningful friendships.

3 hours ago, Not_a_Number said:

Yeah, I definitely present differently than I did as a teen. On the other hand, I was also ridiculously badly socialized -- I didn't go to kindergarten, then my brilliant family sent me to school more than a year early, which really didn't result in me making friends, lol, then we immigrated when I was 11... there was a lot of upheaval and about 0 energy spent making sure that I had the requisite skills. 

I wound up having to teach myself a lot an older teen, but I do wonder how I would have done with at least a modicum of support. 

My father is clearly autistic and my mother has extreme anxiety. Being raised by them was interesting. They were incapable of passing appropriate social skills on to me. And the “skills” they did pass on were wrong. I acted the way my parents acted, but when you act like you’re autistic or anxious because that’s what’s been modeled at home, you don’t make friends or display social skills very well!

2 hours ago, gardenmom5 said:

I'm sure my score would have been higher if I'd done it in my twenties, let alone teens.

I used to be fascinated by spring doorstops, I would sit on the floor, and flick it back and forth over and over. I could easily (and did) do it for 15 minutes.  I was also obsessed with mirrors reflecting back at each other.  The "kid" bathroom when I was growing up, had a mirrored medicine cabinet at a 90 degree angle - so I'd play with those too.

I used to line up toys in rows just for the pleasure of it. I had these plastic deer, about 50 of them, and I’d line them up so perfectly that a row of 10 deer could look like a single deer when you looked at it head on. I’d make 5 rows of 10 deer and line them so perfectly it looked like just 5 deer.

I had matchbox cars and I’d play “traffic jam” for an hour or so at a time. To play traffic jam I’d line all the cars up in a big long row and then move the first car an inch, then move the second car an inch, then the third car, etc, until all 40 cars had moved an inch. Then I’d start again with another inch. For an hour. Now it sounds horribly boring, but I loved playing traffic jam as a kid.

I’m not like that anymore.

 

So, it’s all weird. As a kid, I’d might have been dx’d because of my awful social abilities, my introversion, and quirks about lining up my toys. Right now, I got a score of 15 on the test for the introverted questions, so I don’t think I actually am autistic at all. But I have spent a number of years learning social skills that I wasn’t taught at home. And I am very introverted right now. Very introverted. I just don’t want to talk to anyone. It’s going to be difficult when I start getting out more when we’re all vaccinated. 

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9 hours ago, historically accurate said:

I would probably fall within the umbrella if I were ever tested. In my case, I suspect it is a co-morbid condition with my family's probable Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (oldest DD will be tested soon). I and my brother, and my oldest two children all probably have EDS - we all have some traits of autism. Some of us have more sensory symptoms; some have social symptoms. None of us are diagnosed however. I didn't know how to vote, so I didn't.

 

In a forum I am on for a connective tissue disorder, it is recognized in Europe how they go together.  It is mainly a European group but how most of them had a CCD and on the spectrum was interesting.  And it is mentions quite a bit among their doctors how it they go together.  It was a fascinating read. 

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4 minutes ago, Garga said:

My father is clearly autistic and my mother has extreme anxiety. Being raised by them was interesting. They were incapable of passing appropriate social skills on to me. And the “skills” they did pass on were wrong. I acted the way my parents acted, but when you act like you’re autistic or anxious because that’s what’s been modeled at home, you don’t make friends or display social skills very well!

And both my sister and I copied my mom, who is an insecure narcissist 😂. This turns out not to work very well -- insecure narcissists can't model what's in other people's heads at all, and their stories are only about themselves. 

As it turns out, I actually came out of this more unscathed than my sister, which is odd, because she's definitely not at all autistic. But I'm very reflective and I read people easily, whereas she has come out with definite deficits in reading people and their intentions towards her 😞 . (Please don't quote -- I may delete this.) 

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2 hours ago, Not_a_Number said:

To be fair, it's TOTALLY possible to have intense interests without it being autism.

Absolutely!  (And it’s not just intense interests that make me suspect Autism in some fellow posters.  It’s a whole Spidey-Sense you develop...)

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For the record, I cannot tell if someone is autistic online in any way, shape, or form. I can tell in real life very quickly, but online, I'm missing most of the signals. That goes for many other personality characteristics, for that matter -- I don't have a gut sense with text like I do IRL. 

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There is a writing style with long sentences and longer thoughts I often think could be autism.

There is a “verbal processing” style of autism, whatever it is called, that is mentioned in The Autistic Brain (iirc) by Temple Grandin.

I think it is precise and has long sentences.  
 

I am drawn to it!

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Just now, Lecka said:

There is a writing style with long sentences and longer thoughts I often think could be autism.

There is a “verbal processing” style of autism, whatever it is called, that is mentioned in The Autistic Brain (iirc) by Temple Grandin.

I think it is precise and has long sentences.  
 

I am drawn to it!

I think this one is correlation and not causation! I am 100% sure that there are non-autistic posters that have that style. And I mean, considerably less autistic than me: people who aren't even of the broader phenotype. 

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5 hours ago, Mrs Tiggywinkle said:

I got 38. Lol

Keep trying. Maybe you can get it up. :biggrin:

 

2 hours ago, Not_a_Number said:

To be fair, it's TOTALLY possible to have intense interests without it being autism.

https://www.amazon.com/Uniquely-Human-Different-Seeing-Autism/dp/1476776245/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=barry+prizant&qid=1617755290&sr=8-2  Your library should have this. 

Autism traits are HUMAN traits. It's not like oh alien traits that nobody else has, mercy. Almost anything a person on the spectrum does, a NT person also does. It's the *combination* that gets you there.

A DSM diagnosis also requires significance, ie. it has to actually be having some significance in your life, screwing things up, causing you issues. So the reason the AQ is interesting to people is that people who in fact have those issues are thinking through story after story where those things happen. It's not like oh one thing. It's more like profanity level, that it happens over and over and has seriously affected their lives.

2 hours ago, Not_a_Number said:

high EQ

There's a profile for the manipulation with social thinking deficits. I agree it's contradictory, because many people with social thinking deficits do *not* have the insight to be able to manipulate, and yet there's this variant that in fact does.  https://www.socialthinking.com/Articles?name=social-thinking-social-communication-profile

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1 minute ago, PeterPan said:

There's a profile for the manipulation with social thinking deficits. I agree it's contradictory, because many people with social thinking deficits do *not* have the insight to be able to manipulate, and yet there's this variant that in fact does.  https://www.socialthinking.com/Articles?name=social-thinking-social-communication-profile

I believe that! That's not DD4, though 🙂 . 

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3 minutes ago, Lecka said:

There is a writing style with long sentences and longer thoughts I often think could be autism.

There is a “verbal processing” style of autism, whatever it is called, that is mentioned in The Autistic Brain (iirc) by Temple Grandin.

I think it is precise and has long sentences.  
 

I am drawn to it!

I'm missing the flow of why this was brought up, but yes I call it thinking in paragraphs. When I met my first person who was diagnosed, that was how they thought and talked when their guard was down. If you saw them in professional/NT settings, they would mask and reign it in. But when you just let their brains do their thing, that's how it was. It's a definite pleasure to talk with someone who says what they're thinking and can actually get it out. So their idea of turn taking is my multi-paragraph essay then your multi paragraph essay, haha. 

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5 minutes ago, PeterPan said:

Keep trying. Maybe you can get it up. :biggrin:

 

https://www.amazon.com/Uniquely-Human-Different-Seeing-Autism/dp/1476776245/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=barry+prizant&qid=1617755290&sr=8-2  Your library should have this. 

Autism traits are HUMAN traits. It's not like oh alien traits that nobody else has, mercy. Almost anything a person on the spectrum does, a NT person also does. It's the *combination* that gets you there.

A DSM diagnosis also requires significance, ie. it has to actually be having some significance in your life, screwing things up, causing you issues. So the reason the AQ is interesting to people is that people who in fact have those issues are thinking through story after story where those things happen. It's not like oh one thing. It's more like profanity level, that it happens over and over and has seriously affected their lives.

There's a profile for the manipulation with social thinking deficits. I agree it's contradictory, because many people with social thinking deficits do *not* have the insight to be able to manipulate, and yet there's this variant that in fact does.  https://www.socialthinking.com/Articles?name=social-thinking-social-communication-profile

Thank you.  This might help me understand something 

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2 hours ago, Ausmumof3 said:

lol or both... No one did the kind of analysis about whether kids would cope socially back then like they do now.   But then that gets into a whole other topic about schools and age segregation etc.

Off main topic but on topic of your post.

Schools are still full of kids too young to be there. Drives me nuts. And everyone knows they are too young, and that it makes life difficult for them socially, but the extra year/s of childcare are unaffordable for many. I think it's worse than it was back in the day. At least Kindy used to be developmentally appropriate for 4 year olds, including the half day and naps!

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43 minutes ago, Not_a_Number said:

For the record, I cannot tell if someone is autistic online in any way, shape, or form. I can tell in real life very quickly, but online, I'm missing most of the signals. That goes for many other personality characteristics, for that matter -- I don't have a gut sense with text like I do IRL. 

Quoting myself: and the fact that I have a strong gut sense about people is one of the reasons I ultimately don't think I'm diagnosable 😉 . Not that it rules it out immediately, but if you put it together with everything else, that's what you get. 

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11 minutes ago, Lawyer&Mom said:

You don’t have the signature “thinking in paragraphs” writing style that always jumps out at me.  But that doesn’t mean not-Autistic. 

Interesting!! 

Well, I trigger some people’s Spidey sense and not others’ 😂. Sounds about right given that I’m almost certainly adjacent and yet almost certainly not at this point diagnosable.

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4 minutes ago, Rosie_0801 said:

Please let's not do that "has a discernible EQ therefore not-autistic" thing. 

 

It is really not uncommon for Aspie types to have high EQ.

We had to develop it to minimise the amount of trouble we got into.

Most of the people on this thread who are diagnosed or consider themselves to be autistic have a way better EQ than this normie! (so far as one can tell online). Better social skills too! I think it's called 'all the effort we had to go to not to startle the sheep' 🙂

Which is itself partly a female socialisation thing. 

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I voted no, but adjacent to it, though I did score 32 on the test.   My 14 year old son was recently dx'ed. I also have a probably Autistic dad and a mom with extreme anxiety! Fun!

 

Edited: I went into a long boring story but I realized I am just blabbering because i am tired and it's late!

 

Edited by SanDiegoMom
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1 hour ago, Melissa Louise said:

Most of the people on this thread who are diagnosed or consider themselves to be autistic have a way better EQ than this normie! (so far as one can tell online). Better social skills too! I think it's called 'all the effort we had to go to not to startle the sheep' 🙂

Which is itself partly a female socialisation thing. 

Plus decades of practice... We aren’t kids anymore.

I highly recommend reading the social profiles on the Social Thinking website. It helped me understand the more subtle social deficits I do have, and how I can have the same umbrella condition as someone with far more severe social deficits.  It’s really brilliant stuff.  
 

https://www.socialthinking.com/Articles?name=social-thinking-social-communication-profile

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1 hour ago, Lawyer&Mom said:

I highly recommend reading the social profiles on the Social Thinking website. It helped me understand the more subtle social deficits I do have, and how I can have the same umbrella condition as someone with far more severe social deficits.  It’s really brilliant stuff.  
 

https://www.socialthinking.com/Articles?name=social-thinking-social-communication-profile

Thank you for this article!  My 16yo daughter was diagnosed yesterday.  I'm on a very steep learning curve and this does explain a lot.  

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2 hours ago, Lawyer&Mom said:

Plus decades of practice... We aren’t kids anymore.

I highly recommend reading the social profiles on the Social Thinking website. It helped me understand the more subtle social deficits I do have, and how I can have the same umbrella condition as someone with far more severe social deficits.  It’s really brilliant stuff.  
 

https://www.socialthinking.com/Articles?name=social-thinking-social-communication-profile

This was extremely helpful for me in considering DD, and how she differs from.more neuro-typical others in the family in her social communication profile, but also filled in some gaps for me re students I work with or have contact with on the playground. Some real aha moments there. 

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7 hours ago, Rosie_0801 said:

Please let's not do that "has a discernible EQ therefore not-autistic" thing. 

 

It is really not uncommon for Aspie types to have high EQ.

We had to develop it to minimise the amount of trouble we got into.


I’m a bit at a loss here, because it’s really the case that DD4’s intuitive social profile is not, in my opinion, compatible with being anywhere near the spectrum. Maybe EQ is not the right way to put it, but surely considering social thinking when trying to figure out if someone is autistic is normal?

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7 hours ago, Rosie_0801 said:

Please let's not do that "has a discernible EQ therefore not-autistic" thing. 

 

It is really not uncommon for Aspie types to have high EQ.

We had to develop it to minimise the amount of trouble we got into.

Exactly. Any time we're using IQ strengths and ability to mask to explain away deficits we're on shaky ground. Might be easier just to be honest about the deficits and deal with them.

8 hours ago, Not_a_Number said:

adjacent

Why bother with these sideways terms like adjacent? Now I've said in the past on the boards kissing the spectrum for people who have social thinking deficits and aren't (yet) diagnosed. The article I linked for you explores profiles and I think you'll find that people about whom you'd like to say kissing the spectrum in fact have social thinking deficits and fall into one of those profiles. 

https://www.amazon.com/Bright-Not-Broken-Gifted-Autism/dp/B08BJ8VPZB/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2V93JXOGQ428D&dchild=1&keywords=bright+not+broken&qid=1617792348&sprefix=bright+not+bro%2Caps%2C166&sr=8-1  This book won't necessarily help you sort anything out, but you could try. It has a chart exploring the overlap between gifted and ASD. 

8 hours ago, Not_a_Number said:

yet almost certainly not at this point diagnosable.

Look, are you asking a question or being your own psych? I put this in my post I deleted, but you may not yet be asking the correct question. Maybe start by reading that social thinking article I linked you to and pondering *yourself*. I honestly don't know where you'd fall, but you might find your answers. Ask someone else who knows you well to read the article and say where you'd fall in those profiles.

ADHD involves EF deficits and can have some effect on social. As ADHD becomes more severe, it merges right into ASD. Giftedness (if you believe that book I linked earlier) often is accompanied by EF deficits and effects on social. In other words, the DSM is what is screwed up trying to pigeon hole people into labels and diagnostically tease apart things that overlap. 

So rather than asking what your DSM label is, you could read about the issues and put specific terms to whatever is bothering you. Then you work backward to DSM. The AQ isn't even going through DSM criteria. It's more looking at how the *brain* of the person works. 

https://www.amazon.com/Mindblindness-Essay-Autism-Theory-Mind/dp/026252225X/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=mindblindness&qid=1617792866&sr=8-1

The AQ is the brain chain of the dude who wrote the book I'm linking above. Or put another way, the communication profiles on the Social Thinking site probably reflect the differences in mind blindness. 

But none of that is DSM. The DSM is (removing not nice words) and not biology based. It's what we have to work with, but it's fallible. There's a book you can read on the history of the DSM. They've changed how they arrive at categories and the whole thing is controversial. A WISC on the social thinking profiles could go multiple different ways (ADHD, PDD-NOS, ASD, GAD, no label at all) and might get different labels depending on who sees them. And if you're asking *me* what your social thinking profile is or what your DSM label would be, I don't know. You're very argumentative and resist correction (as a profile I mean, you're actually a very nice person), but you can look at it yourself or ask someone who knows you irl. Have you ever had IQ testing to see if there was a spread in your verbal and nonverbal scores?

What was your score on the AQ? Did you already post it and I missed it? I think it's logical to say the AQ and the social thinking profiles will roughly correlate. I'm not sure anyone has bothered, just saying they probably do. Going through those increasing steps of social thinking challenges you're going to see more and more mind blindness. That's how you get those higher AQ scores, haha. 

Fwiw, there's some pissiness in the autism community with labels at sort of the extreme broadening. I don't think it has to be like Sneeches where we're saying this level is the "real" autism and this level is "not" but there definitely is this range and width. That's why to me it's much more helpful to look at what's actually happening (with the social thinking, with the significant effect on life) vs. making it this yes/no lightswitch of ASD. It's not a lightswitch that is on/off. It's more like a dimmer switch, and the more dim you get (haha, me) the more you move through those profiles and start racking up labels. Sometimes that dimmer switch is a little bit down, sometimes it's way down and the person is really walking in a lot of mindblindess. It's definitely not a yes/no switch. 

I think anyone who would start a thread and ask everyone to publicly post their DSM labels for this has *something* going on, lol. I mean, you didn't even equivocate it and post like most NT people would by explaining why, welcoming people to write you privately, blah blah. You were just like hey, hang out here your federally protected medical information because I want to know. That person clearly has deficits. :biggrin: But does that mean you need an ASD label? I have no clue. I don't even get this whole narcistic thing. Like people say this and say it like you'll know what it means and I'm so b&w it means squat to me. It's not in the DSM (or is it under some personality disorder thing?) and to me it sounds like sin. If you're saying they have a problem, use DSM. If they're sinning, call it sin. But to use terms that mean someone isn't nice, I odn't know, that doesn't help me sort out diddley.

ASD is not about being nice or not nice. Some ASD people are the NICEST PEOPLE you'll know. They're terribly loyal, well intentioned, overly generous, even socially motivated, funny. None of that is about being an unkind, ill intentioned, unthoughtful person except as a side effect of their social thinking deficits. If a person is a crap person, then they should read their Bibles and get it sorted out. But if a person is a nice person and has ASD and acts with mind blindness, well are we shocked? 

That's your morning rant. Personally, I've just viewed you as young. I don't know what part is youth, what is a deficit, what is IQ. Beats me. If you want to start on sorting it out, I've linked you good stuff. There's a lot of learning we do as we sort ourselves out. 

Just for kicks read this article and see where you are with it. It doesn't replace the other books I linked but is a side rabbit trail.

https://www.kelly-mahler.com/what-is-interoception/ 

 

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