Aspergers - Page 2

She has a Ph.D in being a pompous ass. Someone ban this despicable piece of shit and be done with it.

Kate, I'm going to be incredibly tolerant and assume that you're saying that all of humanity is equal, and that personality quirks should not be interpreted as diseases of the self. However, you have to recognize that people who understand the world through the condition you're disparaging have a very different viewpoint. Perhaps they struggle daily with what you're taking for granted as nonsense and therefore have a strong and medically supported opinion on the matter. Perhaps peoples other than youself have a very valid concern over how they are interpreting the world and how the world interprets them. So yes, you're entitled to your opinion, but please don't be surprised when people who oppose you have very different opinions, with which they've struggled all their lives to establish.

Please let the end of Kate be because of a thread entitled "Asperger's"

Aspergers is the 'I want to watch cartoons and play video games and not interact with people and make an effort' disease, right?

It's one of the most self-diagnosed things going. Every personality trait is now a syndrome and can be medicated.

Look, and for the record I have no medical degree etc etc etc. I'm sure Aspergers is a real thing and can be properly diagnosed by a professional and treated. Then again, being gay was in the DSM-IV at one time.

Anyway, I just think that Asperger's has become the go-to WebMD diagnosis for suburban moms who can't come to grips with the fact that Johnny is just kind of an antisocial asshole.

Maybe you just don't understand Johnny.

I'm not going to deny that people overdiagnose. But all I'm seeing here is Kate's parents doing that exact thing and her taking it upon herself to say that people with genuine problems are just being fucked around with because she was fucked around with.

Well, we had all better stop Kate before she makes it illegal to have Aspergers... or whatever it was that she's going to do to harm anyone who is dopey enough to bother reading her posts.

Yep, Kate's gonna blow the lid off this Aspergers thing...I think you just called yourself dopey Devin.

Sorry meant to quote Kate.

I read this thread because people were pussy-achin' about it in the Trolls thread.

You know, I think depression is the perfect example for how I feel about Aspergers.

There's clinical depression, the real deal that needs to be treated by a medical professional. Then there's feeling depressed. Everybody feels depressed sometimes. But it's not the same thing as the clinical condition. Being sad - even being kind of a sad person - isn't a disorder.

There's Aspergers, and then there's just being a lazy, self centered dweeb. It's funny that ryoken diagnosed whatsisname's girlfriend as a true blue Aspie because she didn't like making plans and never met his parents - I'm so unable to make plans that I sometimes don't RSVP for screenings until the day they're happening. And I'll go way out of my way to avoid meeting my girlfriend's family. It's not because I don't understand how important it is to her, it's because I'm selfish and don't want to deal with it. I'm just kind of a generally anxious, lazy, self-centered guy, not someone suffering with Aspergers.

So basically, Kate has issues with her mother and doesn't like when people claim she suffers from Aspergers, therefore Aspergers is just a "big scam" and doesn't actually exist.


What a fucking joke.

Yeah, kinda with Devin on this one.

Yeah, this is part of why I tend to dislike identifying myself as having a diagnosis of Asperger's. People will either patronize me, say there's nothing really wrong with me, or just generally act weird. I'm sure there's a lot of asshole shut-ins out there who blame their toxic personalities on Aspergers, but it is real, though fairly vague. Aspergers is not antisociality, but rather the lack of certain normal human functions that enable socialization.
For me, the key thing is that I find real-life socialization difficult for a number of reasons.
1. I am darn near unable to read social cues (ie. facial expressions, gestures, inflection) unless I know the person very, very well.
2. I can't make small talk, because I just can't come up with anything to say about things that don't interest me.
3. When something that does interest me comes up, I go on loooooooong rants about the subject.
4. I can't really lie, not even the kind of casual lying where you tell a girl that her dress looks nice, even if you don't really have much of an opinion of the dress.
5. I have no sense of what's appropriate to say in a situation and what isn't (like just the other day, I just randomly ended up talking about my sister's sex life with a random acquaintance. yeaaah),
6. I have bizarrely poor conversational memory (that is to say I don't easily remember particulars from any given conversation).
7. I get serious nausea when I'm amid a large crowd of people (when I was in junior high, I had special permission to skip pep assemblies).
For real people with Aspergers, the Internet is invaluable, as it's a socialization tool that doesn't require reading social cues to understand.

The problem is that if you dismiss the condition just due to the number of self diagnosed people on the internet it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater, in my opinion. For some people it's an awesome excuse to be raging misanthropes, other people recognised something was not right in themselves (or had other people recognise), got themselves diagnosed and now do everything in their power to try and not be that person.

If you're invalidating Aspergers, you're invalidating all of the people who tirelessly attempt to adjust to society because of the assholes who use it as an excuse to be dicks.

I don't think anyone's doing that aside from PK, though.

Well aside from Devin. Who seems to be saying that Aspergers is most people making a mountain out an an anti-social douchery molehill.

...

For the record, I agree with the notion that a LOT of supposed self-diagnosed Aspergers sufferers are just antisocial assholes raised in a society where their behaviour is excused. That doesn't mean Aspergers doesn't exist.

People are always going to abuse the system and claim that they have some new disorder, but that doesn't mean that everybody is lying.

Again, no-one is saying that aside from PK.

To be fair to ryoken and me, I wasn't asking whether or not she had it. She and her parents had--on separate occasions--told me that she had been diagnosed with this disorder by a professional. My only question was whether or not her kind of sociopath-like behavior was, in fact, due to the Aspergers.

I've heard it both ways. Another girl with Aspergers told me that she thought the girl in question was just simply a mean person who happened to have Aspergers. I don't have access to people who specialize in the disorder and the person who piqued my interest in it doesn't talk about it. So, I've had her mother tell me she's difficult to deal with because of her disorder, another person affected by it tell me she's just a bitch who happens to have a disorder, and ryoken kicked in with a kind of convincing argument that the ways in which she acts like an asshole are just ways in which the disorder presents itself behaviorally.

I love Devin's reading:
"It probably exists, but you don't have it, you're just a fucking piece of shit".

Isn't that exactly what used to be said about sufferers of depression? That's really gonna make it so easy for actual sufferers to go and get checked out.

It seems to be fashionable/trendy because a lot of movie stars and music people etc have it. Not surprising as it seems to go hand-in-hand with the sort of OCD needed to develop highly specialized skill-sets, and problems with emotional development.

All these things have a "fashionable" period once they're socially accepted, then it passes and things level out. So what if a few douchebags skate by with an "excuse"? It's not like they weren't going to blame their shitty behavior on something other than themselves anyway.

I think this is right on. As someone who has been clinically depressed and formerly suicidal, I get kinda frustrated when people use depression as a catch-all for however they're feeling that day. I guess I shouldn't bitch too much about it, but you're right... it's almost an excuse to define something "wrong" with someone else. In a way it's being lazy with words.

I unblocked Kate momentarily and scanned the thread. Hey, sorry if I offended anybody with my oh so brilliant jokes about Aspergers in the Spider-man black thread. What I was talking about were the reality denying geeks that pollute so much of the internet.

I kinda regret having to read a Kate post. She is such a douche and the forum would be better without her. And the days when we would pummel people that abhorrent/clueless was fun. But whatever, who gives a shit. She's a stupid as hell but it isn't worth getting stressed about it. And back to blocking.

I was having a discussion about Asperger's and autism with one of my colleagues (a psychologist). I wanted some advice with regards to a screenplay I'm working on. Just wanted to make sure it was psychologically accurate and so on...

My point being - a professional in the field informed me that Asperger's definitely exists. But, like many levels of autism, ADD, AD-HD, etc, there is a tendency to misdiagnose. Sometimes, plain old ordinary depression or bipolar disorder have been misdiagnosed as Asperger's. And, sometimes, a kid is just hyperactive. Other times, a kid is just a lazy, anti-social douchebag (my words, not hers) who doesn't want to do any work and they diagnose him as having Asperger's. But these mistakes are normally clarified and sorted out after further diagnosis because the symptoms are very specific and they become clear.

This bad diagnosis tends to be the fault of lazy parents who don't want to make an effort to better educate their kids. Maybe there are issues at home and parents are in constant denial. As a school teacher, I deal with this sort of shit on a daily basis. It's a private school full of rich kids the majority of whom have parents who have no business raising kids. That whole "let me put my 7-year-old kid who likes to play a lot on Ritalin because he obviously must have AD-HD" mentality pisses me off.

But that doesn't mean that people with Asperger's don't have Asperger's. And I can see how it would be offensive to people who are legitimately suffering from that condition to be told that this condition doesn't exist. And, some people don't want to admit that they have a problem. But that, as we know, is the first thing you have to do if you ever want to solve your problem.

.........

In any case, I have nothing against Princess Kate so I won't get on the hate train - she's never done anything to offend me. But there's a copy of Dianetics in my john that may interest her. Based on some of her comments regarding conditions of the mind. I got about 30 pages into it before just wanting to throw it out the window in frustration. So, maybe she will find it more useful.

I will say it was fascinating for me to discover that it has footnotes that define words like "articulate," "tome," and "tactile" among others that any functioning English-speaking human being over the age of 16 should already know.

I suffer from clinical depression and am not offended in the slightest by Devin's suggestion.

I think thats why a lot of people got worked up Kate, there are some genuine folks on the board that struggle with things like this. And I know it wasn't your intention but your post came across like they were full of crap.

We all need to stop and think before posting sometimes.

You know, when my son hadn't started talking by 1 1/2 years, we took him to various doctors to find out how we could help him. Leading hospitals, schools, and teachers in our area diagnosed him as autistic, and thus provided us with the proper windows to get him the help he needs, and we work with this and struggle with it every day. But thank god I read this thread and found out from some of the supergeniuses in here that he in fact is just faking it, and that this whole "diagnosis" thing is a scam.

Nowhere in your original post did you give any indication that you thought the disorder was real, at all. "What do you think about this supposed syndrome? Do you believe it exists?" "My answer? It's a big scam."

If you're saying now that it's real but often over- or mis-diagnosed, which is basically what everyone else already thinks, that's not a "clarification" of your original thoughts, it's a direct contradiction. Nobody's getting angry over "isolated parts" of your posts, it was entirely your initial point of view.

I know you're pretty sensitive due to the personal nature of this and all, but nowhere in this thread does anyone, even PK, call autism a scam. Come on.

She says she thinks it's a scam in the OP.

Nah, you're just besieged by dementors. Eat some chocolate and you'll be fine.

I'm not sure what kind of Harry Potter beastie causes autism, though.

No, she calls Aspergers a scam. There is a difference.

Aspergers is autism. It is on the spectrum. It is a major part of the autism spectrum. Calling it a scam is just as dismissive of autism itself as calling OCD a scam would be dismissive to any anxiety disorders.

I might just be feeling dense today, but that doesn't really make any sense. Not that OCD is, was or ever will be called a scam, or that Aspergers is a scam, or that I agree with PK on any level whatsoever, but I don't think anyone has dismissed autism wholesale here. That's all I'm saying.

edit
nevermind

I like how people don't get how they're being hurtful to people actually diagnosed with Aspergers by constantly making reference to the Syndrome as something that doting mothers label they're stupid, bastard, children with.

It's like "hey guys, I know you're dealing with something and I don't mean any offence, but you're totally effected by a syndrome that people use as an excuse for their deadbeat children. No offence. LOL"

It's like you can't possibly view Aspergers as anything other than nerdy anti-socialism, like there's nothing else to the syndrome to you guys other than an inability to accept costume changes in big budget superhero films.

Hmm, shockingly enough I completely agree with Spike on this. I don't understand this obsessive need people have to dismiss certain legitimate conditions just because they either don't understand them, or think that they happen to be over-diagnosed.

First, no-one's phrased anything like that. Secondly, why should you be offended by such a statement? It doesn't call into question the very real symptoms you may suffer, and I think even genuine sufferers would concede that Aspergers is very much the "in" diagnosis for young children with behavioural/social problems right now, to the point where the spectrum of symptoms seems so broad as to be meaningless. People using Aspergers as an excuse doesn't diminish your own problems - if anything you should be just as mad about the abuse of the term.

Holy fuck no-one outside of PK has dismissed Aspergers outright, repeat ad nauseum

I don't get why Kate is trying to validate a point about the lack of medical condition or not on a forum. That seems really dumb.

It is her thread, so I don't think a vitriolic response to her bs is unwarranted.

It makes me mad cause it's hubris. It's stuff she has no idea what the fuck she's talking about. She makes a thread about it and expects people to listen to her and agree, when in fact she just proves how big of a freakin idiot she is.

And furthermore, I find it incredibly ironic that PK talks about the incredible ignorance and bigotry of the Tea Party movement and Republicans in general when she has similar MO's when it comes to shit like this.

I'm not gonna call for her ban. I think that's way too harsh, but she should be called out for being a total loon.

Because the inference is that 'I'm a lazy, sociopath' because I've got what those mollycoddled kids got afflicted with. The misdiagnosis does irritate me, but what annoys me even more is reducing Aspergers to something that is only inherent in sociopathic, lazy, troublemakers. It feels reductive and it feels like everyone with Aspergers is just using it as an excuse, or at least partially as an excuse, for their own shortcomings. I battle with my symptoms everyday, I force myself to deal with people, deal with phone calls, be objective about what I like and don't like. It's literally a life of second guessing and having to make sure I don't fall into the autistic behaviour patterns.

I see a lot of plural condemnation here, "supergeniuses", "people", and so on. The outrage seems to have spread beyond Kate.