I am hearing repetitively that the diagnostic criterion for autism is unreliable and that the best person to judge whether they have it is the person themself. It has prompted me to ask the question, which came first; the condition or the diagnosis.
The diagnosis describes a set of symptoms that were preexisting long before there was a term coined for it. But given there are so many different symptoms out there, it has been up to the people that study the body and mind to see patterns among those with symptoms and to group them according to similarities (i.e. group them into “conditions”). Symptoms sometimes overlap between conditions, and sometimes the one person can have multiple conditions.
From this perspective, abnormalities of the mind were preexisting, and until the grouping of “autism” was coined, that condition was not unique from any other abnormality of the mind. So “autism” is the definition of the DSM. It’s not the other way around, where autism exists as an abnormality of the mind and the definition of the DSM needs to be adjusted to fit it.
That’s why I find it perplexing when a person says they have the condition but they know a professional would not diagnose them as such. Are they saying they don’t have the symptoms as described by the label? Because if that’s the case, then by very definition they can’t have the label. Or is it that they are concerned a professional would not identify the symptoms in that person (i.e. the symptoms are there but they are hard to see). If that is the case, then I ponder how they could be included in that grouping of symptoms because obviously the symptoms would have had to have been bad enough to see in order to be able to identify and group them in the first place.
The whole idea of self diagnosis is fairly straight forward to me. I can’t take the word of a layman as positive enforcement. Until a third party opinion of someone who has studied the symptoms and grouping of them confirms, then the self diagnosed will remain as “possible”, in my opinion. They may be correct, they may not. Maybe they have the symptoms of several overlapping conditions but lack critical key symptoms of one in particular. If so, it might look like one thing but really be another. The professionals may all have differing opinions, but at least they have studied it.
At the end of the day, all abnormalities of the mind are abnormalities of the mind, and defining them into groupings is arbitrary as long as those that fall into the one group are “similar”. And that is where I am really struggling now on AC. What I do know is that I am professionally diagnosed as aspergical. But there are so many people on AC who are self diagnosed but are so different from me in their capabilities of how they interact that I am confused. They reinforce their self diagnosis’s to each other because they are all similar, but most of them do not have symptoms that are like me.
What really confuses me is that I take the time to read what people say and I see so many flags that do not correspond with what I understand autism to be, and yet I am painted as the “bad guy” for not blindly accepting all people as having autism just because they say they do. Don’t get me wrong, I DO NOT CARE IF YOU ARE SELF DIAGNOSED. What I do care about is the fact I am consistently being alienated by people who are self diagnosed because they either behave so unlike me that I see their behavior more akin to that of an NT, or they misrepresent my opinions and attack me for alienating them.
The diagnosis describes a set of symptoms that were preexisting long before there was a term coined for it. But given there are so many different symptoms out there, it has been up to the people that study the body and mind to see patterns among those with symptoms and to group them according to similarities (i.e. group them into “conditions”). Symptoms sometimes overlap between conditions, and sometimes the one person can have multiple conditions.
From this perspective, abnormalities of the mind were preexisting, and until the grouping of “autism” was coined, that condition was not unique from any other abnormality of the mind. So “autism” is the definition of the DSM. It’s not the other way around, where autism exists as an abnormality of the mind and the definition of the DSM needs to be adjusted to fit it.
That’s why I find it perplexing when a person says they have the condition but they know a professional would not diagnose them as such. Are they saying they don’t have the symptoms as described by the label? Because if that’s the case, then by very definition they can’t have the label. Or is it that they are concerned a professional would not identify the symptoms in that person (i.e. the symptoms are there but they are hard to see). If that is the case, then I ponder how they could be included in that grouping of symptoms because obviously the symptoms would have had to have been bad enough to see in order to be able to identify and group them in the first place.
The whole idea of self diagnosis is fairly straight forward to me. I can’t take the word of a layman as positive enforcement. Until a third party opinion of someone who has studied the symptoms and grouping of them confirms, then the self diagnosed will remain as “possible”, in my opinion. They may be correct, they may not. Maybe they have the symptoms of several overlapping conditions but lack critical key symptoms of one in particular. If so, it might look like one thing but really be another. The professionals may all have differing opinions, but at least they have studied it.
At the end of the day, all abnormalities of the mind are abnormalities of the mind, and defining them into groupings is arbitrary as long as those that fall into the one group are “similar”. And that is where I am really struggling now on AC. What I do know is that I am professionally diagnosed as aspergical. But there are so many people on AC who are self diagnosed but are so different from me in their capabilities of how they interact that I am confused. They reinforce their self diagnosis’s to each other because they are all similar, but most of them do not have symptoms that are like me.
What really confuses me is that I take the time to read what people say and I see so many flags that do not correspond with what I understand autism to be, and yet I am painted as the “bad guy” for not blindly accepting all people as having autism just because they say they do. Don’t get me wrong, I DO NOT CARE IF YOU ARE SELF DIAGNOSED. What I do care about is the fact I am consistently being alienated by people who are self diagnosed because they either behave so unlike me that I see their behavior more akin to that of an NT, or they misrepresent my opinions and attack me for alienating them.
