Aspie Diagnosis, Information, History, etc.

An Aspergers diagnosis is helpful in understanding how our brains work and getting the help that we need, but getting the diagnosis can be very difficult for some Aspies. There are a surprising number of doctors in the mental health field that are uneducated or misinformed when it comes to the Aspergers end of the autism spectrum. So many people are not able to get the help that they need, especially when it comes to an official diagnosis and getting the right help with their mental health. There are doctors who see certain symptoms and will quickly jump to conclusions for a more drastic diagnosis, like bi-polar, or something else. This would be legitimate diagnosis if it actually what the person had, but often times it is not, and the patient is put on a bunch of medications and prescriptions that they really don't need and could be harmful to them. Also, once they are put on these medications, it is often dangerous to get taken off of them, even if they are not needed for patient. The body becomes used to having these medications and will go into withdrawal or worse if the patient is not taken off of them in the proper way. Doctors are often unwilling to do this because if the patient is on the medications, it keeps them coming back to the doctor on a regular basis and it fuels the pharmacy industry. It is all too often all about the money. If the doctors would just learn the symptoms of Aspergers, also called high functioning autism, then maybe we would have less people who have been damaged by a misdiagnosis from a doctor who refuses to admit that the patient could be right and actually knows their own body and brain better than anyone else does.

Part of the misinformation is that there is a stereotype for Aspergers. It is most known to be found in white males and usually in a certain age range as well. Lots of doctors do not take into account that Aspergers can impact both genders and every single race and it has no age limits because it lasts your whole life. There are people of color who are autistic, but because of the stereotype, people, including their own family members, will outright deny this to their faces. There are also differences in how aspergers is managed in boys than it is in girls. Girls are more prone to try to hide their differences because even though we don't instinctively know how to act socially, we know that what we are doing is not what is expected of us and so we learn to copy the behaviors of others in order to not stand out from the crowd. We work hard to hide our true selves in order to not get treated differently from the other girls. The statistics say that male Aspies significantly outnumber the female Aspies, but that data is probably wrong because so many women are Aspies and have learned to hide it in order to fit in. We often go undiagnosed for years. Sometimes we figured out that we are Aspies, but getting an official diagnosis doesn't accomplish anything that a self-diagnosis can't do. I am currently one of those.  Some people wait for years and pay thousands of dollars to get their official diagnosis.

Aspies are often discovered later in life because so many of us are able to hide our true selves from the highly critical world around us. Hiding our true selves takes a lot of mental, emotional, and physical effort. After years of doing this from childhood, it can wear us out and bring us to the point where we can't hide behind our mask of acting normal. We have to be ourselves if we are going to have the energy to accomplish anything in our lives. The longer that we have to act "normal", the more energy it takes and the more worn out we get.  It is better to learn the truth and be our true selves and learn ways to cope that don't burn up all of our energy. Finding ways to cope is better in the long run than just hiding behind the mask of what other people expect as normal.

Even though the Aspergers diagnosis has only been around for less than 100 years, there are people throughout history that we highly suspect were Aspies. If you study the personal lives some of the famous people in history who changed our lives forever for the better, you might find that they actually fit the qualifications for an Aspie. Many of the famous classical musicians have been thought to be Aspies and I firmly believe that some of the best inventors, like Thomas Edison, were also Aspies. They were all different from the people around them and how their parents treated their specialness made all the difference in how they grew up and what they were able to accomplish in their lives. So many other Aspies were lost in history and locked up for their entire lives in mental hospitals because they were not accepted by their families and society in general. Their differences were misdiagnosed as things like demon possession and schizophrenia. These were probably legit diagnosis for lots of people in the mental hospitals, but there were likely Aspies who got caught up in this diagnosis too because there was no distinction made back then between the different types of mental illnesses and disorders. They were all lumped in together. So much potential was lost, and we must do our best to make sure that those things never happen again.

There have been many theories over the years about what causes autism and Aspergers. We know that it is a difference in how the brain is wired and there are studies to determine what causes it. The most common theory right now is that it is genetic and there are many examples to back this theory up. There are companies doing genetic testing to try to find out what genes are the cause of autism. I have heard stories from people who say that their whole family is Aspies, going back 3 or more generations. This would be a concentration of the Aspie gene. There are also examples where the gene can be less prevalent and need just the right combination to make a person an Aspie. This means that it could skip a generation, and/or just effect some of the children in the family, which is likely to be the case for me, since my siblings seem to be more "normal" than me. It can be compared to the genetic probability of eye colors with dominant and recessive genes. There is also the theory that childhood trauma and PTSD can cause autism, especially if the right genes are already present. It makes sense that trauma in a child's early development can cause the brain to grow and wire itself in a different way in order to deal with the trauma.

I hope this information helps in your understanding of the Aspies in your life.