20

I scored 4.

Got 28. Ah well, I'm anti-social.

Agree: 2,4,5,6,7,9,12,13,16,18,19,20,21,22,23,26,33,35,39,41,42,45,46: 1 point
Disagree: 8,10,11,14,17,24,25,27,28,31,32,36,37,38,44,47: 1 point
Score: 39

Meh. Nothing new.

Ditto. I'm more likely to have schizoid personality disorder than Asperger's, but that was just a self-diagnosis I made when I was taking abnormal psych classes.

I'm just an introvert who likes to do extrovert things. "Hey this sounds like fun - ohgod people. Energy...draining..."

18.

I'm more like "Hey, this sounds like fun! Yay, people! ENERGY!" It's just that getting me to break my routine to actually DO that is a pain in the ass.

I got a 13!

Alas, I guess I'm not cut out to be one of the most successful and richest people, such as Michael Burry.

Darn, I got an 8 and got all excited that I might be the most extroverted person in Lusty, but I should have known Noola would get something crazy low.

I scored a 39, and I'm not surprised. (It must be the people with character names starting with 'I'...)

I scored 25 which is kind of what I expected. I have been told that I exhibit traits of Asperger's such as difficulty making eye contact (although I consciously work on that, when I remember it, and I believe I'm better than I used to be) but aside from not liking change in general I'm not much of a routine person. I could say I am borderline bi-polar and aspergers but I think, actually, the majority of the answers which gave me this score (and a score I did a while back for bipolar disorder) are probably more to do with a combination of depression, some intelligence and lack of self confidence. Trying to find a label is just me searching for an excuse for being anti-social.



I vary, some social situations I get on fine, others I run away and hide. Completely depends on my energy level and general confidence that day.

I took the test some months or so ago, and I got about 26, but I got the diagnose, as in, the doctor diagnosed me with Asperger when I was about 11 years old. It is not very noticeable, to be honest, and sometimes I have doubted whether it was a correct diagnose or if it was a mistake. I tend to not like parties, but I have nothing against social interactions in an environment I feel comfortable with. Also, I spend literally hours on my interests, completely submerged in them to an almost ridiculous degree. I sometime have a hard time understanding subtle cues, but I am getting better at that. I used to be quite shy, but I am also getting better at that. I guess that is/was my Asperger-like qualities, along with quite a few others. Now, reading that, it seems a much more certain that the diagnose is correct, but it does not really play much into my personal life, most people don't notice, so it is hard to make note of it myself.

In the end I just stopped wondering whether or not I had Asperger since I can't really know for sure, I guess. So whenever the question comes up I try to answer as truthfully as possible, which is: I got diagnosed with Asperger, but I am not sure if I was just weird at the time or actually have Asperger.

What a silly mind I have.

Llesvelt just pointed out the problem I have with (and please excuse the term) label-diseases. While there are many individuals who suffer from any autism-spectrum disorder (or any psychiatric disorder really) to an extent where normal functioning in day to day life is just completely impossible, there are at least 50 times as many individuals who are borderline (psychiatric pun intended). Like so many diseases, autism spectrum disorders are in essence extremes of characteristics that we all share to a certain extent. There isn't a person in the world who can't look at those questions and feel that some of them apply to them personally.

Diagnosis of autism spectrum disorders (like of most psychiatric disorders) is almost never a clear cut case and often takes months and sometimes even years to complete. It's not like the rest of medicine, where you can just take a blood culture, a stool sample or a biopsy and have a 95% certainty of diagnosis. Cases of 'schizophrenia not responsive to standard antipsychotics' often turn out to be misdiagnosed bipolar disorders, and those are some of the clearest diagnoses in psychiatry. There's a clear reason the DSM IV is undergoing constant revision, as often, the disagnosis that is labelled on you depends more on the psychiatrist across from you and his personal interpretation of your symptoms than any real substrate of your complaints.

In conclusion, psychiatric disorders are notoriously hard to diagnose and when labelling individuals with them, it is crucial to always keep in mind one of the key features of psychiatry.

Something isn't a disorder until it impedes normal daily functioning.

To rephrase: while most of us have characteristics suggestive of psychiatry on one or more aspects of our psyche, if you function adequately in everyday life, you are not suffering from a psychiatric disorder.

38.. Oh my.

Also, just so everyone's clear on this: this is in no way a medical diagnostic test! In fact, at a glance, it's a fairly whimsical test with disproportionate focus on certain aspects as well as random perspective switching on questions which makes it really easy to give incorrect answers. It's probably a very bad screening tool as I can predict its specificity is going to be very very low.

To further add on to Elostian's point and Roark's disclaimer, simply scoring high on this particular test doesn't mean that you suffer from Asperger's. All of us have some hypochondriac tendency to see the symptoms within ourselves, but like Elostian said, psychological disorders are on a scale, so many people will have some mild degree of anti-social characteristics or having a one-track mind. That does -not- mean you have Asperger's.

Like Elostian, I have a similar issue with psychiatrists who tend to take a medical point of view with regards to mental disorders - symptom-based diagnosis and drug-based treatment. Unlike, say, malaria, being diagnosed with a psychological disorder means you carry the label with you for life. You don't see people walking around being called 'the guy who had dengue', but you hear about 'that autistic kid' all the time. On top of what Elostian has already mentioned about this, there's another side-effect of being labelled, which is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Well, a quick search on Google Scholar says that it was written in 2001, and cited by 440 other articles. According to the paper, it has high validity and reliability, although they also noted that they did not test for its specificity, and scientists tend to score higher than non-scientists.

I think this is a very important section of the paper which everyone should read:
"We wish to underline that the AQ is not diagnostic, but may serve as a useful instrument in identifying the extent of autistic traits shown by an adult of normal intelligence. A score of 32+ appears to be a useful cutoff for distinguishing individuals who have clinically significant levels of autistic traits. Such a high score on the AQ however does not mean an individual has AS or HFA, since a diagnosis is only merited if the individual is suffering a clinical level of distress as a result of their autistic traits."

In case anyone wants to read the paper, here is the link.

I tend to agree with Elostian in general, particularly about how people who are one tick from the mythical standard of normal co-opting terms like "obsessive compulsive" is trivializing to people who genuinely suffer from the disorder. (OCD is probably the most widely abused disorder label, but plenty of them have the same problem.)

But to be devil's advocate, labelling a spectrum disorder has some good sides too. It helps people understand themselves better: they have a label they can go look up, can talk to people about, can read up on. It helps people accept themselves because they come to realize that what they have is not "just" them being weird or broken, but a specific thing that they're not alone in having. It helps them learn ways to cope with the condition, whether it's mild or severe, because they might not have realized the specifics or what can be done to work around it. And it can help other people accept them, because sometimes people tend to assume everyone else can see and sense everything they can, and if they're ignoring it, they're doing so willfully, but a condition name can make them accept that people really exist that don't sense what's "obvious" to them.

All of those things can of course go too far, and all of them have bad sides too. (Most obvious is when people take the label as an excuse to not even try to behave better -- though I feel often, the label's not to blame, a jerk would have been a jerk either way, they just have a different vector for their jerkishness now.)

Add it all up and I think that labelling a spectrum disorder can be both beneficial and harmful, and we, as a global society, are still figuring out how to find the right balance that builds on the former and minimizes the latter.

I completely agree with this statement which is why I don't think I have Asperger's, even if I do have some of the traits, the only psychiatric problem that has ever got in the way of my everyday life is my depression.


I agree with this too. Because my uncle suffered from very bad bi-polar disorder, and it became something of a familial stigma, I'm pretty certain I projected some of that onto myself and accentuated certain behaviours as a result of that association.

I have a very poor opinion of psychiatrists as a result of my past experiences. I feel that in a number of cases they can actually be harmful to the situation.

The best advice I ever got, about my psyche, was from a very good friend who said to me: "You think too much about useless things."