The spectrum of disorders/syndromes/conditions/whatever-you-want-to-call-them that deal heavily with social interactions are really fun stuff... there's so many facets of the human personality that affect our interpersonal relationships you could spend an eternity or two just studying such scenarios. Granted, differential diagnoses make the area get kind of murky, but that's the fun part! You can just keep on learning more and more about the human mind on an indefinite level. No matter what behavioral patterns are shared, we all still develop on a unique individual basis, and there's always something new to learn from each person's experience.
What I find so fascinating about Autism in particular are the myriad of symptoms from a wonky range of shit, that all converge in a recognizable package. You have a high dependence on routine and ritual for emotional comfort, crazy intense pattern-based learning processes, social awkwardness (and subsequent isolation) from an excessively
personal locus of self-concept, really weird hyper/hypo sensoral sensitivity, and a wicked awesome ability to super-learn every waking detail of irrationally picked interests with extreme ease. It pulls select attributes from most of the main diagnoses out there... anxiety disorders, ADHD, OCD, Bi/unipolarity, and (in my pseudo-humble opinion) Addiction. Of course, it's a legitimate critique that these are attributes shared by all people at some point or another; the difference is that the autistic personality more or less perpetually exhibits a simultaneous embodiment of all of such characteristics. Then you throw in the variability of linguistic/other communicative capacities, and you end up with a bajillion different versions of the exact same tendencies. Literally, when you read the posts in Autism online communities, there's a hilarious similarity of pacing, vocabulary choice, and attitude; from a personal standpoint, there's
way more sense of personal deja vu than I've ever felt before, and all from wildly varying range of demographics.
Wings of Fire, it's always fun to hear what professional diagnosticians have to say about you, but remember that they can never know you as well as you know yourself. When I referred to them as parrots, I meant it as insultingly as possible; I much prefer the rehabilitation ability-continuum of observing people much moreso than the this-or-that medical model approach that's so regrettably pervasive in token psychiatry. Rehabilitation embraces an emphasis of treating people on an intensely individualistic basis, instead of just trying to lump characteristics together to form bullshit quantifiable population statistics. There's a definite over/misdiagnoses of Autism at large, courtesy of the overlapping similarities with a lot of differential diagnoses, and a pretty poor conception of the state of mind amongst those outside of the ASD realm of study (and even then, the predominance of effort to diagnose and treat children disregards what I consider to be the *really* cool part: studying how autistic individuals adapt to fill self-determined roles via their own unique talents). I'm actually quite curious to know how you feel about someone else labeling you as having an avoidant and co-dependent personality
Autism Spectrum Disorders
