I spoke with my psychiatrist about Asperger's yesterday

and she said she only had two patients who were diagnosed with it, both who she did not diagnose, and she would need to research it more since she wasn't experienced with it before diagnosing me or not. My next session with her is in about 6 weeks. I'm not so much looking for support in an informal diagnosis or support in my self diagnosis here as I am wanting to share my symptoms here, so here is a quick run down:

Score of 55 on the Pervasive Development Disorder Assesment Scale (as completed by me). Threshhold for Asperger's Syndrome is 60.

Lifelong comments about poor eye contact.

Comments from both my girlfriend and immediate family members (the only people outside of work in my life) about me giving off body language and facial expressions that indicate I'm angry, annoyed, not enjoying their comnay, etc when I'm not feeling any of these emotions or thinking such thoughts. Note: such comments come from times such as when I'm driving, eating in a resturant, and talking with only them in a room in my house.

An occurance where my girlfriend and I were intimate and talking dirty and she mispronounced a certain bodypart word as "duck" and I began making quacking noises and randomly using the word duck until she threw attempted to kick me out of the bed and yelling at me. At the time I completely mistook her vocal inflection and facial expressions as thinking it was funny, despite telling me how annoying it was and how mad at me she was. It wasn't until weeks later she told me how upset she was that night and to this day, were it not for the fact she made it adimantly clear to me I hurt her feelings that night, I still want to argue with her that it was funny as hell.

Empathy quotent test results based on a test designed by the co-directer of the Autism Research Center at Cambridge scored me at 5 the last time I took it. I've taken this test 3 times now with scores ranging from 6-9. The score range is 0-80 and people diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome and High Functioning Autism (from Cambridge sources) score an average of 20 on this test and the average male scores a 42 on this test.

My systemizing quotent score on a test designed by the same source listed as above was 46 the last time I took it. The last 3 times I've taken it the score was approximatly 45. The average Asperger's Symdrome/HFA score range is 40-50 and average male score is 30. Score scale is 0-80.

People my girlfriend have introduced me to have told her they think I don't like them when I've done little more than say hello to them. This must be due to the off putting body langauge described above.

My girlfriend's mother told her that I seem to be unaffected by joy, pain, or pleasure.

Fits/Tantrums when I was in school

1st grade - yelling and screaming at other children for talking back to a chrachter on the tv screen when a tape of a children's show was played one day. I remeber calling them morons, or something like this, for talking to the television because the charachter on tv couldn't hear them.

2nd grade - threatening to kill my second grade teacher after he made me mad for some reason I can't reacall.

2nd grade - frequently yelling and screaming at other children and banging my chair around trying to make them stop making so much noise when the teacher left the room.

10th grade - throwing another student out of my seat after returning to it from a group excercise that required changing seats. She was done with her assignment and my seat and didn't leave my seat upon requesting my doing so, which upset me greatly, so I threw her out of it.

10th grade - yelling and screaming in German class at my teacher for playing Christmas music too loud and out of season (I really, really, really hate Christmas music in the first place and loud noises disturbe me a lot in the first place) and throwing a workbook at him when he didn't respond.

11th grade - throwing another student into a wall when he didn't do what I asked him to in shop class. Backhistory on this one is each week we changed out "foremen" in shop class, meaning every week a different person was in charge of having everyone clean up. On my week a particular person refused to clean up something and became belligerent with me, so I threw him into a wall. Yes, I do understand now that it was me being belligerent.

many more behavioral problems at school I'm sure I've forgotten.

10 years old - little sister knocked my computer disk box over messing the arrangement over so I threw a plastic toy at her causing a gash that required stitches.

Many various incidences of hitting and/or yelling at my little brother when he didn't do what I wanted or made me mad in some way.

An intersting note on these tantrums is the violent behavior didn't start until just after my parent's divorce, but at the time my mom was taking a lot of her frustrations over my dad out on me, which may have pushed me over the edge and into violent behavior myself.

miscellaneous / possibly repetition of thought

About kindergarden age I started spitting a lot and I had to spit until it felt even. If I spat even one too many times I would start the entire process over again. The same applied for touchine objects, clicking things, etc. This did not stop until my late teenage years.

In my mid to late teenage years I would often walk in circles when stressed or in social situations. My friends at the time were quite accepting of me being rather eccentric so this wasn't an issue for them, but looking back it was very odd. I know this isn't related to mania because when I'm manic I pace instead of walking in circles and the mental state felt completely different.

When typing or writing if I misspell a word or something distracts me from typing or writing I must start typing/writing the word over again.

My special interests are too numerious to go into so I won't even bother typing them as it would take too much time.

Repetition of thought and failed social interactions

Numerious failed attempts at going up and talking to girls like other guys do and failing then spending months dwelling on why I failed. Quite frankly, these were minuscule details of my life, but never the less, I spent hour upon hour, day after day, month upon month pondering over every second of exactly what went wrong. This might be related to my near perfect audio memory. Examples of perfect audio memory: on May 25th 2005 my Psychiatrist said 3 worlds and told me to remeber them before having me subtract 7 from 100 5 times, asking me the date, where I was, my age, my birthdate, who the president is, if I have any suicidal/homocidal thoughts , if I hear any voices in the room, if I think she could read my thoughts, and then asked if I remembered those 3 words. I've never written them down, but over a month later I remember they were apple, desk, penny in that exact order.

Routines, repetive behavior, and rituals

My car cd player has one cd in it all of the time. That cd plays every morning on my 1 hour drive to work with 1 song on replay. On the 1 hour drive home from work the same song plays for between half and a quarter of the time, depending on how much the radio sucks that day. Until I started considering Asperger's a lot lately I never thought about why I listened to that song so much other than I really liked it, but looking back I've always had simaliar behavior, but with other albums.

Unexpected phone calls and guests cause me a lot of distress and I will do everything I can to prevent them from happening, including my own girlfriend from just showing up when ever she wants. I know that sounds selfish but once she came over when I was out and told me about it and I flipped out (but didn't tell her about flipping out) at the very idea she would just show up without asking first. After 3 months of dating, I've finally trained her to my schedule of seeing each other every Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, unless planning in advance, and I'm much happier for it!

Another good example of the above is 2 weeks ago when I decided to try using a bank branch than I've always used because it ways on the way home from work. Not only was it the first time I used it, which caused me to be somewhat anxious and disturbed, but I also ran into my aunt and her children in the parking lot. At first, I walked past the children and pretended not to noticed them, but then the aunt yelled at me not to ignore her, so I was forced into conversing with them for a while.

Groceries shopping is only to be done on Sundays during Summer break, but when I have classes I've always done it on Thursday evenings. I also always use the same parking place, give or take a spot or two, facing the exact same direction and buy pretty much the same items. I might change out different types of chichen or boxed pasta week by week, but the quantity and types of food purchased are always the same. I also find the shopping to be stressful becaused all of the different text and colors to look at. I tend to want to read every bit of text I can make out and all of the colors distract me. In the checkout lines I feel very nervous because of the loud amount of noise if the lines are busy.

Other people cooking offering to cook for me or trying to give me food they cooked will drive me nuts. I've discussed this with both my psychiatrist and psychologist and we're pretty sure it isn't paranoia since I'm not afaraid they're not trying to poision me or something, but I just don't like the idea of someone else cooking for me. Note: it doesn't bother me to go out to a resturant or buy food out if I've planned to do so.

Other people toching my possessions and/or moving them without my permission will drive me nuts. I won't resort to violence like I did when I was a kid anymore, but I still flip out in my head.

"and she said she only had two patients who were diagnosed with it, both who she did not diagnose, and she would need to research it more since she wasn't experienced with it before diagnosing me or not."

I find it rather strange that your psychiatrist, already having patients with AS, needs to do research on it. In my opinion, It does not matter what she is currently treating the referenced other patients for; but as a responsible professional no matter if its one patient or 100 of them, she should have already educated herself on it.[/i]

earplug wrote:I find it rather strange that your psychiatrist, already having patients with AS, needs to do research on it. In my opinion, It does not matter what she is currently treating the referenced other patients for; but as a responsible professional no matter if its one patient or 100 of them, she should have already educated herself on it.[/i]

I was a little surprised that she wasn't familiar with the disorder myself, but considering I live in a town of 70,000 it might not be that strange. I think this, combined with the fact I never attended school at one place for more than 2 years except 4 years at my highschool, lead to the fact that I wasn't diagnosed as a child or teenager.

I started kindergarden in 1988 and Asperger's Syndrome wasn't added to the DSM until 1994 or well known until years later. Combine that with the fact I lived in rural parts of eastern Oklahoma and western Arkansas until about 1996, when I moved to Oklahoma City. OKC still isn't a huge modern metro area, coming in with the popluation at 250k and entire metro area population at between 1.5 and 2 million. Given that I've lived in mostly backwards and behind the times areas most of my life and changed schools frequently I don't think it's hard to see why I easily went throughout school without attention being drawn to me.

I also don't think my psychiatrist is treating them for Asperger's so much as they came in with it as a preexisting condition and she is treating them for something else. She did state that they were both younger than me and diagnosed as children in school. I assume her issue was with diagnosing an adult (which seems to be rare compared to children) because an undiagnosed case of Asperger's Syndrome isn't something she has encountered before. Other than mood stabilizers, antidepressants, and possibly Risperdal to control repetition of thought what treatments would a psychiatrist use for Asperger's?

Her exact statement to me was that she would need to research the condition more before diagnosing me one way or another because she didn't want to give me an improper diagnosis for something I don't have. This almost caused me to have a monologue and fit because I have the exact diagnosis criteria memorized and wanted to make it very clear to her that the criteria for Asperger's is the same as Kanner's Syndrome (standard autism), but without the early speech development issues and cognitive impairment. However, growing older has mellowed me out a lot and I also figure there are things she will research that I know nothing about as an amature in the field.

She seems to be a very competent psychiatrist in all other regards, so I'm more than willing to wait a few weeks while she prepares for a proper diagnosis session and I append my notes some more.