Tag Archives: autistic traits

How We Experience the World Survey

July 15, 2014 musingsofanaspie 191 Comments

I was stumped for a title on this one. The questions all center around various ways we experience the world around us, but they’re about as loosely related as you can get and still say there’s a theme.

If you want to answer anonymously, you can do so at Survey Monkey.

1. Is the fascination with certain topics usually a life-long one, persistent over many years, or subject to change ?

2. What are your special interests and on what scale do you engage in them?

3. What effect does alcohol have on you, particularly on your executive function or stimming?

4. I’m wondering if sitting all crossed-up in chairs is an ASD ‘thing.’ (i.e. do you do this?)

5. Do you have some very specific memories? Such as “ah-ha!” moments that you can draw up much more clearly than most memories, involving not only a picture but feelings, perhaps sounds and smells etc. as well and the image is VERY clear whereas most memories are a thought.

6. Do you sometimes attribute feelings to inanimate objects? Do you feel like certain objects ‘want to’ be interacted with or will feel bad if you don’t use them? Do you explain some of your quirks in this way, for example thinking that street furniture or certain textures want to be touched/felt, rather than you want to touch them? Or does it feel this way but you translate it when talking to others?

7. Does arousal influence you in an autism-specific way? As in: Do you overload easily when aroused? Does arousal influence, for example, your verbal reasoning skills than you feel would be “normal”? Do you stim when aroused? (for clarification: the questioner described this question as being “personal” so I think they are referring to sexual arousal, but answer in whatever way is comfortable for you)

8. Do you have difficulty with sequencing – working out the order in which you need to do things – for example if you were preparing an unfamiliar meal with several elements, would you have difficulty balancing them all without explicit planning and measurement in advance? Do you often realise you’ve done things in the wrong order or in a very inefficient way?

9. Is your primary fantasy ‘stopping’? In school, I used to fantasize about spontaneously dropping unconscious. As an adult, I fantasize about leaving the social system entirely. more details here

10. We often hear about autistic children wandering off. Did you wander? Did you “disappear” frequently to the point that was upsetting to your family (or teachers?) Why did you wander off? What do you remember about it? Now that you are an adult do you still wander? Do you disappear (perhaps during sensory overload) without telling anyone that you need to remove yourself at this time? more details here

Aspie Traits

Gender and Autism: A Preliminary Survey Post

December 5, 2013 musingsofanaspie 71 Comments

I’ve been planning to write about gender and autism for a while now. Months ago, I wrote a personal reflection piece. It got two emphatic thumbs down in beta, so I let it languish in my drafts folder. Then, after some feedback from commenters here, I decided I would write a more informative companion post as context for the personal reflections, but that never happened. Then I cannibalized the personal reflections piece for something I was invited to submit to an anthology, which took me weeks to write because apparently everything takes me weeks to write lately.

Which left me still wanting to write about gender and autism here. As a first attempt, I’ve surveyed some of the ideas that people have put forth about gender and autism over the years, starting with Asperger himself.

Note: I’ve linked to a bunch of articles in this post, many of which I don’t agree with. However,I want to share the background information that I used so you can make your own decisions. Also, most references here are to binary gender and gender norms because that is the way most of the research is framed.

The Original Gender Link

In his paper describing his case studies, Hans Asperger hypothesized that autism must be a sex-limited or sex-linked condition because he had only observed it in boys. However, he also noted that some mothers of boys at his clinic who had autistic traits, which he found puzzling given the lack of girls who fit his model. His explanation for why there might be autistic women but not autistic girls was to suggest that autistic traits develop in females only after puberty.

He went on to state that he’d studied over 200 additional autistic children and had concluded from his observations that the autistic personality is an extreme variant of male intelligence. It’s important to note here that Asperger’s model was developed based on case studies of 4 boys who had been referred to him for behavior problems in school. All of them were considered to be uneducable in the traditional school system, creating a very specific profile on which Asperger based his observations.

It’s interesting to contrast Asperger’s idea of male versus female intelligence with Simon Baron-Cohen’s male and female brain models. Asperger believed that females were better learners with a tendency toward concrete practical thinking and tidy methodical work. He thought that males, on the other hand, were naturally gifted with logical ability, abstraction, precise thinking and formulating, and were predisposed to excel at independent scientific investigation. Continue reading Gender and Autism: A Preliminary Survey Post →

Diagnosis

Do We Need a Female Diagnostic Model for Autism?

November 21, 2013 musingsofanaspie 159 Comments

I’m sure you can guess what my answer to that question is. My post this month at Autism Women’s Network, Understanding the Gender Gap: Autistic Women and Girls, outlines some key ways in which autistic girls and women often don’t fit the traditional diagnostic models for autism and Asperger’s syndrome. In part, this is because the traditional models were developed primarily by observing autistic boys.

For anyone who reads the article, I have a few questions. If you identify as female, do you think the traits I listed in the article fit you? Do you think including traits like that in the diagnostic model would make it easier for someone like yourself to be diagnosed? If you identify as male (or not female), do you feel like any of the traits also fit you?

I’m asking that last question because it also occurred to me that part of the problem with applying the current diagnostic model to adult women is that it was developed based on autistic children. When I started researching Asperger’s syndrome, I kept coming across information aimed at screening children and had trouble seeing myself in the most commonly mentioned traits. By the time we reach adulthood, we’ve often made a lot of adaptations that conceal our autistic traits. So I suspect that some of the social traits in particular might also apply to many adults, regardless of gender. I’m also curious what other traits you think should be part of the diagnostic criteria or how the diagnostic criteria could be modified to be more inclusive.