as small as a world and as large as alone, Why would any doctor diagnose someone who was at a...

4:34pm June 4, 2014

Anonymous asked: Why would any doctor diagnose someone who was at a school for the extremely gifted PDD-NOS when 99% of the time they'd be Aspergers at the time? Did (s)he know someone nobody else did?

I wasn’t at a ‘school for the extremely gifted’, in fact being gifted was not an entrance requirement at all, although lots of people were. I don’t even know if I would have tested as gifted at that point (a year later, I didn’t). But I was certainly at a school that had a lot of gifted students. There’s still a difference.

Regardless, there is no form of autism that has an upper-end IQ cutoff, and Asperger’s is not another word for “gifted people with autism”. You can have PDDNOS and a very high IQ, you can have autistic disorder (which he eventually diagnosed me with) and a very high IQ. The only thing that has to do with IQ in the diagnosis of autism at all is that your IQ is technically supposed to be above 70 for Asperger’s. But there’s nothing about the other diagnoses suggesting a low IQ is necessary. So your “99%” figure is probably pulled out of your ass based on stereotypes.

He diagnosed me with PDDNOS because he’d taken a developmental history that was not consistent with Asperger’s in the slightest, and I still had some pretty big language issues that followed on from that developmental history. Plus I met the criteria for autistic disorder, which he later changed my diagnosis to. In the nineties, it was extremely common for kids who met the full criteria to get diagnosed with PDDNOS in order to “avoid stigma” and the like – so he at first told my parents that I had autism and a cognitive profile like an idiot savant, and then he wrote PDDNOS on paper for a few years until he switched to autistic disorder. (Roy Grinker writes about it in Unstrange Minds, it happened to his daughter at almost exactly the time I was getting diagnosed.)

Anyway, I think it’s pretty insulting to suggest that only people with Asperger’s could possibly be gifted, or could possibly end up at what you inaccurately describe as a “school for the extremely gifted”. I was considered gifted up until I lost that status at the age of 15, and nobody ever suggested Asperger’s about me. I had too many early language problems for Asperger’s. And those differences between me and someone with Asperger’s did not in any way take away from my “highly gifted” status for the 10 years I actually had it. I’ve been diagnosed PDDNOS, I’ve been diagnosed autistic disorder, I’ve been called highly gifted, and I’ve been told by the guy who diagnosed me “Never let anyone tell you you have Asperger’s, because you don’t.” He actually said that. So that’s my answer to your aspified snobbery. Because that’s what it is, when you think only one diagnosis on the spectrum could possibly include gifted people.

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