7:59pm June 4, 2014

Just a reminder.

I know an autistic teen who can’t speak, has never had clear speech, has had a better vocabulary than his linguist mother since he was seven years old, has been in college and university and thriving there since he was thirteen, and is diagnosed with autistic disorder. Also has a quite low IQ the one time they tested it. And he can run rings around many an aspie intellectually, but he wouldn’t, because he’s too much of a caring decent human being.

Just in case anyone else wants to come to my ask box and tell me that the only diagnosis for high-achieving students is Asperger’s.

My friend had the experience of going to Autreat, expecting to fit in, and having another autistic person take it upon herself to teach him to say “bubble” in the most condescending way possible. This, too, is not surprising.

Asperger is not “autistic plus gifted”. PDDNOS and autism are not “Asperger minus gifted”. These are insulting to everyone with all of these diagnoses regardless of gifted status. It’s also an insult to the doctor who diagnosed me, as if he didn’t know damn well what my IQ had been or where I’d been to school when he said things like PDDNOS and autistic disorder and idiot savant and don’t let anyone ever tell you you have Asperger’s, because you don’t.

Asperger’s, for those who aren’t aware, is a diagnosis for people with a specific type of language development. My early language development, as described by my parents to my doctor, did not match the pattern associated with Asperger’s, it matched the pattern associated with regressive autism. Careful testing of my current language abilities at the time, revealed serious problems that most people were not expert enough to pick up on, but that this doctor was. This confirmed that the language problems were not a one-off fluke of early development, but a thread that wound throughout my entire life and still continues to do so. Hyperlexia often involves extremes of good language skills paired with very bad language skills, and I am no exception (in fact I’m practically the stereotype – good decoding, awful comprehension).

Not that anyone actually wanted to know any of this when they came through and made pot shots at my diagnostic status. They were just engaging in the time-honored tradition of diagnosis-via-Internet. Funny how people who are against self-diagnosis are so often willing to diagnose others through the Internet, and to ignore the words of the person’s actual doctors who knew them and observed them closely for their entire adolescent and early adult years. Because a doctor who knew me that long couldn’t possibly know anything about the difference between Asperger’s and autism or PDDNOS.