Aspies For Freedom

How do you know? I maintain that this amateur distance-diagnosing of famous people is both (1) unprofessional, (2) unfounded, (3) unhelpful and (4) unjustified. We are not qualified to diagnose anyone, let alone someone we have never even met and observed in person. This useless "claiming" of people as "our own" has got to stop.

I never attempt to deliberately annoy people. This is bullshit. Keep on topic; criticize my ideas, not my person.

As everyone here is fond of reminding us, it can be a burden to carry in today's society. And would you be happy to find a website full of amateurs speculating that you were schizophrenic, psychotic, had Down's, dyslexia, or whatever?

Of course, the same doesn't apply to dead people. But in any case, it's mostly amateurs that have no qualifications to diagnose anyone, doing it on the basis of third-hand information, without ever observing the person or even speaking to someone who did, without ever going through the various methods used to assess whether someone really has AS. It's unprofessional, the claims are unjustified, and it's misleading.

Some points. You shouldn't go by DSM-IV alone, it's far from the only diagnostic criteria in use throughout the world.

So, fuckups happen. Doesn't mean unqualified amateurs are any better at diagnosis. You shouldn't presume so.

As for schizophrenia, there is a type of schizophrenia not too different from AS that doesn't require split personality, psychosis and so on.

[quot]Regarding your protests that we are diagnosing people that we cannot observe, well in the age of almost limitless electronic media access, this is not true. I think someone on this thread wrote that they had observed Tim Burton, I assume in some mass media programme. I'm sure that most famous people have some footage of them that can be viewed in the internet, TV, video-hire, DVD-hire, public libraries (that loan all kinds of stuff) or through purchase of media products. Look at the references section of my list and you can find links to moving images that you can view over the net of Bill Gates rocking and also some of Glenn Gould being Glenn Gould. I've recently realized that a hugely well-known female Australian journalist appears to be AS. I've seen her body language innumerable times on TV over a span of decades, and it's plainly obvious that she has hypertelorism and a monotone voice. A while back I was watching a documentary in which my favourite Australian musician was interviewed, and I couldn't help but notice his utterly deadpan voice and body language (that he has always had) and they way he rocked his way through the interview. Knowing that he has a BIG reputation for behaving in an Aspergian manner, what am I supposed to think?[/quote]
How would you like it if someone made a website where they speculated in YOUR mental health? Oh, she looks so schizophrenic, or, hmm, maybe narcissistic. In fact, this is what happens to a lot of celebrities and guess what, most of the amateur-diagnosed illnesses are wrong.

Seeing someone on TV isn't enough to diagnose anyone. ALL the traits you've mentioned are non-essential; one cna have them (yes, all of them at the same time) without having AS and vice versa.

Look at some other diagnostic criteria. Also, note that none of these traits are ones you have if, and only if you have AS or some kind of autism.

I haven't attacked you personally. You're free to make a list of people speculated to be autistic. I'm not out to get you, but I disagree that the people you presumably link to (havn't seen the list) are qualified or justified in their speculation.

I have no idea what hypertelorism is, but I'd like to point out that I didn't write that. Perhaps it's an error in formatting

You cannot generalize in this way. There's a huge logical gap in there, between "doctors and medical professionals aren't omniscient" to "they aren't qualified to make diagnoses".

No, psychosis is most definitely not the defining feature of modern, mainstream medical definitions of schizophrenia. Here's one modern, mainstream medical definition, from DSM IV:

As you can see, it suffices to have "(4) grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior,
(5) negative symptoms, i.e., affective flattening, alogia, or avolition" and social/occupational dysfunction.      

Well, excuse me for not applying a word filter to remove the offending language. You understood well what I wrote, even though I may have had to write "YOUR neurological variation" to please you. Oh, and I don't care about "how we view autism in this forum". There is no collective brain here, there's a spectrum (haha) of views and beliefs. Last I checked, members didn't have to agree with any opinions to join here.

Your nitpicking about language completely ignores the point of that section. Also, I have never said or implied that autism is an illness. Just because I'm not always politically correct here doesn't mean I necessarily disagree with you.

Perhaps you'd like to make a substantive response to the point of that section, which was that amateurs constantly speculate about the mental health and neurological variety and everything that's got to do with the minds of celebrities, and that they are wrong as often or more often than they're right?

What makes you think amateurs are qualified to diagnose autism?

Would you please provide a reference that says these things are sufficient to diagnose someone with autism, or that rule out that these traits could be caused by anything else? Until then, I suggest at least sticking with the official diagnostic criteria.

We were not talking about writing about the autistic spectrum. I never denied that anyone had any right or qualifications to write about the autistic spectrum.

We were discussing the far-diagnosis of people. The diagnosis of people whom the person doing the diagnosis hasn't met. The diagnosis of people long dead. Do I think that anyone is qualified to do that? Let's say I still hold my reservations about such far diagnosis, regardless of who makes them.

I must admit that the total disdain for science and evidence, as well as the staggering naivete and the uncritical embracing of information gets a bit irritating too.

But you know what is even more irritating? That people aren't supposed to disagree. People aren't supposed to be skeptical or question established truths.

I do not hold any holier-than-thou attitude. You're welcome to be skeptical of any claims I make; unlike some, I welcome criticism and disagreement so long as it's constructive. What pisses me off is this constant focus on people and their attitudes and ways of expressing themselves instead of what they express. I thought aspies were supposed to be non-prejudiced, taking things literally instead of focusing on the person making a claim. I'm starting to realize that was only prejudice from reading too much and meeting too few aspies on my part.

Yes, I do. I'm constantly battling internally between the view that this makes me a sellout confirmist snob who wants to be great so as to achieve the benefits of greatness, and the view that this makes me noble for wanting to achieve good results or for enjoying the process of making or breaking good ideas. Probably, the answer is in between.

You're not, and it wasn't my intention to portray you as such. Welcome to AFF. Your work sounds interesting, too

So you think that a person, in order to fit the criteria, must also fit a criterion not in the official criteria? This reeks of special pleading. What I presented is the important part, nearly the full criteria; the other criteria do not state anything about being insane, psychosis, or anything like that, they simply restrict the number of additional/co-morbid diagnoses.

Go look it up if you like: the full criteria do not require insanity or psychosis.

Another thing is that you jumped all over me when I happened to mention mental health and autism in the same sentence, but you have no trouble saying that people with schizophrenia have something seriously wrong with them and are insane.

Just seems a bit inconsistent, being that schizophrenia, too, has a strong genetic component, and the neurotype that is predisposed to schizophrenia is very much integral to that person, just as much so as with autism.

What you need to look for is famous people who have demonstrably been correctly diagnosed in any well-publicized publication.

But anyway, I don't get your point. I see speculations about the mental health of celebrities everywhere. Online, in weekly gossip magazines, everywhere, and often with references to purported experts.

So, would you trust a proposal for a unified theory of physics from a journalist, on the grounds that "Journalists pry"?

If not, what is it that makes journalists qualified to be doctors and diagnosticians but not physicists? Do they not both require a long, extensive education?

When you mention that sometimes the famous are happy to reveal interesting things to journalists, of course, if they revealed a diagnosis I wouldn't have any trouble with it.

You're ignoring that there is also no one more biased than yourself. Self-diagnoses are notoriously unreliable in general. Not saying they're never right, just saying that they are unreliable. Often, they're wrong. Studies have shown time and again that people suck at evaluating themselves. Do you dispute this?

Further, I would have no trouble with the famous "coming out" about a self-diagnosis; or rather, I would urge people to be cautious as self-diagnoses can be unreliable, but I wouldn't mind anyone publicizing it.

But you're not talking about self-diagnoses. You're talking about the "expert diagnoses", from those very same experts you earlier sought to drag down from their pedestals, those same people you were so skeptical about earlier. And then there's the amateurs. They have every flaw the experts have, and the additional flaw that they aren't experts.

Exactly! Far-off diagnoses cannot possibly have this insight. Therefore, your own arguments show them to be unreliable.

You build a straw man when you bring up 5 minute medicine. Of course I don't trust that! Five minutes isn't enough for a correct diagnosis. But five minutes by an expert is often much better than hours with an amateur unqualified for the task. And it's a bit ironic that you bring up intimacy when you're trying to defend diagnosing people with whom it's impossible to have intimacy--long dead people, people on the other side of the planet whom you've never met!

To expand/clarify on this. Let's return to the physics analogy. Who's more likely to get the right answer when asked to calculate, say, what would happen when two atoms interacted in a certain manner: an expert well-versed in the mathematics of quantum mechanics, or an amateur (journalist or not) who's only read pop-sci explanations?

And with regards to experts: who's more likely to get a correct answer when asked to diagnose someone: a practicing diagnostician with intimate knowledge of the person's health and having met and observed the person several times, having been able to run any questionnaires and tests he'd like, or an expert who had access to none of these things?

The analogy wasn't meant to apply for self-diagnosis, but for far-diagnosis of celebrities. I see your point, though.

I don't think anyone is pretending to fit any criteria. I just think they are often mistaken. I, too, trust self-diagnosing people, insofar as I believe their self-diagnoses are honest, and that they are absolutely convinced that they have the diagnose they self-dxed.

I get the feeling people are taking it more seriously than they should. If it's just a game and you acknowledge it, I have no trouble with that.