In a new study, researchers found that those who self-diagnose as having autism spectrum disorder (ASD) traits don’t actually exhibit the key features of ASD when tested. They don’t show deficits in social functioning, restricted behaviors, or repetitive behaviors. Instead, they perform just as well as the average person.
“Only individuals with confirmed ASD showed impairments in recognizing opportunities to exert social control and reduced affiliation in their interactions with virtual characters; by contrast, high-trait individuals identified online showed comparable social behaviors to low-trait individuals,” the researchers write.
Instead, according to the researchers, their findings show that people may be mistaking social anxiety for autism. Those who self-diagnosed showed higher levels of social anxiety and avoidance than those with clinician-diagnosed ASD.
“Despite having comparable self-reported autistic traits, the online high-trait group reported significantly more social anxiety and avoidant symptoms than in-person ASD participants,” the researchers write.
The study was led by Sarah M. Banker at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, and published in Nature Mental Health.
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Lol, shyness and awkwardness as disorders. Whatever next?
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Well, shyness and awkwardness can become so severe that they cumulate into what’s aptly being described as the so called avoidant personality disorder. The suffering is huge and it often goes together with chronic depression.
I checked all the boxes of the necessary criteria since I was 15 years old but went misdiagnosed and maltreated for the next twenty because all my therapists reacted just as you, telling me that they too were a little shy around others sometimes, and were absolutely not getting the problem.
As a consequence I had to figure out therapeutical measures and manage a treatment plan on my own. Which was extremely difficult and exhausting.
Yoga and meditation for bringing down stress levels and understand depressive reactions, anxiety desensitivisation and self-help groups are key.
I am also not a fan of the theoretical work around the so called autism spectrum. But it is a fact that the folks with the problems of the so called avoidant personality disorder are one of the phenotypes that the autism theorists draw their wild speculations upon. Thus, I can understand when folks with the same problems I used to have self-diagnose with autism.
Unfortunately, I found out about this diagnosis after I had recovered, when I found some very good clinical literature about it online.
I am still very angry and will be for a long time because of misdiagnosis and not getting any help for my whole teenage years and my young adult life while consulting more than two dozens of clinical specialists over the years.
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If I understand you correctly shyness and awkwardness can be so severe it is crippling. I can only agree, in English we have a phrase for this, “cripplingly shy.” I am sorry you had such bad therapists that they were not able to take you at your word and see if they could help you with that. However I still don’t think being cripplingly shy us a disorder anymore than being the life and soul of the party and hogging the conversation. I’ve done both by the way.
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Amen Mr Hoggett. Quite so.
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I hope the day will come where you take seriously your heart’s longing, stop talking, and begin to put in the practice that is required to walk the path.
For people who are as overly identified with their intellectual world as you are hatha yoga is the easiest place to start.
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In German we call it simply debilitating or disabling.
I think that it speaks of confusion when people believe the explanatory models like the medical paradigm in psychiatry and clinical psychology are vicious and the people who are trained in them – the psychotherapists – are the good guys.
Psychotherapists who claim that the diagnostic manual is too degrading or too nonsensical to apply upon people and thus try to help them without it remind me of something that I once read in an introduction to literary theory by Jonathan Cullers. It goes on the lines of: People who claim that theories are bad and/or unnecessary and therefore claim that they work without one have one too – a bad one.
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Dear John,
I fully agree with your insightful observation.
In light of the lack of objective evidence to substantiate the existence of “Autism” as a distinct biological entity, how should we interpret the researchers’ assertion that individuals diagnosed with clinician-confirmed “ASD” exhibit a diminished capacity to influence others? This brings to light a significant concern: those labelled with a questionable disorder do not pursue dominance over their peers. Instead, it suggests they may possess a greater sense of humanity than the researchers who regard them merely as subjects for experimentation rooted in a quasi-scientific theory.
Kind regards,
Cat
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Being innately shy, and being uncomfortable speaking in public (feeling such is apparently called by psychiatry “awkward”) are not actually “mental illnesses,” to anyone other than the scientific fraud based DSM “bible” billers … and perhaps, also, the teachers in charge of public speaking classes.
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IF YOU ARE A MALE ADOLESCENT you will be diagnosed with ASD but if you are a female of any age your chances drop significantly but your symptoms increase with age. Why? Because we are busy taking care of all the ASD boys and men -and everyone else as well. We start masking nearly out of the womb. We are forced to be uber aware of everything in our environments because we are preyed upon immediately. We are forced into caregiver situations and expectations of achievement that boys never see in early childhood.
We exhibit in extremely different ways that if anyone bothered to research with any level of respect for our existence they would see the covert ways we clearly share the roots of the very discriminatory guidelines for ASD. As with all things, there is supposed to be a process of expansion and change with the expansion and changes in the world around us and science and everything else but somehow the only thing that changes in the 2000’s is what thing’s are called. Asperger’s becomes Autism Spectrum to ASD to people complaining about it not being called Asperger’s anymore so using that ugly term all over again but nothing in the criteria changes for the ignored aging women and men nor the growing number of young females discovering why they have carried this weight so long but couldn’t name it.
Invalidating us does not actually make us disappear. As you can all see, we just get loud and proud.
It is exactly the same problem we have with ADHD diagnosis’s. I am almost 60 and still fight every single month to ‘prove’ I am ADHD. In fact, as a female I have seen such a deeply discriminating atmosphere emerge in the 2000’s for everything when connected to a female vs. a male. I am getting older and instead of gaining any kind of respect or credentials for my decades of life and LIVING IN MY OWN BODY it seems that externally socially I am less allowed to have knowledge about myself. All my decades of diagnosis and medical records somehow do not rate as viable. So it isn’t just with ASD and ADHD it is a clear full scale attack on gender and as we see in this ‘article’ AGAIN, there is not even the respect to include females and the very biased ‘guidelines’ and testing for Autism that the majority of the population does not fit into…
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Dear JMP,
I agree that there is a “clear full scale attack on gender”. For centuries, women have been victims of horrific abuse directly caused by men. Psychiatry is a continuation of this misogyny.
I am curious to understand how you can provide “proof” of having ‘ADHD’ “every single month” when no objective tests can confirm its existence (Council For Evidence Based Psychiatry, 2024, http://www.cepuk.org, Breggin, 1991; Woolfolk, 2001; & Szasz, 1987). This is not a question of “invalidation.” The DSM and the field of psychiatry reflect inherent misogyny, unscientific principles, and discrimination.
You may find it enlightening to read works such as Gary Greenberg’s “The Book of Woe”, Thomas Szasz’s “The Myth of Mental Illness” or Bonnie Burstow’s “Psychiatry and the Business of Madness.”
Kind regards,
Cat
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I find it so much easier to connect on the level of real love, understanding and intimacy with a bush or a garden plant now then with almost any other human being I’ve ever known, and this is not a joke – admittedly it has only emerged recently. I sort of swooned in a spiritual haze and collapsed into a bush and our consciousness merged like old friends, and there was no surprise or shock on my part because it really was just like seeing a much loved old friend you had lost for some reason and you are so glad to see them again. it know everything about me and reacted to what it felt in me, and there was deep understanding of each other flowing between us, and it was more intelligent and I could almost even say more of a real human being then anyone you would likely meet in life. I know this sounds incredible but really reality itself is incredible, but we have entered a world of sleep and illusion presently. It felt like a really close union even though there was some distance because the vegetable kingdom because I think we urbanized human beings have little understanding of their sensitivity, purity and real compassion believe it or not, intrinsic to the, and a higher spiritually then we are in our dark Earth plain. Perhaps they are Earthly equivalents to angels. And then yesterday, I was observing the plants around me in a park drinking a beer, and I just became aware and started connecting and communicating to this plant next to me, not consciously, not intending to at all, and it, like the last one, seemed to know everything about me, and it asked me at one point “how can you drink”? And the brain was stunned into silence because the question was definitely insightful somehow, but I just could not understand what it meant, and I turned it over asking if it meant this or that, but then I think ultimately I reached the right understanding – he meant how can the higher spiritual energies through which these connections are possible could drink. And if I promise you, I know if I could live in nature and commune with nature like this all the time I’d need neither to drink, or have sex, or speak to people, or anything else, and hopefully I’d be a good forager and live on mushrooms. I know this sounds like I’m making this up but I’m honestly not, and I can’t be bothered to dress it up in intelligent sounding language – it’s as simple as I described, and the spirits of plants are a bit like our referred sages and gurus in their wisdom – they are like spiritual and angelic beings.
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There are these two forces of life and death struggling in the world, and in many of us this struggle is a fight to the death and in most the forces of death have already now prevailed over a captured body and heart which lumbers under it’s socially conditioned illusory reality marching them off to their graves. The struggle within me is intensely conscious and acute because I have prevailed and continue to prevail but underneath is a wild animal spitting fire and blood in the city but losing themselves into communion plants and animals in the gardens with a sense of Mother Nature pervading the land and the sun making all things beautiful. But in the world the forces of death, which is society and those it has conditioned and captured, are winning, because you focus your attention on fighting it’s most ravaged victims like the politicians and business class rather then fighting this process within yourselves and throwing off the shackles of society and intellect in order to develop the power for the fight the losing of which means the loss of any possible future. Most of you and your children will be destroyed by these forces, and only in waking up to this can there be hope for you, and only in allowing your children to be free are you worthy of the title of being a loving parent. Your children are nature struggling to become free – help them in their struggle: don’t hinder them.
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You are existence. You can’t be contained.
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Oi matey. God is one, but it estranged itself from itself in order to produce all the dualities, the antimonies, such as good and evil, male and female – the same antimony on the spiritual and physical level respectively. The masculine is the perfection of power, the feminine the perfection of beauty, but the mature male has perfected power and seeks now only to perfect beauty, whereas the mature female has perfected beauty but now seeks to perfect power. Beauty is not physical beauty but the harmony and sensitivity of existence. Power is not physical power but the force of clarity and truth, which is the father. Beauty is the Mother ever longing for and eventually obtaining the father. The father is strength ever longing for an eventually attaining the beauty, which is the eternal Mother, that one light fixture shining through a trillion living forms, the one eternal father shining through a billion blinding lights which exist only to illuminate these forms. The one and the other, untouchables, and in their unity the ultimate, unreachable. A living form is a life system of pure energy, which is magnetism and light. The only other is the emptiness which sees it all and is nothing at all besides what it sees. Both recede into the eternal darkness which is the humility of the excellent brilliance of all and every light, so humble it cannot see itself because in itself it goes blind.
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This article misrepresents the study. The study compares 2 cohorts, 1) people who would qualify as autistic based on a questionnaire, and 2) people who qualify as autistic based on clinical observation. No where does it test people who self diagnose as autistic.
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Anyone can self diagnose as anything they like. It doesn’t mean anything real has been found.
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Something to add here:
“They don’t show deficits in social functioning”
The term “social functioning” is interpreted widely differently depending on profession and also person. Laymen usually interpret it as meaning functioning in specifically social settings like your ability to properly engage in conversations etc. For psychiatrists, and especially insurance companies, the term social functioning is much broader and refers largely to an individual’s ability to conform to market expectations. Someone who’s unemployed, for example, has poor social functioning. The study doesn’t make it clear by what definition they abide, hence it’s in practical terms meaningless.
Why do I add this? Because it’s important to understand how the concept of autism came to be in the first place.
The interest in autism, to a significant degree, stems from questionaires, some going back as far as the ’60s, identifying a bunch of seemingly innocuous behavior (like not making enough eye contact, crying a lot as a baby, delayed speech, preoccupied with one’s interests etc.) that has been associated with poor or very poor functioning as adults. Similar behavioral traits have been found in infantile autism cases (in the ’80s it was widely assumed that infantile autism was caused by viral infections attacking the nervous system hence the often observed regression. I don’t think anyone has ever followed up on that theory despite this being the most probable explanation.). Eventually, milder variants gave rise to Asperger’s syndrome which was linked to infantile autism based on superficial behavioral similarities. Because psychiatric diagnostics (hence the entire DSM/ICD) ultimately serve insurance purposes, this gave rise to a false connotation of there being a real disease called autism (or ADHD, depression etc.) There’s also a funny anecdote here about modern-day depression diagnostic guidelines all going back to an ’80s Pfizer questionaire solely meant to boost Prozac sales.
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And introversion and autism can be misdiagnosed as social anxiety. My sensory issues cause me to feel overwhelmed. It has nothing to do with feeling bad about myself or judged by others. I also have a myriad of traits that are better understood by those who have been officially diagnosed as autistic. I cannot tolerate fake people and chit chat. I don’t fear their evaluation of me. I feel trapped In these intolerable situations. I’m not shy. A shy person would never be totally open about themselves and readily put you in your place for violating their boundries and displaying a gross lack of respect. “Experts” miss autism. Self awareness leads to better outcomes for those who are autistic rather than dealing with the “experts” who feel threatened by a clients intelligence and knowledge or embarrassed by their mistakes.
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Dear Sheila,
How can it be that specialists overlook the diagnosis of ‘autism’ when it is fundamentally a social construct established by the American Psychiatric Association (Greenberg, G. and Burstow, B.)? There are no objective biological markers, such as blood tests or neuroimaging, that can definitively validate the existence of ‘autism’ or any other condition outlined in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) (cepuk.org). What is it that these professionals fail to recognise when they do not diagnose a true clinical entity? The Emperor’s New Clothes comes to mind.
Kind regards,
Cat
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