promoting human empathy through self-coddling self-diagnosis of shadow syndromes

There's been a joke going around SomethingAwful that the primary cause of Aspergers Syndrome is reading the Wikipedia page that describes its symptoms.

Apparently I myself asked my counselor about it so often, that he went through a book and listed off symptoms, and the only ones I had were the ones that were better explained by visual impairment.

But when I was a kid, I was shopped around psychologists often enough, and put on so many meds, that I could have been stamped for Aspergers if I had been born a few years later.

--Nick B Mon Nov 5 13:55:16 2007

I started the test for Aspergers, and got through about 30 questions and then lost interest and watched TV instead, which almost certainly rules out Aspergers for me. heheh.

--LAN3 Mon Nov 5 16:55:44 2007

This kind of quiz suffers from the same thing focus groups do: people can't just answer questions straight up, they will always take the "meta", "well what does this answer mean" approach, so there's a big risk of getting the answer that you want, which points to Nick's problem.

FWIW, I think self-diagnosed-ADD has that "easy to be diagnosed with" issue even moreso.

--Kirk Mon Nov 5 17:47:07 2007

I have a friend who says doctors diagnosed him slightly Asbergers. He is definatly a walking encyclopedia of music and movie information. One of the symptoms is being a "little professor', focusing on one subject obsessivly. Recently, he recognized the last name of a customer as the same as the lead singer in Concrete Blonde. When the customer said his daughter was in show business, he surprised the guy by knowing his daughter and her work. His face looks mildly autistic too. I would ask him about the online test, but he just went camping for week. 
If Kirk has any syndrome, it's that obsessive journaling thing , ;)

--Erin    Mon Nov 5 18:53:16 2007

Our culture has gotten too meta these days.

--The_Lex Tue Nov 6 10:52:54 2007

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