And well, there's like a very persistent pattern in all these self assessment test results 😅
Not as high as yours, but still in the "yes, lol" side of things
@alice@actuallyautistic
a) thanks for putting this together & making it easy to access
b) 👼💩 I love it when autistic folks focus on a topic and then are like "look at all the cool stuff i found!" ;)
@alice@actuallyautistic To me, it's not even a question of validity. It's necessary! If I hadn't suspected mine, it would've never been diagnosed, I've gotten so good at masking that many psychiatrists and therapists missed the OBVIOUS autism in the room when talking to me.
It took me wondering what the fuck was wrong with me and hours of digging around to come to the conclusion that it may be autism. I met with a therapist who knows her shit, talked to her about why I questioned it and she was like: "Oh. Yeah, it's actually quite obvious with you, can't believed no one noticed." Yeah. Me too.
Official diagnostic in the works now. This could be life changing for me. Still though, I'm resentful at the failure of the medical system and all of the people who failed, or didn't even care to see the obvious signs...
@alice@actuallyautistic thank you for this, it is a great resource! As I don't know your cat farting gif, count me in the people who now know you thanks to this rather than the gif 🙂
@alice@actuallyautistic also not only are diagnostic criteria extremely sexist and not workibg out for most bit cisbinary dudes but also is access to qualified diagnosticians extremely paywalled and hard.
@alice@actuallyautistic As someone who was diaged as a kid but left the diag behind for a while to have opportunities I'd be denied, I've come to see myself in late-diag/self-diag folk quite a bit
Y'all have so much of the same experiences I did, just without knowing why for so long
It's wild how much of the trauma, and pretending to be okay I see in y'all.
@lira@actuallyautistic@alice
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I think I had something like an awakening before puberty and when they saw it, they all shut up and my childhood remained some family secret, trying not to jinx it, I guess. 😈 ❤️
@alice Thank you!! I appreciate this so much. I still might like to get a formal diagnosis but it's nice to know that self-diagnosis is valid. A git repository for autism resources = so cool!!! @actuallyautistic
@alice@actuallyautistic This is fantastic! One thing I've been going through is "is it Bipolar?" I've taken all the same tests for autism as you have, and score high as well on many of them
I do have a formal diagnosis, but let me say that anyone who spends the time to dig into this rabbit hole the way you have is almost surely also autistic.
When you're assessed as an adult, you've likely acquired so many masking skills that all they can really do is ask us how we feel. And that will very likely match our "dossiers"
@alice@actuallyautistic that's pretty nifty! I wonder if I am somewhere on the spectrum, but not so much that it would be meaningful to search out a formal diagnoses. Thank you for sharing your work.
"Importantly, individuals with a clinical diagnosis of autism and those who considered themselves to be autistic responded to survey items in a very similar way. "
Monotropism has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread by @rabia_elizabeth. @ferrous' parent was one of the original authors of the idea and Ferrous helps keep the idea alive.
(I don't know if the Murray, A who co-wrote the MQ paper is related.)
@alice@actuallyautistic Thank you so much for this. I've just taken three of the tests and been surprised at how clearly the results show me to have autistic traits. I need this kind of thing to give me the confidence to mention autism/autistic traits as I am #SelfDx
@alice@actuallyautistic
I just took the Female ADHD Test. I got a 62 out of 72, and had to avoid bursting into tears several times.
Meanwhile I was going to take the AQ test, and started answering strong no to several things, but got bored and moves on. #ActuallyADHD
I remain incredibly frustrated by the fact that "Hyperactivity" being added really screwed with a bunch of diagnosis in the past.
@AeonCypher@actuallyautistic there needs to be better differentiation between question sets and diagnostic criteria for different subtypes within diagnoses like ASD and ADD/ADHD, especially where they often present differently between genders, cultures, etc.
I believe that we have the issue where a lot of these DSM entries are still going off US-male-centric views and/or outdated research.
@alice@AeonCypher@actuallyautistic
Did you considder to include the monotropism questionair into your list?
I glimpsed over it again and didn't saw it.
@alice@AeonCypher@actuallyautistic
Alright. I guess it is really debatable, because it isn't included in typical manuals yet afaik.
But it is really nice to do a test that isn't full of questionable ideas.
@Dr_Obvious@AeonCypher@actuallyautistic not yet. I took a quick look at it, but that project has been on the back-burner for a while due to other things needing attention in my life.
Create a huge ilst of questions. More than we need, but like 100. This is so that we can have questions that we agree are more representative and don't have false assumptions.
Have ~1k people take the test, and the other tests.
Have people self-report on self-diagnosis and official diagnosis.
Get the inter-rater reliability of the questions, and also the perform a per question and multi-question test of proportions.
Find the smallest set of questions with the maximal amount of information.
Report on the sensitivity and specificity of the test.
Show the cross test reliability of the tests, to demonstrate that the tests are measuring the same thing (Convergent Validity).
Give comparative analysis to identify the relative predictive power of the test.
Write the results.
Publish.
Bonus: Perform a Factor Analysis on our test to identify the factors that define #ASD,, repeat on the other tests, identify the factors that are measurably different.
@AeonCypher@alice@actuallyautistic
I don't feel competent in that area. But I agree that a reevaluation of criteria for ASD with respect to the people relating to ASD, would be beneficial.
I think monotropism was intended to do that.
@Dr_Obvious@AeonCypher@alice@actuallyautistic
My understanding is that the monotropic test, isn't so much to identify autistic's as the monotropic mindset. Which, whilst really common amongst autistic's, isn't exclusively so.
Here's a link to an article I found interesting: "Me and Monotropism: A unified theory of autism — By Fergus Murray (science teacher, writer and 'autist'), on single attention and associated cognition in autism"
Someone organize gathering a committee to make questions.
Someone organize the question drive.
I'll do the analysis, and find a PHD to work with to write the paper.
(BTW, I bet we could also ask ADHD questions, and find differential validity).
How about starting with a collection of the diagnostic "I statements" from the diagnostic tests in my self-dx project (and any other good tests with solid research behind them)?
We can ask people to not only answer the questions, but to also rate how useful they feel that statement is as a differentiator.
We should capture self-reported age-range, gender identity, and self/formal diagnosis status for ASD, AD(H)D, MDD, (G)AD, and possibly OCD. Their traits all have some overlap (and everyone is depressed and anxious).
The reason why I am diagnosed with HKS (Hyperkinetic Syndrome, what nowadays is called ADHD) is, because of those stereotypes. Apparently I wasnt "autistic enough", ie. my masking was already that good.
Also, almost all of those tests and dx criteria ignore the rest of the circumstances, eg. pre-existing handicaps.
In my case, its being strongly sight-impaired from birth. That leads to different, "unexpected" behaviour, because you already are REQUIRED to cope with your environment. Ie. its an automatic adaption to life. And thus "failing" the stereotypes and "criteria" that orient themselves on such crude ways.
I wonder how many people are just dxd wrong or not at all because of pre-existing conditions.
@alice@AeonCypher@actuallyautistic Gotta be quite a number of underreporting in the fancy statistics (German really got better words for this: "Dunkelziffer" - dark number / figure).
@alice@AeonCypher@actuallyautistic plus I noticed they acknowledge a Fascination for specific topics but make no allowance for what happens if your fascination is something like behavioral science or neurochemicals or the deceptive practices of the marketing industry... like a person can be highly interested in a subject not for the usual reasons or at the usual casual intensity of a non-divergent to the degree that what is categorized as a typical or defining "autistic" trait ISN'T present... only because the autistic person is ironically fixating on what non autistic people do 🤣💖 hmmm! 🤔
@jan@actuallyautistic finding out more about how your brain works is always good news 🙂 if nothing else, it helps explain your lived experiences better.