ArtemisSo shit like this is why autism goes undiagnosed & unrecognized so often.
These will be true of *some* autistic people, but it really has nothing to do with anything.
And that's not even mentioning the fact that a lot of questions ignore the possibility that an autistic person may also have ADHD.
Like "It’s important to me to carefully plan any activities I am going to do". Ummm. I have ADHD, motherfuckers. Of course I don't carefully plan all my activities! How tf would I manage that when I'm fucking impulsive as all hell?
I do carefully plan A LOT of my activities, but "all/any" is so silly. It doesn't just ignore ADHD. It ignores the fact that people don't always act the same way in every situation.
It's so weird to put things in such absolute ways.
But the people writing diagnostic questions for autism don't consider that the person answering them might be obsessed with nuance & accuracy, which seems like a failing.
The true test of whether you're autistic is how much time you spend explaining that the diagnostic questions are unanswerable, overgeneralized, & hard to give a clear response to. 😅
Diagnostic questions for autism are indistinguishable from Buzzfeed quizzes in my opinion. You can often tell what answer you should give to get a specific result, but the actual question is nonsensical.
I also think that they don't realize a special interest can be ANYTHING, including, say, an interest in emotional well-being & nurturing relationships.
The Autistic Innovator 
@artemis Those questions read more like one of those what is your personality type quizzes.
@AutisticInnovator
Yeah, I had to leave the website I was on to do some Googling to confirm that they do indeed seem to be authentic questions that may be used in some settings to assess autism.
Because, yep, they are absolutely personality questions.
Franchesca@artemis @AutisticInnovator been through the diagnosis process twice now, these are absolutely the kind of things they have to ask, but the specialists who run the process are (in the Netherlands at least) very good at getting the context around it to understand the why and see if it really fitted or not.
Agnieszka R. Turczyńska
Dave Alvarado@artemis this right here is why we are so much better at diagnosing boys. Girls being especially interested in relationships is just girl-coded behavior. Boys staring for hours at trains is weird.
@artemis Let's imagine a perfectly round autistic person in a vacuum...
Lydia Conwell@artemis I don't think I'm autistic but whenever I've done those online tests I've come out as: Might Be Autistic.
There are questions like: Do you find background noise distracting/intolerable?
Who like background noise? Who wants to listen to the soothing sounds of a car engine idling out the window?
WearyBonnie@artemis
As an undiagnosed Autist who masked very successfully all the way through school, uni, work etc, I am pretty good at appearing neurotypical in a lot of situations. Put me somewhere where I've not had a chance to develop my "what is the next appropriate response" algorithm though, and my brain/face just bluescreens 😅
As an undiagnosed Autist who masked very successfully all the way through school, uni, work etc, I am pretty good at appearing neurotypical in a lot of situations. Put me somewhere where I've not had a chance to develop my "what is the next appropriate response" algorithm though, and my brain/face just bluescreens 😅
Alex P. 👹
Hannu@artemis honestly-- yes, this is closer, though OCD level ambivalence is on the differential as well. (and overlaps with ADHD neurobiologically extensively)
Jess👾@FknHannu @artemis At some point, neurodiversity diagnosis based on symptoms hits its limits because there's extensive overlap between most of the neurodiversities. My hypothesis (uninformed) is that a lot of the overlap in symptoms simply boils down to trauma from being raised as a person born "different" in a world that punishes differences.
@JessTheUnstill @FknHannu
I think this is a major reason it took me so long to get from realizing I have ADHD to also realizing I'm autistic.
So much stuff could just be explained as trauma from living in a world that doesn't accept or accommodate ADHD.
This site has a series of "Misdiagnosis" charts that look at symptom overlaps.
It's overly simplistic but useful I feel.
Compendium of helpful images that I will cry if they are ever erased from the net:
https://neurodivergentinsights.com/category/misdiagnosis-monday/
Bernie Luckily Does It@artemis I'm glad you did realize you're autistic and I'm glad you're one of us!
Morgan ⚧️@JessTheUnstill @FknHannu @artemis the genetics have a lot of overlap too. I'd bet the diagnoses we have right now are both too specific to accurately assign just one category to a lot of us, and too vague to accurately assign all of us to any category (or accurately predict our needs). Brains all just have different levels of the same many characteristics, but people who base their personalities on fitting in the normal box will lose their minds without other boxes to seal the rest of us into
spanghero@artemis I legit think this might be in the diagnosis manual.
Hannah Celsius@artemis
During my diagnosis there were like a hundred questionnaires, and several times there was this very annoying and suggestive question:
"Do you think people are talking about you?"
So i always wrote on the forms that it wasn't my thinking, but reality that people were talking about me - i actually heard it with my own ears! 😂
It still pisses me off when people tend to ask questions this way.
During my diagnosis there were like a hundred questionnaires, and several times there was this very annoying and suggestive question:
"Do you think people are talking about you?"
So i always wrote on the forms that it wasn't my thinking, but reality that people were talking about me - i actually heard it with my own ears! 😂
It still pisses me off when people tend to ask questions this way.
Janus@HannahCelsius @artemis Knowing how people are, who are they *not* talking about behind their backs? Is that a question to recognize the naive/clueless ones?
@Newstrujew
Could be.
I always thought the question was more about the prejudice that autists are suspicious, and that we think/make up things because of that.
Vinnie (any)@artemis that would include me. 🤔
серафими многоꙮчитїи@artemis I wonder if the #ActuallyAutistic hashtag needs a supplementary #ProbablyAutistic for the conscientious among us
Laurent Bercot@artemis ...and subscribed in case there are other lost souls
Fish Id Wardrobe ⁂
Advanced Persistent Teapot@artemis goddammit just @ me already
Haelwenn /элвэн/ 
@artemis This bit reminds me, last time I checked, to contact the local autism ressource center there's either phone or paper mail…
I guess I passed it, there's no way I'd do that. :D
I guess I passed it, there's no way I'd do that. :D
Greg Bell@artemis @TindrasGrove "where can I submit corrections to the questions?"
Tindra@ferrix @artemis a large part of my job is dealing with questionnaire data.
And trying to interpret what the respondent *meant*, because that may be very different from what the question *asked*.
Also a nontrivial number of these questions are terribly worded and I absolutely would like to fix them.
Robot Diver 🌊🌬️🍃🌿🌸🌱🌱🌱I feel seen
SecondUniverse (she/her/they)@artemis now you have figured out how the test ACTUALLY works, you unfortunately are now the target of a team of psychiatric ninjas. The secret must be maintained!
Jay Grant 🏳️⚧️@artemis when I did psych testing to get diagnosed, I argued some of the questions and the reviewer laughed and said, "yeah, you're definitely autistic"
Miakoda 
@artemis I'm reminded of "Would you rather go to a party or a meuseum?"
Well, what kind of party? How many people will be there? Is it loud? Is there space I can duck in to when I need a break? How long will I be there?
What kind of meuseum? Is it crowded? Who's going with me?
How far away are these places?
...Who the actual fuck has an answer to party v meuseum with 0 details?!?! I am frightened of whomever has that much wreckless abandon!!!
Well, what kind of party? How many people will be there? Is it loud? Is there space I can duck in to when I need a break? How long will I be there?
What kind of meuseum? Is it crowded? Who's going with me?
How far away are these places?
...Who the actual fuck has an answer to party v meuseum with 0 details?!?! I am frightened of whomever has that much wreckless abandon!!!
@hellomiakoda
I KNOW!
It definitely feels like that question implies that allistic people are ALWAYS down to party, & that can't possibly be right!
mpark@hellomiakoda @artemis I feel like making either choice is allistic and this is the autistic answer. But I don't think they're actually using the questions this way.
@hellomiakoda @artemis Sounds like a question to determine whether a person is more introverted or extraverted, nothing else. Are all autistic people introverted? I would tend to think no.
Also, I can't answer the question either. I don't like parties, and I don't like museums either, so I'll just stay home. What does your test say about me now, huh?
food in training@artemis (statement "\"I am more interested in 'things' than people\" evaluates to false. People are things, with many qualities which differentiate them as *not merely* things.")
(statement "ugh!")
Virginicus@artemis “…and here’s the workaround.”
GinevraCat@artemis YES YES YES
Kotes
Kevin Karhan 
Vanfunfun
NaomiElizabeth@artemis They were mutually exclusive according to the DSM for a long while, and Dr's aren't the kind of people to put any effort into learning anything new, after the amount they had to do for med school.
Really inspires confidence when you go to see them, and they only have a DSM-III on their shelf, when IV has been current for ages, and V is nearly ready for release.
Then you hear someone like Dr. Russell Barkley saying '60-70% of people with ADHD also have autism'.
If that's the case then surely the reverse is also true, and if it's that common then why isn't one automatically being tested for, after diagnosis with the other?
@NaomiElizabeth @artemis It's weird to me that you can't necessarily even get both things evaluated by the same doctor. When I got my ADHD diagnosis, she suggested I seek an autism diagnosis (which tells me she thinks I'm autistic) but that I'd have to go somewhere else to get it because she doesn't do that.
@mpark @artemis And all too often the diagnosis will differ depending on who's doing it. Saw so many people on the Wrong Planet forums, listing the number of different diagnoses they got from different doctors, before they finally ended up with 'autism'.
And then even when they've found one that accurately explains them, a lot were stuck with the stigma of a prior schizophrenia dx, and providers who refused to accept their new diagnosis, because 'autism is made up' or 'overdiagnosed'.
Far, /far/ too much of the upper hierarchy of the medical profession is made up of willfully ignorant conservatives (who probably never even wanted the job, but either that or lawyer was all their well-off parents would let them study), with no empathy whatsoever, and a god-complex.
And that's before you even get to the thoroughly unscientific shit-show of bigotry, whose foundation is pathologizing, institutionalizing, and abusing everyone who wouldn't conform, on the basis of whatever its practitioners could make up for their 'case studies', that is psychiatry.
Healthcare should be regulated by bodies representing patients. /Never/ providers.
@NaomiElizabeth @artemis I was also wondering about the reverse. The proportion is really about how common ADHD is compared to autism. And we don't really have reliable data on that. Like: we have data of diagnosed children saying that boys are twice as likely to be diagnosed which essentially means that girls are still massively underdiagnosed. Data on races (which is often just a proxy for poverty) indicates the same thing. Overall it seems that ADHD is more common than autism. But that would mean that these "60-70%" become almost 100% for the reverse. Which is strange: ADHD is definitely very common within the autistic population but it isn't universally present.
@artemis I have ADHD and I find it important, yet I'm often unable to plan. Would be a yes?