A lot of lighting hot tempers in this here thread. I am going to just give myself the liberty of adding my two or maybe twenty cents on the matter. I meet a lot of people who claim to have an undiagnosed case of Asperger's syndrome. I think that may have been a major cause of the American Psychiatric Association doing away with that diagnostic label in their DSM-5, because so many people claimed to have it. Now everyone is just on the autism spectrum over here, if they have any degree of autism. My brother was diagnosed with Asperger's when he was about 7. He is actually open to talking to strangers and is very friendly. But there is more than that, and it can be very difficult with him. He talks to himself constantly all day long and often into the night, repeating the same things to himself over and over again and will often rock back and forth clapping his hands and, when he's really excited, jumping up and down. I used to have a room beside his, and it has driven me insane (more on that later). He would get obsessive phases where he would spend time finding out everything he could about whatever particular topic he was interested in at the time, which included bugs, dinosaurs, and actors and actresses, among others. Never really seemed too interested in trains. He doesn't seem to have these phases anymore, but then again, I don't live with him anymore. He takes no medications for it. I have met other autistic people that were also very similar in their habits, and it is definitely not something I would want to have.
I think that many I have met might think that I have Asperger's syndrome because of the way that I act, but that is simply untrue. I am usually antisocial, and usually hate crowds, and I do tend to get obsessive about constantly changing topics, reading everything I can on the matter, and have a lot of those stereotypical traits, but I dislike the labeling of people's minor idiosyncrasies and it is highly fascinating to me to see people seeming to want these labels. I don't dislike them for it, but it's very interesting for me to see that behavior from what one might call a psychologically healthy--i.e. a "normal" person. Honestly, I think that because of being with my younger brother and also being under the watch of so many of therapists, counselors, psychologists, and psychiatrists, I find a lot of behavior of the psychologically health (normal) people really fascinating and I really want to know more how to emulate that and get that way too so I don't have to spend so much time in psych wards/mental health hospitals--i.e. the "looney bin" or however the hell you want to call it.
As I've said in other posts, I have often been under the influence of some very soul crushing and treatment resistant depression which I won't go into here, and I have read a ton of articles on the subject and of other mental health issues, as well as asking almost everyone I know for advice, and then, at the age of fifteen, I discovered how to break my way out of it--but at a pretty high cost. I stopped sleeping. For about a week, though it may have been a day or two shy of a full week--I am unsure due to the fact that I was really losing it by the end. I had what you may call a nervous breakdown, anxiety attack-- I never really found out what the doctors called it because I can't seem to remember the name of the mental hospital I was sent to so that I can request the records. You can go ahead and say I'm making it up. But I have no way to prove to you, and you can believe or disbelieve it as you like. But during this time, I was very active--I only lay down at night in the early hours of the morning and I would just stare at my clock the entire time. I paced for hours. Still do pretty often, as a matter of fact, which I am told is not normal, but screw that. I started reading my scriptures obsessively, highlighting and looking up every reference to Satan, and trying to write and figure out the numerical value of the words of the book of Revelations, which is some kind of practice of which the name is eludes me. I started walking my dog outside circles around my neighborhood for miles, walks with my dog that would go over an hour. Started wandering out in the woods, looking for snakes until I finally found a big black one in a tree. Anyways.. this all may seem awful, to you, but to me I had never felt less depressed in my entire life. I felt the complete opposite of it, as a matter of fact. Long story short, I was taken to the doctor and diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The manic type (I forget if that's type one or two).
I have gone up and down with this thing I have, and taken many medications for it, including aripiprazole, depakote, lithium, risperdal, lemotrogine, trazadone, zoloft, and a whole bunch of others whose names elude me at this time, and gone back forth from the manic to the depressed, but as I have done so, it has honestly come to perplex me why we have to dope up all the people who act differently simply because they don't conform to the social norms and mores that for some reason we "have" to follow. For example, take ADD (or ADHD). It is very interesting to me that people who think that we evolved from a hunter gatherer pre-homo sapien species (forgive my lack of expertise in prehistoric human history), would think that their descendants would have evolved and changed to be able to sit still on a chair while listening to another person talk for a long period of time and just sit and watch them for as long as an hour, or sometimes even longer, and call this normal. Why would it be considered normal behavior for our species, who apparently obtained intelligence from being hunter-gatherers, would now turn into a species that, for the majority, spend long periods of time sitting and/or doing repetitive tasks for a job while still remaining very calm and compliant, as if this is normal healthy behavior for any living creature. It's just downright odd to me, and I have yet to receive what I find satisfactory explanation for it. I also find it odd that people who read and believe horoscopes, or think that talking to water can make it into beautiful shapes because it "likes" the positive energy, or believe the earth is 6,000 years old, can be considered normal and psychologically healthy, but for some reason, I, who does somewhat odd things like pace for like an hour or so every once in a while, spends hours alone reading books that almost nobody reads for fun, and say idiosyncratic things that people may seem illogical, am supposed to be "mentally ill." To me, it's ridiculous.
For those of you who took the time to read my short novel of a comment, please let me know your thoughts on the matter of labels of what is normal, i.e. psychologically "healthy," or not. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
