Can you help guide me with symptoms?

[Wantage]

I have a 17 year old daughter.  She has always been anti social, resistant to change/things out of their perceived place, and sensitive to tactile differences.
She can have crying and screaming fits over anything.  Yet academically, she excels.  She is a great "traditional" student, yet when it comes to group or a "real world" experience activity, she does not like it and will beg the teacher for an alternate activity.  If she has to complete the activity, she has bouts of anxiety and crying fits.
Her behaviors have been present since youth, yet have seems to intensify through the teen years.  Her behavior, however, goes beyond normal teen behaviors (I am a high school teacher, so I know teens fairly well).
I do not know if this is Asperger's or something else.  Also, I do not know where to even begin to find testing and hopefully some answsers.  Can you please guide me?

[Suzyq0826]

It could be Asperger's but you definitely need a professional diagnosis. My stepson is 10 and very bright. He does very well in school...in the areas he wants to. He has a mind that works like no one I've ever known. At 10 years old, if you mention any movie produced, he can tell you what movie studio made it, who the producers, directors and actors are and what year it was released.

But his perception of reality is distorted also....for example he is now into watching wrestling and on Monday night there was a contest. Even though we explained to him that a million other people entered the contest and the odds were not good, he sat for 2 hours with the phone in his hands waiting for Ed McMahon to call him and when he didn't, he was certain that his Dad put in the wrong phone number when they entered the contest from the website.

One of the things I've found about Asperger's, and it's different for everyone, is that they will focus on the most irrelevant details to the point of obsession...such as when he tells us every movie that someone has been in and who produced/directed it. He is also obsessive-compulsive to a certain extent and does not handle deviations from routine. If we drive to the mall one way the first time...there is no other way to get there. If I decide that I want to take a different route because of traffic or whatever, it has him totally disturbed.

He also does not handle "real-world" experiences very well such as school field trips, going to the movies or amusement parks, anyplace crowded and noisy. He will be social on certain occasions, such as when we have company over and he is around his father and I, but outside of his comfort zone he is very introverted.

Where do you live...if I can I'll give you links as to where you might find help and a diagnosis.

Suzy

[Sally44]

I have put together a Health Page that you can access by clicking on the Health Page icon on the top right hand side of this forum page.  This is taken from DSM IV for autism and people have added examples of behaviour that fits the criteria.  You may find that helpful.  Then you can google DSM IV for Aspergers and read the criteria for that.  It is very similar but usually there is no speech delay or disorder with Aspergers although there is usually some language processing problems and literal interpretation of language.
If you think this is a possibility would you be able to talk it through with your daughter to see if she wanted to find out if it was relevant to her.  Sometimes it can be a big help to understand that there is a 'reason' for some of your difficulties.  But others may not want a diagnosis and prefer to find out about it themselves without being given the label.
To be assessed you need to talk to your family doctor and ask for a referral to a clinical psychologist or communication centre that deals specifically with diagnosing autism and aspergers.

[mtgoat911]

I can relate to alot of the ways your daughter is responding to her teenage years
with me diagnoses are not as important as treating the actualy symptoms
i have lived with aspergers for 32 years, i was diagnosed with this illness last year
when i was really young i was diagnosed with ADHd, then depression, ocd, bi-polar, pts, social anxiety and odd
each diagnoses i would take some type of med and be sent off to school, sometimes the meds would make the issue worse, but most of the time i was just over-whelmed with life
nothing big had to happen, everything was too much for me to handle, i needed some help but i did not know how to ask for it, so i would just bust out in a crying fit
suzy made a good point, every patient is different, now my son seems to be hit much harder with this
he is in special education classes, he was evaluated within the school system
that maybe something you can look into, see if your district will give your daughter the behavioral test for aspergers and then maybe they can get her more of the help she may need

[MJIthewriter]

I too am autistic, but I have taken a different approach. As a child I sometimes found myself thinking I was different and inferior, but that changed when I got aquainted with other autistic people who had a positive view about their autism. Instead of seeing my autism as a bad thing, I've taken to using the "gifts" it has given me.

I can relate to the real world experiance. When you live with a creative mind and always imagining something interesting, it does seem to be a bit dull waiting in line, thinking about how long is it gonna take... or focus on any other maundaine task... I find myself having to deliberatly make effort to distract myself from my mind when I need to pay attention.

For me my obsession has always been with insects. In time I also developed an interet in psychology, writing, and art.  It has created something really interesting... I write stories about human-like insect creatures who struggle with human like problems. I draw them from time to time. (my avatar is one of my favorite characters) a recovering addict.

Not to say that I am immune to the noise sensitivty, but rather than be upset, I try to take measures to better myself and work with my autism rather than against it.  If a flickering burned out light bothers me, I request it be changed if it's taking away my focus.  Other times I've come to just bear with discomfort. It will pass.

Autism doesn't have to be bad. I wish more people could see it this way than to believe all the cr@p doom and gloom there is out there....seriously.

[tiggyG]

I have a daughter with Aspergers. She was diagnosed at 17. Firstly I read everything I could about it, then approached our GP saying what I thought it may be, he agreed and referred us to a psychiatrist. I wondered about that!  But it was the way to go. He didn't want to see our daughter until the last visit. He wanted to obtain all the information about her from pregnancy on, so of course she didn't know those answers.

She always says the diagnosis is very important. You know what is wrong, that they are not just being difficult. But it is very different in everyone. It seems no two people are the same or have the same symptoms.