Oh yeah, and I'm on spectrum myself and yes, self diagnosed at first. I am getting tired of people dissing self diagnosed Aspies. Most of the Aspies I know were self diagnosed, and knowing how dang hard it is to actually get an official diagnosis as adult, at least here in Europe (95% of psychologists are only allowed to diagnose kids) I am pretty sure most European Aspies will stay undiagnosed officially. And it is a lot easier to know why you can't do certain things or get sick having to do other stuff, just as it is way easier for me to deal with my inability to process numbers since I am aware that such a thing like discalculia exists. And it sure helps people dealing with me if they know why I react differently. It's not an excuse for most of us, it's a fact.
Also, anyone hanging out on sites like Wrong Planet (and don't get me started on them) likely accepts being Aspie or being relatedto/friends with one. Which qualifies as self diagnosed for me.
Is it
really that hard to get a diagnosis of Autism in Europe? It isn't in the UK, so I'm surprised to hear that. As for self-diagnosis, there are so many problems with it that it's a whole other thread in another forum. It does as much harm as good, that's for sure. Being aware of conditions like Autism or dyscalculia (which are not connected, particularly, I note - though ADD/ADHD is connected to dyscalculia) is quite different from deciding you have them and going around telling people that you do. Avoiding diagnosis (usually by finding excuses, in my experience) is detrimental in that it prevents you from being provided with access to a lot of really useful stuff (whether tools, medication or other forms of support -
particularly in Western Europe, where non-neurotypical stuff isn't stigmatized as much as the rest of the world).
Complete tangent but I think one particular issue with self-diagnosis in the last five-six years is that a lot of people who had no real Autism symptoms beyond "poor social skills" self-diagnosed, made it part of their identity and so on, and as they get older, at least some of those people are realizing that they just had, y'know, poor social skills (and now have better ones, as age often brings), but are now in a situation where they announced to everyone that they had a very specific disability... Not great for anyone involved.
We can collect anecdotal evidence
My IQ used to be over 140 (age is part of the formula...) and I make less mistakes calculating in my head than with a 'typing aid'.
Mine still is well over, and I make far more mistakes calculating in my head/on paper than using spreadsheets or calculators! I admit that am mystified as to how one would make more mistakes with a spreadsheet or the like, because typos tend to be super-obvious on spreadsheets, and the kinds of error made are quite different. For example, on a spreadsheet, I might typo 58 as 85, but I'll immediately see that, because the result won't be even proximate to what I expect - in my head I might add 58 to 291, and would get 339 or 359, when 349 is of course correct. I may well notice that later, but I might not.
Bear in mind, this is assuming I'm distracted, answering questions and so on, and not able to quietly focus on the math. By myself or in quiet exam room, doing such math, it's unlikely I'd make the above mistake, but that's not the situation being discussed.
What I particularly like about these sort of aids is that it frees up attention - I can just enter the number and be reasonably certain that I will recognize a typo, because it'll usually be digit reversal or a missing digit. Whereas having to take time to try and add the numbers whilst people are talking and I may be being asked questions or trying to think about other stuff, that's quite tricky.
As for my players, they're all pretty smart, but how intelligent someone is generally doesn't seem to correspond especially closely to how likely they are to make an error in math when not focusing on it.
