Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment gifted vs. aspergers

I would love to know how many parents of Highly gifted kids have had the possible label of aspergers suggested to them.....DS6 has had numerous assessments done by various people and EVERY single one of them says without a doubt - no, he does not have aspergers. Both his speech and OT have also said, no to aspergers. My gut after what seems like 10 zillion hours of reading research and articles tells me no to aspergers.

He does have OE issues with being over sensitive and dyspraxia and is highly gifted....we had a meeting today with an advocate who we found that was going to help us with tweaking my son's IEP (he gets speech and OT and we are trying to get gifted to put on with our private testing we did this summer)since we left homeschooling and will be trying the local public school. She was up front and said she really had limited experience with the gifted side of things and deals more with the special ed side of things with autistic/asperger children and understands his dyspraxia...but there honestly is no one else in our area and she is highly recommended....and her own child has aspergers. When I gave a break down of my little guy, more than once she said, he has aspergers....I tried to explain to her that there is a trend in education today where many gifted children are being misdiagnosed with aspergers and that I was steadfast that he does not have aspergers but she just couldn't move past it. When I told her that I thought asperger children have severe social interaction issues...she said, well your son seems to have issues with social interactions with kids his age....my response...well yes, duh...he wants to talk about the electromagnet he built at home that day on his circuit board while many other kids his age look at him like he has horns coming out of his head...BUT when he hangs out with his 9 year old best buddy they can sit and talk about different topics for hours and have a meaningful conversation back and forth. Or if he hangs out with the homeschool math games group, he sits and plays all the games and carries on a variety of conversations and has a blast because he can finally hang out with another kid who actually likes monopoly as much as he does....or he can share his excitement about designing and making his own monopoly game board and pieces and have the other kids in the group think that is totally cool. He just has very clearly shown that he wants to be able to talk and interact with people he can have a conversation with....it's not that he doesn't want to interact....he VERY much wants to be social and part of a group, he has just learned that when he does open up to some kids, he is usually met with them laughing at him or teasing him....but with the right group or person, he has NO issue whatsoever talking back and forth and sharing and having a meaningful conversation.
Then with the advocate, I pulled out a circle graph he had completed a few months ago where he measured the distance his foam airplane glider flew in the backyard and then graphed all the bits of information onto the circle graph just to show her one of his 10 million interests.....and she immediately said...aspergers. What?????? She then stated that asperger children have an uncanny ability to be extremely brilliant in 1 or 2 areas and know everything inside out about that topic. Well, I went on to explain that this was a last minute experiment that came to him while he was throwing his plane in the backyard and he said he wondered if throwing it harder or at different angles how it would affect how far it went. I then went on to explain that this kid collects rocks, loves computer programming, builds rockets, made his own family nature club where he gives tours and shares about the local flora/fauna at different nature sanctuaries, loves trains, maps, building legos, performing science experiments...I could go on for an hour. He is like a giant sponge he can't get enough about everything....so to me that is not a child with a concentrated interest in 1-2 topics.
He shows concern when an animal or person gets hurt...and he is concerned and worried when he hears on the news that a tsunami hit or an earthquake hit....or if I am not feeling well...he has to come make sure I get a kiss and a hug to make me feel better and tells me how sorry he is that I am not feeling well. He made up his own 5 chapter story about manatees the other day and in the story he invented his own machine that stopped boats from hitting manatees because "how could anyone hurt something so cute"...and then made a computer program where you drove a boat and everytime you missed hitting a manatee you earned points. Many times he gets so emotional and concerned that he honestly can't express it.
I found a wonderful article by Dr. Amend (who we had considered driving to for formal testing at one point) that made my point ten million times over and I am faxing a copy of it to the advocate tomorrow.
The thing that just makes me so upset is I wonder how many other gifted parents have had their child mislabeled aspergers all because a particular person or professional honestly does not know gifted characteristics.....the advocate just could not get off the fact that he was not aspergers and was not focusing her energy on how to meet his gifted needs and more so on how to meet his dyspraxia needs and label him with aspergers. She then ended the conversation with the fact that if he could be labeled aspergers then the whole world would open up to him and he would be able to get more of his needs met...all I could come up with was "how????"....his needs are that he needs to be in a setting that will allow him to accelerate to the levels he needs to meet his gifted needs and help with his dyspraxia needs....she then went on to ask if I was open to just going ahead labeling him aspergers so that we could get more accommodations for him..so that if we decided to leave at the end of the year, he would qualify for the McKay Scholarship where the county would pay for him to attend a private school of our choice(all children in florida with an IEP are eligible for this after a year of being enrolled in a public school)...with getting the asperger label he would get almost double the money. I REFUSE to label my child with a wrong diagnosis.
She stated that the school would also question aspergers right from the get go and that she asked if we could do the GADS assessment to totally rule this out.....so at the moment I said yes....I now dont know if that was a good thing or not...here we have all these other professional people saying, NO and now we have to go through more hoops....I am just frustrated and feel like why does everything have to be SO hard to get the needs of a very gifted child met!

Yes, we have had this label offered by friends/strangers several times for our ds, and spent time/money/energy/worries over the whole thing. Turns out he does have some social issues but not aspergers. Nor Adhd, another one suggested a few times.
My personal scale for 'obsessive interest' in a topic is probably not one to judge by, but our ds, while very interested in certain things over the years, never approached what I would call 'obsessive'. (This was a word used in one of the many assessment forms we've filled out)
I think you are right to completely rule this out with the GADS assessment, if possible. Sounds like some folks will still have their own opinion on the matter, but the school hopefully will respond more appropriately, and not spend further time on this question.

If this article you mention is available on the web, please post, I would be very interested to read it.

what i think is true is that PDD and aspergers get a LOT of press these days (rightfully so, considering the numbers of kids) and the profoundly gifted population is so much smaller and gets little media attention.

I also had no idea of the overlap in traits (such as obsessive interests vs. passions) until realizing this year that my DD7 who has been diagnosed with PDD since age 2 is actually highly gifted. Then I found the whole 2E world, and the possibility of misdiagnosis.

The advocate probably really thinks she's right and trying to help. But its the kind of thing that if you go to an autism specialist they'll see autism and if you go to a gifted specialist, they'll seee gifted. Only someone who understands both populations can do a really good job distinguishing them..

The advocate is herself very entrenched in the autism world, having a son herself, that it may be hard for her to see beyond that.
irene

Thanks guys for your insights - I so appreciate them...this past week I really feel like my brain is being pulled in ten different directions!
I just get so frustrated when people are so quick to put a label down before the whole situation has been seen or told..when we have 4-5 professionals all telling us no and then a new situation comes up where we have to explain DS6's "issues" to a new group of people, this whole debate just gets brought to the front again...

The article link is here
http://www.sengifted.org/articles_counseling/Amend_MisdiagnosisOfAspergersDisorder.shtml

and here is another link I found that was very interesting and showed how a gifted child could be mislabeled with aspergers.

http://gifted-disinkroni.blogspot.com/2007/04/psychological-misdiagnosis-of-gifted.html

Given it sounds like several people who likely have more training than the advocate have clearly told you it isn't Asperger's, it sounds like maybe if the advocate can't move on it is time to find a new one who can keep her own experience separate and focus more on the specific needs your son has.

I certainly agree misdiagnosis is a huge problem. It is worth keeping in mind though that there certainly are gifted kids who have Asperger's so if parents are hearing over and over again that the child has AS it is worth investigating that with someone who understands giftedness.

Hi Belle, thanks for the links, very interesting!

I think passthepotatoes makes a good point, it had not occurred to me that you could perhaps work with another person.

Also, I definitely think that some therapies for specific diagnoses can cross over to be effective for kids with similar issues - however misdiagnosing a child to get there doesn't make a lot of sense to me either. For instance, we are doing a little bit of counseling for my son, in both social skills training and also starting discussion with a therapist about negative thinking, and how to turn that around, work on 'resiliency', etc. The second article you link to talks a bit about gifted kids being more prone to having thoughts which in the normal population would be considered definitely depressive, for gifted kids it may be more 'normal', but still something to help them work through.

Belle - I'm sorry you've had to go through this. Very frustrating! I agree with the others who suggest finding another advocate, if possible. This one just does not get it, and does not seem likely to give up.

Thanks for the links. I think Dr. Amend's letter could be useful for us to give to the school when they start worrying about our DS5's social interactions. They have not suggested AS, but when they observed him in preschool in the spring, they noted as a red flag that DS did not interact much with the other kids.

http://www.sengifted.org/articles_counseling/Amend_MisdiagnosisOfAspergersDisorder.shtml

I recently had an interesting conversation about this very topic with a friend who is getting his teaching degree. He did a paper on AS, partly because he has a nephew with AS and he's concerned with proper ID'ing of this group. He gave me an example of how an AS kid and a gifted kid might respond in a particular situation, and the only difference is the motivation (which could be tricky for a teacher to distinguish without follow-up): A teacher tells the students in the class to bring their mats to the middle of the room. One student refuses. The teacher asks the student to please go get his mat. He doesn't budge. (And so on.) The teacher ends up talking a parent, who asks if the teacher asked the student why he wouldn't get his mat. She had not. When asked, he says that he does not have a mat, he has a rug. The parent explains that one part of the student's AS makes him take things quite literally, and he would have felt he was lying if he brought over his rug, which was not a mat as the teacher asked.

I could imagine a smart-alecky and bored gifted kid doing the same thing, but with a different motivation ("I don't have a mat, I have a rug" - just to be difficult and act out when in an unchallenging placement).

(Note - I really don't know that much about AS, and I'm just relating my friend's example. I hope it's not off the mark.)

I have gone through this pain a hundred times over. My older son does have an Aspeger's diagnosis, but I railed against it until I was positive that at least several pieces fit. For instance, he does look you in the eyes, but he also has this need for auditory stimulation, sometimes repeating the same song to himself over and over. He's 8 and still can't handle frustration very well. He closes up and sometimes tantrums (though less often now). But, he is also highly gifted, interested in lots of things, fairly social, etc.

It's hard. We didn't really see it until he transitioned into a new school and the transition threw him out of whack completely. Suddenly all these subtle little signs that I wasn't paying attention to became full-blown AS type reactions. He is back to baseline now, but now that we've seen how he handles transitions, a lot of other things begin to make sense.

Anyway, you know your child best. And the AS/Gifted diagnosis is a very hard one to make. I hope you manage to talk to the advocate and get the support you need from her.

I feel for you as well. We were told by the assistant principal at our public school this year that DS6 needed to "get an Aspergers diagnosis". Even if it was 100% accurate at least the school could offer some services to him, otherwise there was nothing they could provide him. So sad.

Some great comments guys - thanks a bunch...I just thought that article just really shed some light on my concerns....I decided to write an email to the advocate last night sharing the 2 links and then giving her some real details about why I think the way I do and I will see how she responds.....if she still pursues that avenue I think we may need to say thank you and move on. There are no other advocate choices in our area so I would go at it alone....but I would rather do that then purposely make up something I know in my heart isn't true just to play the system.

Thanks guys for always giving me support!!