Expert: Ettina - 11/13/2009

Question
I'm 23 and it came to my mind this year, that I (and possibly my mother and brother) can have some autistic spectrum disorder. However some of my behaviours don't match the autistic stereotype, as I lack good concentration and memory.

I started speaking in whole words before my 1st birthday and learned, myself, to read before the age of 5, but my physical development was slightly delayed.
In childhood, I never had good contact with my peers, actually I preferred imaginary friends. Me and my brother liked pretending and role-playing, but we played this way only one with another. I expressed some "girlish" behaviour (treating plush toys like babies), along with "boyish" ones (building cities from Lego bricks and playing war with figures). About that time I first developed stereotypic movements, for which I've been punished by my parents. So I would hide, e.g. in the bathroom, and let my body do, what it wants.
As I was growing up, I devoured information more and more. I used to annoy my classmates with monologues about ancient civilizations and species of animals, especially dinosaurs. Since my teenage time, I've complained on horrible concentration difficulties. I can't think longer than 5 minutes about things I'm not really interested in. During lessons I used to be elsewhere. I love doing many things at one time, in fact doing nothing at all. I'm also lazy and like laying in bed till late.
On the other hand I easily get absorbed by activities not involving thinking, e.g. drawing. My pictures (mostly fantastic animals) are very expressive and "every pixel is in place", as my friends say. When I'm bored and don't feel creative, I draw complicated geometrical patterns and fractals.
While talking with people, I sometimes miss irony. I don't keep eye contact and tend to cut in. I don't have good memory, even learning my phone number was a challenge.
To finish with, I took several on-line IQ tests and scored about 120-130. Despite my laziness, absent-mindedness and poor memory, I've been a good student till the end of high school and now study at a medical university.

How do you think, am I really autistic? What can I have: AS, PDA, something else?

Answer
It's not really possible to diagnose someone over the internet, but most likely you are on the autism spectrum.
Not all autistics have good concentration - in fact, autism overlaps quite a bit with ADHD. Both autistics and ADHDers tend to concentrate really well when interested and poorly when uninterested, although with ADHD the poor concentration aspect is often more prominant than with autism.
I think drawing does involve thinking, although probably more visual thinking than verbal. It sounds to me like you're quite creative, which would suggest more PDA than AS, though you didn't mention how you feel about people telling you what to do. Keep in mind, also, that the various autism subtypes are stereotypes and there are many people who don't fit neatly into any given category.
Good memory is often a characteristic of autistic people, but attention differences can mean that the good memory is only apparent in limited settings (for example, I can easily memorize features of syndromes, but not math formulas). And certainly there are also plenty of autistics with poor memory in general.