What I have found dealing with people that are Aspie/ADD (father and brother)
How transparent you are in the fact that you are applying a completely anecdotal and personal experience to the largest possible generalization of ADD/Asperger's.
That is very unscientific, and to people like me who deal with ADHD and a few other mental illnesses, downright offensive and prejudiced.
How do you know it's not a symmetric relationship?
It always seemed inherently weird and self-contradictory to me to accuse someone of lacking empathy. How can failure to understand another person's feelings be other than mutual?
Everybody ignores the feelings of others on occasion due to lack of understanding, but also when their own feelings are powerful enough to take precedence. I think it's best to assume that any time someone is causing pain, or even awkwardness, it's due to one of those situations or maybe a combination. I'm doubtful that there are really any other kinds of people.
The fact that you are even conflating Asperger's and ADD like this betray how little you know about the disorders. It's not just unscientific, it's insensitive.
It's my own personal experience that Aspie/ADD people often can't understand how much pain they can cause other people.
You listed your father and brother as evidence. Add maybe half a dozen more and that's your entire sample pool. It's amazing that you think this enough for your generalizations to be valid enough to share with others publicly before doing real research about these disorders.
Lol, you can't wrap your naive opinions as "personal experience" and then apply them to a generality of millions of people. You passed off this claim as real. Just because you frame it as personal experience doesn't suddenly make it not a form of prejudice, and doesn't suddenly make it correct and valid.
I don't need data to counter your "personal experience" a.k.a. anecdotal evidence, because it was never valid to submit as a claim in the first place. There is no "both sides", there is one side: the objective truth: ADHD is too complex for you to make ridiculous unbacked claims like that.
I have quite advanced ADHD, OCD and bipolar II disorder and I don't have problems with empathy; in fact, in my circles I'm known as an especially attentive listener. I'm a walking contradiction to your baseless claims.
So please, try again, this time without insulting an entire class of people by claiming we all fit your incomplete behavioral model.
Are you saying your own personal experience is a counter to mine?
You keep trying to twist this situation with carefully crafted language into something that it isn't.
I'm not offering you "personal experience", you are attempting to equate our statements here in order to maintain a level playing field. Unfortunately, you are trying to pass off as a generalized fact something which my very existence disproves. You can study me independently to reach this conclusion. I am a data point. It has nothing to do with my own experiences, but the very real and measurable phenomenon that is my actions in the world.
Are you for real? How can you sit here and make such outrageously anecdotal and uncited claims and then turn around and say that any proof to the contrary needs to be backed up? Lol dude get the heck out of here.
The fact is, you are literally talking to someone who could help you better understand what life with ADD is like, and instead of taking the chance to learn and grow, you're trying to convince someone who literally has ADD that everyone with ADD behaves a certain way, and trying to make the claim that I am not qualified to talk about my own disorder.
How prejudiced and narcissistic can you be that you ignore what is right in front of you? How can you not understand how insulting this is to me? What if your dad was black, would you go around saying all black people are unempathetic, too? No, you wouldn't, because someone would put you in your place reaaaaaal quick.
Sharing personal experiences is how normal humans learn about each other.
I like how you try to go further and insinuate that I am "not normal" because I am not accepting your anecdotal nonsense as evidence. Do you treat everyone whom you argue with this way? That's just sad.
No, you are trying to be wily and ask a loaded question in order to shape the language of the conversation and position yourself as simply in search of the noble truth and I as someone who doesn't wish to see eye to eye, but it comes off as an obvious and hamfisted attempt.
Honestly, this kind of self-victimizing behavior leads me to question whether you are entirely self-aware of the nature of your interactions with your father and brother and can even trust in your own interpretation of them. You and I are not even able to have a meaningful conversation because you are bent on framing me as incapable of reasoning with you while ignoring everything I'm saying.
How transparent you are in the fact that you are applying a completely anecdotal and personal experience to the largest possible generalization of ADD/Asperger's.
That is very unscientific, and to people like me who deal with ADHD and a few other mental illnesses, downright offensive and prejudiced.