Hello everybody(hi dr. nick), I actually had actually formed my account a few months ago, but only know worked up the courage to post something and try and enter the autie community. You can call me Mark Magnums. Like everybody here I have some form of ASD. As a child my parents noticed the usual signs: failure to socialize,obsession with routines and inanimate objects(tires in this case) and lack of imagination(I would collect transformer action figures, but not play with them, just stare at them and transform them occasionally, and actually get angry when other kids tried to engage in imaginative play) and decided to bring me to a child psychiatrist and a neurologist. I I was diagnosed with PDD-NOS, along with tourette syndrome as a comorbid disorder, and the neurologist thought I was normal enough to be mainstreamed, only taking this "social help" class during lunch period.
Well, as the case with many such special needs programs in public schools, it really didn't help much, by the end of high school I was socially stunted, the mind of a 13-year-old in an 18 year-olds body( I had started school a year later than the other kids, at six rather than five), not ready for college and certainly not ready for adult life. Don't know how to talk to people, and my parents don't give a s**t only care about money and themselves. So I needed help, I needed to find people like me,people that understand me, I can relate and talk too, and now I have on this site. Thank you wrongplanet, I hope to be a great contributor and do what I can to make Wrongplanet a better place.