Why are so many aspies mild?

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I agree there. I have said in the past my AS shouldn't be any worse just because I had depression or just because I have anxiety or learning difficulties. My AS alone is mild, add in the co morbid conditions, it will seem worse. Some doctors go by co morbid conditions to rate how bad your AS is. I don't agree. I am not sure where my psychiatrist placed me. Mild to moderate I'm guessing based on what my mom has told me.

When I get in relationships, twice. My AS got worse but it seemed like it was worse because I was in a situation now that triggered more symptoms. Then my husband came along and my AS got worse again but he accepted me and let me do what I wanted, then bam it was mild again. Know what I mean?

I say this is all an illusion that mine gets worse and then goes back down. Even my own mom has told me I meet the aspie criteria off and on and has said I go up in the moderate range when stressed. Then I don't have it at all when things go my way and when I am calm. Of course I still have it, my symptoms just are not showing at the moment. Same goes for people who are bipolar or ADHD or have depression, or schizophrenia. Just because they aren't showing any symptoms at the moment doesn't mean they don't have it. Then all of a sudden they do have it again when they show it.

My AS shows because of the environment and Tony Attwood says to get rid of a child's AS, put them in their bedroom alone. No joke because there be nothing to trigger his symptoms. But of course the kid still has it.

Environment can definitely make you higher or lower functioning/milder or more severe.

Someone, with the full disorder of AS, might not even be diagnosable if everything falls into place perfectly, but take that person away from that place, and bang, disorder.

The severity of one's disability has very little to do with one's quality of life.

I did some research on quality of life a year or so ago that revealed the opposite of what you might suspect: People with more severe disabilities (most of the studies measured this by how much help you needed for your ADLs) actually tended to have slightly better quality of life in the domains that weren't directly related to independent living. The milder, near-typical people tended to get more social rejection, had more depression and anxiety, and felt less accepted. Most of the time, the studies concluded that more disability meant lower quality of life; but not when you looked at the sub-categories.

It depends on how you measure quality of life. Measure it by what a person can do, and the severe disabilities will always show up as worse quality of life. (I really thought this was a trivial result, though. Define severity by how much you can do and then define quality of life by being able to do those things, and obviously there'll be a correlation.) But if you measure it by the subjective experiences of the people with the disabilities, and the scale tends to tip the other way, with people reporting slightly more difficult experiences the closer they were to "normal". There is of course a wide variation; but from everything I could tell, severity had very little to do with whether people basically felt their lives were enjoyable and worth living.

I think that the problems that come along with being disabled haven't got much to do with the disability itself; it's got more to do with how people see you and your disability, and whether or not you're treated decently.

I have long suspected that being or appearing closer to the norm can result in more stress because of more pressure to go just that little bit more beyond your abilities than you're already doing. Or can result in fooling oneself into figuring if you just work harfbenough you'll be like everyone else.

I guess when you get older and older, it guess less and less visible. In my case my AS traits are becoming less and less obvious as we speak. I hope I can keep up with many good things that I have been learning in life.

I suspect it could be described like many phenomena: the bell shaped curve from statistics. There are more NT's than sub clinical aspies. There are more sub-clinical aspies than mild aspies. And there are more mild aspies than moderate, etc. What I wonder about is what lies on the other side of the bell shaped curve beyond typical NT's. Some have theorized William's Syndrome. As I visualize it, some people are more NT than others. In other words, more inclined toward chit chat and social climbing, for example.

Lets see, the severe NTs would be the ones who are outgoing and love to socialize and they are extroverted and have zero aspie traits. The mild ones would have some aspie traits and be a introvert and not like people that much or social situations, might be shy. You might think they are aspie because of their traits and the fact they are introverted. I would rate my mom to be a severe NT despite that she has a few aspie traits and my dad is probably a moderate NT. He is also sociable and outgoing but he is socially awkward and my social skills are better than his. He also talks about his sports and doesn't seem to understand I am not into it and I don't enjoy it. He goes "How can you not like the Packers?" But he has ADHD and I am not sure how bad it is or how mild. I never rated it or even asked how bad it is. His pacing and foot tapping I take that as part of his ADHD. He wouldn't be considered NT then since he has it.

My little brother who has four apsie traits, I would probably rate him a moderate NT since he has troubles fitting in off and on. But he has friends and is outgoing and socializes. My other brother, maybe a severe NT.

I think the more aspie traits people have, the less NT they are. Maybe a borderline NT would be they have half of the aspie symptoms and it impairs them but they don't have enough to be on the spectrum. So they are screwed unless they have another condition that causes their traits.

I'm being silly here. Doctors like to rate conditions, why not rate NTs? We had a thread about that here once on NT severeness and NT mildness and I said a low functioning NT would be someone like Bush.

Most Aspie are mild for the same reason for wich most autistic are mild etc.. Is a matter of gaussian. Autism (at least in his original form, not considering autism caused by injuries or other morbidities) is polygenetics with a probable gene pool of 50-100 genes, add personalities, educations, environment, intelligence and all the other factors you want and you have something like 200 factors determining the functioning of a guy. Now that number of factor is enough to use a gaussian approximation so if you consider an overall "functioning" without going into the single facets you will have a sort of gaussian.
The reason is the same why you find far more tall people than VERY tall people.

I have another view on this. My wife is "severely NT", i often joke that she is the oposite to aspie. When we go out, while i don't notice a lot of the social rules and anxieties going on, she is completely tuned in to it all, over tuned in. She feels it's her responsibility to ensure everyone is getting on and everyone is having a good time and of anyone is rude she feels she has to fix it and make excuses for that person. For her, having a good time is making sure everyone else has a good time and is nice to each other, if someone is rude to someone else it ruins the evening for her, if someone causes a scene, even just something like complaining to a waiter about the food, she would be mortified.
Everyone has to just smile and be nice to everyone else and hide any problems and be seen to have a good time.

This is why while she can be extremely helpful at times covering for me or doing the social stuff for us as a couple so i don't have to, i often feel she is exagerating and making excuses for me when there's no need to.

I used to know a woman who at least by stereotypes was... like the opposite of an autistic person (I won't say NT because NT means not having any neurological oddities, not just autism, so extreme NT doesn't mean the opposite of autism).

She could not see a situation without reading more into it than was there. She wasn't just nonliteral, she was incapable of seeing any part of the world even close to directly without overlaying all her thoughts and expectations and feelings on it. She was more literally in a world of her own than any autistic person I have ever met.

Similarly in social situations she was incapable of taking her literally. For instance she was writing a book including information about an autistic friend. But the information was flagrantly wrong in her usual style. So for instance if my friend had an experience for a year the woman would say it was her whole life and got other things just as wrong. Not understandable memory errors but like you could tell her one thing and she would write down something else that better fit a story in her head.

So I with my friends permission contacted her and corrected her. Politely, I checked with nonautistic people before sending it. And instead of responding to the factual content of what I said, she told me I was jealous of my friend and refused to talk to me without that friend present even though each of the three of us would never meet all at once due to each being thousands of miles apart. Then she took my correction and distorted it so that my friend had had a totally different experience that she never had. I knew several people who were in the book and all their lives were distorted.

This wasn't just a single misunderstanding. She did this to everyone in her entire life. It was as if she had made up stories about us and we as the real people did not exist to her. She once overloaded someone I knew, who never has meltdowns, to the point that person had a meltdown. And then she got all excited about making a "intense emotional connection" to that person. She did this to lots of people and fancied herself an expert on autistic communication.

One time she called the cell phone of my roommate. We were living without a land line and without any Internet or other connection to the outside world. The cell phone had a limited number of minutes that we were saving to order pizza and for emergencies. My roommate spent half an hour trying to get this lady to stop randomly gushing about the weird emotional meaning of everything she said and get off the phone. The roommate kept saying things like "We have limited number of minutes. We need this for emergencies. You have got to say goodbye now and get off the phone." And the woman would find an emotional meaning in that and go on about that. Finally my roommate said "I am terribly sorry I don't want to have to do this but I have to hang up on you." The woman still didn't stop finding meanings in this and my roommate hung up. We then had to endure another half hour of the phone ringing.

And situations like this just cropped up everywhere this person went. It wasn't unique to any one person. And she was so much the opposite of the autistic people she met that she was unable to realize she was wrong even if we told her directly. She had no malice and no awareness how wrong she was. She also could sometimes manipulate us into doing things we would otherwise never do. And to this day I think she believes she has special insight into autism. But when I think an opposite to autism I think of her. Always. I am saying all this with no ill will just very much amazement.

Would that not result in some kind of Schrödinger's cat paradox?
If you go in, he shows symptoms, but if you do not go in, he can be showing symptoms or not showing symptons.

I have never understood that comment about no longer being autistic if you're by yourself. When I am by myself I have just as many repetitive movements if not more, certainly more echolalic vocalizations as I try to suppress those in public, I still have all my perceptual acuity, I still have trouble understanding language, I can still be overloaded or shut down, still have meltdowns, still have trouble connecting to my body and interpreting things through my senses, etc.

The fact that social problems temporarily disappear when alone is noticeable but to claim that's all or even a majority or even the most important of autistic traits is both baffling and wrong.

I think the point of that saying is, that when the expectations of social life are taken away, the child [or adult] is far more comfortable when they're left to their own devices, rather than suddenly losing themselves.

Probably because those who aren't mild are diagnosed with Autism rather than AS.

I have no idea but I've seemed to have noticed that from when I first joined this site back in September.
Yet I also like most people here have mine mild to moderate.

I'm pretty sure I'm in that mild to moderate category.