"No Autistic People Fifty Years Ago" What?

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"Hyperactivity" was used during that time. Here's a study that talks about the terminology that was written in 1975:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1956602/

The author appears to be arguing that hyperkinesis should be the disorder and hyperactivity a symptom.

Scott's behavior as you described it is consistent with ADHD-C type symptoms. Especially the risk-taking impulsiveness, which is a hallmark of the disorder. His mother likely had little or nothing to do with it, beyond not medicating him.

When looking at the past I think it's easy to confuse lack of public awareness with non existence. Take Down's Syndrome for example. Granting that I was a child in the 70's my memory is that even adults referred to such people as "ret*d". (Please forgive the usage. I don't approve of the term. I just need it to make a point.) This was in spite of the fact that the term "Down's Syndrome" is named for a 19th century physician. I suspect that you would have trouble finding the term outside of medical literature before the 1980's. This could easily lead someone younger than myself to the erroneous conclusion that "Down's didn't exist."

In general whenever someone says something didn't happen in the past I take it with a grain of salt.

Awhile ago, exact time I 'm not sure, the diagnosis of autism was only givien to children who fit he full spectrum. Now a child has to only fit a few fo the characterisitcs. It has changed the diagnosis dramatically. Many individuals who were considered mentally ret*d/develomentally disabled are now considered autistic.

Oh, the mythical good old days. They never existed. Sure, things have changed, some for the better some not.

My daughter can't cope in mainstream classrooms. This is definitely not due to lack of discipline. Discipline is not beating or berating. It's not so long ago that she would have been punished on a daily basis for being too lazy to read, too disobedient to sit still, too disrespectful for not looking at the teacher. I dealt with much of the same. Oh yes, there was AS. I know where they are. Some are friends of mine. I've married 3 of them. The lucky ones are scientists and inventors. The others are too psychologically damaged--if they even survived--to get anywhere close to fulfilling their potential.

Originally, autism was about people some would describe as mid- to high-functioning (including many who would be diagnosed with AS or PDD-NOS today). Those who would be described as low functioning were instead diagnosed with childhood schizophrenia. At some point (the 50s I think, maybe later) "low functioning" autistic children were included in the spectrum, which I have been told caused a stir because they had not been considered autistic before then. Somehow, over time, things swung around and now people think that autism was originally defined around severely autistic children and speech delays, and neither was actually the case.

^^THIS^^

Back in the 60s we were beat all the time. At school and at home. We did not act out as a result. It was very black/white. Today, the parenting and discipline style is very ambiguous. Very bad for many special needs kids. Now we have ODD as a label. I do not suggest we go back to the barrage of beatings but there has to be more black/white parenting. But that is a topic for another post. Just saying that we were hidden by terror of adults and labeled as "bad" kids back then. My brother has ADHD and I have ASD. My Mother never knew.... She thought she was just a bad parent. Different times...

^^^^^
Word.

There has always been "crazy" Aunts and Uncles. Depending on how your extended family dealt with you and how able you could cope in society, pretty much determined where you wound up.

Also, 50 years ago, you could get a job in a plant running a drill press or some other job where human interaction was minimal. You did your work and got the hell out. Women did things like just filing or just typing letters and forms in an office setting. There was none of this team player BS.

So...if you were high enough functioning to not ping the weirdness radar, you could get a job that made enough money to live. If you didn't have any overt behavioral issues, I'm guessing life was a bit easier for Aspies.

Most people didn't go to college 50 years ago. You were actually treated like an adult at 18, and some people who dropped out of school could still find a decent paying blue collar job.

But if you had serious behavioral problems, and "looked and acted ret*d", you were shipped off to a state asylum. My father (who is 75) told me kids who were "handfuls" (ADHD/ODD), got booted to reform schools. Or the military "to straighten your ass out." (I'm guessing boys went into the military)

If your family had money and a name, enough money was tossed at any problem to keep you out of troubled.

There has always been people with ASD or ADHD. 50 years ago things were handles differently.

A lot of diagnoses did not exist 50 years ago, but that does not mean there where not people who fit the criteria for various mental disorders.

As I said earlier, most of them would have been invisible because they would have been in mental asylums where many of them would have had a horrid existence.

Or, like my father, they could come from a good family but be weird enough in one way or another to be the black sheep. They then scrape by on the margins of society doing whatever they can to get by. Eventually even that gets to be too much and they do odd things like try to take apart their trailer with their heads and land in the hospital where they are fed massive doses of thorazine. They forget to contact their children so end up dying alone somewhere.

Don't you hate it when people use the word "discipline" when they mean "punishment"? I think kids need to learn discipline, to the extent that each is able to do for themselves, and that there are certain things that kids should be punished for if they truly understand that it was wrong/dangerous, and they could have stopped themself from doing so. Of course back then, they didn't see that kids had any different levels of ability regarding those things. Kids were seen as either able to do exactly as told to do and either defiant or uncaring, or not able to do or understand anything at all. There wasn't much of a grey area in the minds of a lot of people.

The high school that my kids go to now has special ed, but it's one class per grade. Almost all kids are put in the regular classes. I know one of the teachers of the special ed classes. She teaches the tenth grade special ed. She doesn't actually teach anything she says. She says she's more of an occupational therapist because she doesn't believe they can learn anything at all. She's only ten years older than me, so I'm very surprised at her outlook! However, I also don't know anything about the kids in her classes. I do know another girl who teaches special ed at the grammar school, and she doesn't feel like my other friend at all. Again, it may be the difference in the children, or their ages and abilities, or the way the school puts most kids in mainstream, etc. Remember, these are pretty small, country schools too. The only other girl I know who works in any kind of special ed, works in a residential facility in the city. She had to take a vacation two weeks before her wedding because the kids in her class are very violent and bite and hit. Young children, but when they get out of control they can leave bruises or marks. She wants to get away from that place before she gets burnout. She wants to work in special ed, but in regular schools.

As to my first paragraph, I was punished a lot for standing at my desk or fidgiting. I didn't notice I was doing it. They didn't believe me. I also couldn't force myself to say "maam" or "sir" to teachers whom I did not respect. I got punished for that too. It didn't damage my psychologically though, and as for my potential, I'm sure I never reached it, but I just never felt that I needed to prove to anyone that I could do something.

Down here, there are a lot of crazy people just accepted as normal. By crazy, I do not mean disordered, etc, I mean insane. There are people who will shoot at you for stepping on their property. There are people who have 40 or 50 cats and treat them like little children, literally, not like beloved pets but like children. There are people who bring large food animals such as deer into their houses. People who think that segregation should still be practiced. People who stay and drive drunk and tell you stories about weekends that they and their dog went to jail because of it. People who shoot other people over football. People who ride their motorcycles indoors. People who have ridden a horse into the house. All kinds of stuff. It's just considered a pequilarity and we try to be polite about it.

As you said in your post, as long as you could act normal towards others, and even though everybody knew you were not exactly sane, you were considered nice, you did fine.

You had said something about families with money which I didn't quote and that reminded me of the one Kennedy girl that they put in the institution and did a lobotomy on. I cannot remember what was wrong with her, but that seems to be an example right there. With all the money and connections they had, they could surely have kept her at home and gave her a happy life, but she wasn't "perfect" so they didn't.

Dr. Manette had PTSD.

Mr. Jaggers was OCD.

Dickens wrote those books around 1860 and was very obviously familiar with both types of disorders.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWnReAsg ... lf=mh_lolz

Yes. My father was a long haul trucker, or a diesel mechanic, or a truck flat fixer. Any job away from people. The werewolf is so right. I've known a night janitor who could have easily done the work in the high energy physics lab where he worked. Not to mention the physicists who come in at odd hours of the night. Aspie geniuses are everywhere and in every class. Many are in the underground alternate cultures that fly under the radar of mainstream culture.

I guess they think that because they never heard those words "back in the day" that the conditions didn't exist. No, the WORDS didn't exist. Not to compare autism to alcoholism, but the word alcoholism wasn't first used until the 1800s but that doesn't mean there haven't been alcoholics as long as there's been alcohol. Likely there's been autism as long as there's been humans. Unless they find out that TV or Coca Cola is the sole cause of it or something (which it's not).