girls with Aspergers, more mild symptoms? better over time?

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Wonderfully stated! I thought I was fine until I started trying to make the post-school transition to adult life. I have a VERY significant problem with executive functioning - terrible receptionist, terrible paralegal, and now struggling to student-teach. No one seems to understand it because I was such a high achiever and good student, and everyone assumes that if you did well in school, you will do well at jobs. Asperger seems to be the only thing that makes sense to me, but I am not clinically diagnosed. I keep hoping I'll get competent enough at executive functioning someday to finally handle a job and be independent.

um not mild by a long shot as you become older people want you to touch or hold their screaming children talk about celebrity, or care about the hottest resteraunt. Aiieee... I just wish someone would like to talk about anatomy all this war or uprisings happening or I don't know do you actually read books. Sorry my old lady grump is showing.

My symptoms may be less disruptive to other people, but that doesn't make them milder.

I read on wikipedia that only 20% of adults with AS no longer meet the AS criteria.

I know I have gotten milder as I got older and sometimes I get worse and then I go back to normal again.

^This.

As others have said, girls tend to internalise, boys tend to externalise. The squeaky wheel...and all that.

I don't know, my cousin is a boy and was very Aspie-like when he was a child, but now he's a young adult he goes out clubbing an awful lot with a group of mates and seems very popular now, and he has just celebrated his 21st birthday and had posted pictures on Facebook of himself with a pile of mates in a bar and named the album ''this is my best night I have ever had''. Sometimes he spends days out up London with a group of mates. This doesn't sound very Aspie to me, since there's fat chance I'd ever get to do that with a group of mates.

Unless he actually was diagnosed with Asperger's, I find it very understandable for NTs to develop in this way. Remember, we have a developmental disability. Because we tend to be behind in social development doesn't mean that NTs are fully developed social beings since they came out of the womb.

But I understand, I would have trouble with that kind of lifestyle as well. And a lot of my childhood friends had grown out of me so-to-speak, and moved on to more social opportunities.

Just because you can't do that, doesn't mean he's not an Aspie. Not everyone on the spectrum is the same.

I think we have to be careful not to make the mistake of seeing AS as just a problem with socialising. That would just be shyness. The "symptom" of difficulty with social communication means as opposed to pragmatic communication. That includes any kind of interaction that doesn't use factual language. This is why Aspies are often most at home in subjects like maths, science, music, certain areas of law etc. The "people manipulating" jobs are the ones we can't do.
When clinicians look for symptoms in order to make a diagnosis, they are only looking at the outside, and the problems we face are in our brains! I think women who are not so good at dealing with people don't find family life very easy.
For my part, I'm either getting worse, or I've become more aware of it since discovering the syndrome.

I wouldn't use the term 'milder', but rather other words like 'dormant', 'hidden' and 'overlooked'. Symptoms aren't milder, but are just appear more subtle than it does in boys. There also is a lack of research/studies done on girls with the disorder.

Last edited by KnarlyDUDE09 on 18 Jul 2012, 6:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.

While the Extreme Male Brain theory would support, actual statistics show the opposite: Girls with autism are more severely effected. My explanation is this: For whatever reasons, the social differences between boys and girls make it harder to pick up in girls, so only the more severe cases get detected most of the time. When a deeper analysis is done it's shown that many girls that aren't diagnosed with autism are just as severe as autistic males, but it doesn't show up as well.

Those definitely aren't my social issues.....



Nope.

You claim to be a military aircraft mechanic. That's quite a male occupation for a woman.

Even though this statement is clearly not directed at me, I'm still going to reply to it (as I am doing, right now). That is not a male occupation; just as the color pink is not a female one. Things are only said to be how society defines them; just as Aspergians are classed as "atypical" because they deviate away from a societal construct ("neurotypicalism" yes I did make up that word, or 'normality').

I have seen statistics showing that there is a bigger gender discrepancy between girls and boys who have ASD and no intellectual disability , than there is between boys and girls that have ASD with intellectual disability (so when you look at kids with intellectual disabilities more girls have it than when you look at kids that have average or higher IQ's) this is the only thing that suggests girls are more severely affected. If you read Tony Atwood's books he looks just at people with AS (so ASD with normal or above average IQ and normal language dev.) he says that he thinks there are many girls who adapt really well socially, learn to imitate other people and so fly under the radar of the diagnosticians. He says he thinks AS is under-diagnosed in girls both because they adapt better socially (since socializing/cooperation is emphasized more for girls in our society than it is for boys) but also the symptoms appear differently in girls than in boys. He talks about how many girls (in his experience/ many years of clinical practice) seem to have less esoteric interests, girls might have a fantasy world that is very intense and they spend all their time in or be obsessed with reading fiction for example. These girls may be as impaired y their special interest (it might prevent them from engaging in the world" socializing, doing homework, becoming interested in other things but it is not the typical kind of restricted interest psych's look for when they are looking for ASD. Having said all this I know a lot of girls on here and in general with ASD do have esoteric interests and just as severe difficulty socializing, I'm just saying overall, in general in Atwood's clinical observations girls tend to (what was said above).

Thank you for those comments. What a lot of sense. I must get hold of Attwood's book. I'm one of those refused diagnosis, I'm sure for these reasons.