aren't ret*d people the opposite of autistic people?

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It's funny - I've met three people in my life who have Mental Retardation, and I have and know better social skills than all three of them put together.

I even feel like I have a better chance of going to the pub and socialising that what these people have, if you know what I mean. But they were severely Autistic, they just had a severe learning disability that affected their behaviour, learning and social interaction. They had the mind of a 2-year-old. My mind is about 4 when I have outbursts, 14 when I have mood swings, 70 when it comes to social situations, and 21 (my own age) in otherwise.

I apologise on how I directed that statement. On who has the world in their hands, I am more concerned with regard their EQ.

good point.

I sometimes ponder the same thing.
Thanks for bringing this up for discussion to open our minds.

I'm autistic and I find ret*ds to be too social and one of my neighbors are one... I do not get along with ret*ds because they are way more social than me and a little more childish baby like in a way... theres a huge different between ret*d and autism...

The answer to the question is hell no. The Autism spectrum ranges from people who are mentally ret*d to savants. Savants represent 10% of the Autistic people. Arguably 90 percent of us are not the opposite of intellecually disabled. Although functioning labals for autism are going out of style the definition of low functioning autism are those people the OP from long ago thinks she is the opposite of.

While not ret*d at least by IQ testing, I did have very strong abilities & equally strong disabilities in testing & at least a couple of the areas of weakness strongly suggested autism as they were areas an autistic would do poorly at.

Unlike many autistic though I have a very outwardly calm demeanor. This does not mean however that I am calm inside my head, it just doesn't show outwardly. I have much difficulty expressing emotions other than sadness & often I wish that I could hide that one more thoroughly. Certain triggers will very frequently start the tears flowing & sometimes even outright balling but I generally am able to go off by myself when I feel that intensity coming on. Not being able to show enjoyment or happiness for the most part makes friendship difficult at best unless there is a common interest but even then there is still very much a flatness to my emotional demeanor that is difficult for me to get over.

I do get angry but I stuff it out of fear that one I could hurt someone else or more likely get hurt myself because I'm not a good fighter, I never have been unless I'm agree to the point of blowing up which takes a lot to accomplish as I have very thoroughly squashed my anger. It has taken years of emotional abuse before I have snapped as an adult.

That is not to say that I haven't harbored thoughts of even murder but never let it out except once when I was still a teenager I was so angry that I almost stomped on one of my foster brothers head which would have killed him.

While I'm not any karate expert I did a lot of breaking boards up to 2 by 4's & once even broke a 2 by 12 with my feet through stomping. I even broke one board against the grain that one of my military cohorts that had a black belt couldn't break against the grain due to the type of wood. He could break it along the grain with his bare hand but I was the only one to break it against the grain which I did with my extremely powerful stomp. The board literally shattered from my stomp.

Not only due many autistic people have intellectual disabilities, but many autistic people WITHOUT intellectual disabilities fit your stereotype of ret*d people rather than autistic people.

You do realize that most savants are technically mentally ret*d...

IQ is a very poor indicator of actual intelligence. People in third world countries score very low but I doubt racial qualities have anything to do with, on the flipside aspergians score very high in IQ tests yet display remarkable intelligence impairment. Intelligence which is namely the ability to act, think, and evaluate situations with practicality and analysis.
Examples of impaired intelligence is our inability to carry one situation over to the next, our tendency to not be able to carry multiple thoughts at once, our many instances of not seeing the bigger picture, deducing things automatically from context, poor executive function, the ability to automatically do what is planned out, repetitive speech, lack of just "getting stuff" that NT people get (for instance: you ask somebody at work what the daily password is, but you just got there earlier than them by 3 hours, and everybody else realized it too before you, now imagine things like this x1000 everyday.)

And so on and so forth.
People with mental retardation are better described as simply have less software and the concept of intelligence is likely absent from them, but many with iqs around 80-90 do display higher intelligence than people with aspergers and have better prospects of success in life.

Literally all you've done is say autistic people have lower intelligence despite evidence to the contrary. You've got one post to prove you're not a troll before being outed as a troll.

What is wrong with this guy Johnny? Why has he got an axe to grind?

Erroneous generalization after erroneous generalization.

Best ignored, frankly.

Because in my daily life, I've seen NTs who sucked at school and could not read a book to save their life yet have displayed more these intelligence-type qualities that I lack. They do better at work, have better memories, never make silly mistakes, can read and get things without even trying, can plan effortlessly, and find everything easier behind a reception desk (where I used to work).

I see your frustration. But, at this point, you are thinking quite "cut and dry" and "black and white." I am prone to this mode of thinking, too--that's why I know it when I see it.

Everybody lacks something. What you have to do is find a way to compensate for your "lackings" by accentuating your strengths. That's your job as a person.

I might suck at football; but I may be good at table tennis. I may suck at biology, but be great at physics. I might have a great memory, but suck as far as general knowledge is concerned. I might be great at being a receptionist; but when it comes to managing money, I suck.

The best friendships are where one can, say, fix one's computer when it has a glitch; while the other one fixes one's refrigerator.

Making many "silly mistakes" is part and parcel of doing great things. Many famous people have looked like total fools before they were able to "put everything together" at one moment in time. Once they became famous for that "one thing," their little quirks were ignored--because they were able to accentuate their strengths.

Which proves I can fall for stereotypes and collequal language also.

There are a lot of different kinds of intelligence and aptitude. Emotional intelligence, social intelligence, spatial reasoning, abstract reasoning, visual reasoning, working memory, long-term memory, processing speed, and so on. You can't boil intelligence down to a "have it" or "don't have it" binary.

As KraftieKortie said, everyone has different areas that they are strong in, which is why standardized tests (IQ or educational) tend to get a lot of criticism--most older tests only test one kind of reasoning or are culturally, economically, or gender-biased. One IQ test I took had questions about American history--what if I were a recent immigrant, or came from an impoverished school with a poor history program? I've taken three IQ tests and got very different scores: 132 (Stanford-Binet), 108 (Weschler), and 153 (Raven Progressive Matrices). The areas tested are different in each. The Weschler was perhaps the most broad-based, with some areas scoring very low and others very high.

It's possible that that job was just not a good fit for your aptitudes, or that you needed some help with your weaker areas (e.g., software to help with planning, a mentor or job coach). Also, you may be comparing yourself unfairly to others. People may not have it as easy as you think, or may have gotten in trouble for poor performance and you didn't know it. They may have more experience, and have already gotten the silly mistakes out of the way.

Also the person with a learning disability may be used to triangulate Autistic people without learning disabilities but mental acceleration. In lets say a sheltered work place that caters for all disabilities and run by allistic people the autistic person is likely to get bullied by the staff or other people. If a person with a learning disability does work well then he or she will be rewarded with praise or something else. An autistic person with allistic levels of intelligence or mentally accelerated will get taken for granted. If a person with a learning disability lies about an aspie/autistic their care worker would yell at the autistic like the allistic has some kind of hypo sensitivity. It would never be an aspies word taken in that circumstance. Why because the other person is on the neurotypical spectrum so an allistic is likely to believe someone else on the neurotypical spectrum rather than on the autistic spectrum. My experience that for some autistic people they are treated the opposite of people with learning disabilities to the point of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and get victimised or goaded by people on the neurotypical spectrum allistic or some with learning disabilities. All would enable an aspie to be taken advantage but not a person with a learning disability. That is from my won experience.