I have Asperger's but my family had no cases of autism

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Just consider ASD as shotgun diagnosis. Some hit target and some offshoot pieces bring down false positives because they need it, hopefully. ASD as I view it is a social construct and it must be if we view it most objectively. It has good deal of drapetomania/sluggish schizophrenia alike components that are not so pretty to look at.

But hey you probably needed it and that is the point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia

This cuts both ways. For those who have no autistics in their family it often makes it very difficult if not impossible for the autistic family member and the rest of the family to understand each other. If their are other autisic family members it makes it easy for autism to not be recognized and suspicions dismissed because autistic behaviors seem perfectly normal.

Your guess is as good as mine, a well known neuroscientist who has actually studied actual autistic brains proposed a triple hit hypothesis, genes, environmental factors and timing during brain development.

https://corticalchauvinism.com/

My NT daughter is the only NT in 3 generations of our family. She married an AS man, perhaps because that was so familiar to her, and she understood AS life from the start by being a participant observer. Relating to AS people is her normal. Her twin sons are on the spectrum though they have very different personalities. She has been a superb mother to them given her understanding and they are doing exceptionally well at their educational activities. As they have always had each other to socialise with they have been protected from isolation and lack of close bonds within their own age group. Their father is a great mentor to them as he has a broader parental understanding of the challenges they will face in later life.

Its not like having blue eyes.

Saying that "I have aspergers but no one else in my family had autism" is like saying "Abraham Lincoln didn't use Twitter as often as Trump does".

You have to take anachronism into account.

It makes sense to compare Trump to Obama about Twitter use (and maybe to W. as well although I believe W's administration may have predated Twitter) because Twitter was a thing that existed in Obama's time as president. But Twitter (and the Net itself) didn't exist in Lincoln's time.

Similarly autism awareness didn't exist even among mental health professionals even in advanced countries until around 1960 when Leo Kanner discovered autism as a disorder. And even then his "autism" label only applied to the narrow category of what we now call "Level Three low functioning autistics".

It wasn't until 1994 that the mental health community expanded autism into a whole "spectrum" that included aspergers and high funcitioning autism.

So autism didn't exist as an official diagnosis until two generations ago, and the recent expansion of the autism label to include folks like you and I (aspies) didn't happen until one generation ago. And about the later: the lady shrink I went to had "never even heard of aspgergers" until our family brought up the possibility that I might have it- that was ten years after 1994.

So you may well have relatives, living or dead, who may well fit somewhere on the autism spectrum, but who never got the official medical diagnosis because they grew up, three, two, or even a single, generation ago. Or they may even be your contempories who go to shrinks who "never heard of aspergers" even today.

Any "overly" feeling or "overly" reserved or intellectual women in your family? My grandmother was (mis?)diagnosed schizo (she talked of electronics and physics a lot), my mom was (mis?)diagnosed major depression (she was one of the first computer scientists) and I was misdiagnosed bipolar (I'm a bubbly handful). I really get a kick out of studies that claim reserved ASD boys are created by all these outgoing, over-feeling mothers. Um, [name calling] scientists: you are dismissing the genetic legacy!! !! !! ! (my daughter is a reserved ASD girl, while I am her over-the-top ASD mother) Look further than stereotypes in your family tree.

naturalplastic yes you're right, is true that Autism was unknown these years ago, but gosh, at least if some of my ancestors had Autism and if someone noticed something wrong, they could be informed in the next generations until it reached me, even though Autism was not known at the time.

For those that are the only autistic in their family: How old was your mother when she had you?

I've read that the probability of having an autistic child increases if a mother is in her thirties or forties.

Magna, my mother got pregnant at 24, I probably think that was not the problem.

As I mentioned earlier, my Mum was 41, and Dad was 51. I'm sure my autism came from my Dad's side of the family.

I have significant autism but no one on either side of my family is on the spectrum. I only have one non-biological relitive who is an aspie.

My mom was 27 and my dad was 28 when I was born.

But my case is probably an exception to the rule.

My mom was 36 when she had me and my dad turned 40 shortly after I was born. We have had people say that my mother's age could have been a factor before to us.

Could it be correlation? For example, ASD (or similar) folks tend to be late bloomers, so some may be more likely to have children later. I wonder that infertility and pregnancy is the same percentage in this group or higher than the general population. I started trying to conceive at early 30s and bore a children late 30s --- so my ASD-daughter fits the profile (but not my NT son born in my early 40s). My BAP or ASD-like sister conceived readily (at 30-some) but bore a premature baby who has ASD, so fits that profile also. My ASD-like mother and my ASD-like grandmother both had fertility issues, and PCOS ---- I hear that's associated with testosterone which is associated with ASD. Correlation is my instinct, but others would say causation.

Last edited by SharonB on 22 Jan 2020, 2:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

My parents were both in their 20s when I was born.

I think with me it's just caused by genes. It's a shame I had to be drawn the short straw out of all of my cousins.

It always will make me feel resentful.

A good reason that it might not show up in families is that Autism has only been recently been diagnosed at the scale it is today. Some people from older generations who have learned to live as they are may have no interest in getting their 'eccentricities' diagnosed, either. So it's not completely unlikely that even if it is in the family tree, it might not be documented as such. I have Asperger's Syndrome and although I am the only diagnosed family member, I have an uncle who I am pretty sure also has it.

I have two cousins diagnosed with Aspergers, both over ten years younger than me and on different sides of the family: I would have been twelve when recognition of higher functioning forms of ASD started to come onto UK medical professions radar which is probably why no-one put two and two together until I was thirty.

I do think that the generations born before widespread professional, let alone public, awareness issue could be a major factor in ‘spontaneous autism’.

There were no diagnoses for generations before mine, but when I look at them there was/is a clustering of autistic traits/tendencies, but not of the severity one would expect for a diagnosis.

Danish psychologist (who has Aspergers himself) Christian Stewart-Ferrer asserts that his anecdotal experience from practice is that autistic children are far more likely to have parents who either work in hard sciences or engineering, or tend to think things through in the way those professions favour if not.
This is definitely true of my family, although I don’t know of any formally conducted study.

Food for thought anyway