Why are so many aspies mild?

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As time goes on I've adapted and made progress. I still got plenty of issues but I'm no where near as bad as I was a few years ago. I'm sure some people have a harder time and some easier.

I have a diagnosis of Asperger's (severe) at the psychiatrist's and autism (mild) at the psychologist's. I don't feel like I fit in at WP for the most part. Maybe that's why so many people here seem "mild"... because the rest of us have trouble fitting in here and don't post much. But I'm here, and I'm not mild.

I was diagnosed with mild AS, originally by a counsellor I was seeing....the thing I will never understand/know is she said she felt I had Aspergers, but she also said that to talk to me I was 'normal', so I've always wondered what exactly I either did or she saw that made her say that to me in the first place......

Also, what I would like to know is of those WP members who are classed as 'mild AS', how many of you are female? There's the whole thing with females being much better able to mask ourselves and our AS than males, I'm female and I hide it pretty-well...the biggest impairments my AS gives me are sensory and social, but I am damned-good at pretending to be 'normal' for a while (the more you get to know me, the more I let my guard down and become me, warts and all!)

So, in females at least, is it that we're mild AS, or that our presentation is simply different a lot of the time?

I still wonder what makes a person mild or severe... I can look at myself and see things that might be considered severe and other things about myself that might be considered mild. Most days I feel less like a spot on a spectrum and more like several spots on the same spectrum. Is it like math... you just claim the dot that best represents the majority of your symptoms? Mine change from day to day depending on how things are going in my life. It is subjective and confusing to me.

I think that the reason that many Aspies are mild, is because AS is a very mild form of autism.

I dislike the fact people think of AS as a mild form of autism and i dislike the fact people think the "spectrum" goes from mild to severe.

A rainbow is a spectrum of colours, but each colour is 100% completely a colour. One colour is not more mild or severe than another. Sure a pastal colour is not as bright as neon, but they are still 100% colours.

Autism traits are not inherently mild or severe they just are. You can not be at the mild end of the spectrum. Sure you can be mild, but it's nothing to do with where you are on the spectrum. The spectrum is about traits. If i share the same traits as you, we are on the same place on the spectrum. How "mild" or "severe" we are depends on how badly/strongly those traits impact us. Your traits put you on the autistic spectrum and within that you fall roughly in the areas named AS, LFA, HFA etc.

The spectrum is about traits and your place on the spectrum depends on if you have a trait or not.

Your level or severity of autism or AS or whatever is about how severe your traits are. Now sure, AS traits in general are the type that lead to a better quality of life than LFA traits, but that's not to say someone with AS wouldn't be as disfunctional as someone with LFA, it's just that naturally, having an IQ of 100 will lead to a better quality of life than an IQ of 50, plus the mental tools to cope, mask and hide to get on in life. It's also not to say that someone with AS has an easier life, or finds their limitations less severe or less disabling. Naturally banging your head against a wall until it bleeds is going to get lots of visability and shock points and everyone is going to say poor you, but is it really more severe for the actual person than being unable to leave the house due to an impulsive need to check and recheck everything? Is lashing out and screaming more severe for the person doing it than shutting down and rocking in front of your work coleagues or schoolmates?
Again, quality of life there is no comparison, but i'm looking at how this effects all the people on this forum on a daily basis and you all say you have a mild form of a syndrome which is just a mild form of another condition, yet i read every day about how it effects your life as much as a blind person, more than a deaf person, more than someone in a wheel chair. How is that a mild version of "autism-lite"

So i don't consider myself to have mild autism, i consider myself to have full blown AS. If you remove the AS label i consider myself to have medium severity HFA. Nothing about what i struggle with is mild, but i'm aware of people with AS who have more severe symphoms than i do, so i wouldn't call myself severe.
The fact that most LFA's could never lead the life I do does not diminish my challenges within the diagnosis of HFA/AS, they're just a totally different set of challenges.

Who has the most severe mental issue, someone mentally ret*d or a genious with psycosis.
Who has the worst physical disability, a double leg amputee or someone under constant medication due to skeleton pain who can walk with crutches but can't sleep, concentrate or function due to pain?

Sorry long rambling post, i went back and rewrote a ton of it and duplicated stuff and now its way too long to make the point i wanted to, but may be interesting for someone to read. It's actually helped me organise my thoughts somewhat, which is interesting becuase i rarely get anything out of writing things down, it's usually just a poor copy of what i'm actually thinking.

I suspect the real reason is that people are constantly told that AS is by definition mild so no matter what kind or level of traits they have that's how they are going to answer. That and the fact that mild vs severe is usually judged on a small number of superficial traits usually and it can be hard for autistic people to know how we appear to others.

I remember in October as a new member at WP last year having this discussion in a thread.

Willard pointed out that in his opinion 'there is NOTHING mild about AS'.

I assumed he meant everyone EXCEPT me of course; I mean I MUST be mild if I have a science degree, professional qualifications, my own business started from zero and a very good income...........

WRONG.........despite all the intellectual and academic trappings I am socially impaired and it is anything but mild. I dont notice it because I don't mix with people much outside of my business. I DO notice it at home and I AM very impaired.

Willard was spot on, with me anyway.

Thanks Willard.

Danke, Spot

I still say that just because we may be more articulate than our less communicative brethren, the sensory hypersensitivities and social handicaps we manifest are no less debilitating internally, nor a less disabling set of handicaps in terms of practical reality.

Example:

I get some mail from a government agency notifying me than I've been enrolled without my knowledge in a program that takes money out of my household budget that I can't afford to lose. I go immediately into panic mode and toss the paperwork on a counter, where it sits for a month while I worry and hyperventilate and stim endlessly, making myself physically ill, until finally I have a day when I feel calm and competent enough to sit down and actually read the documents over, only to find that while I was incapacitated by anxiety, the deadline for opting out of that unaffordable program has now passed and I'm in for an even more complicated maze of government paperwork to straighten the mess out, if in fact, it can be straightened out at this point.

And while one who doesn't suffer from this level of anxiety and executive dysfunction would see this behavior as simply foolish and cowardly, that doesn't change the fact that the effect on my day-to-day survival is anything but mild.

The frightening part is, while at a certain age you might hope to eventually outgrow that sort of thing, I'm finding that it is actually becoming worse as I get older. My functionality seems to have peaked somewhere between ages 25-40, followed by a rapid decline. So, yes, during a certain portion of my life I appeared to be almost completely normal. But it doesn't last.

AS gets tagged as 'mild' based on external appearances only. I know when I was first diagnosed, I tried to convince myself MY AS was a mild case of mild Autism. I was kidding myself. Once I studied the condition thoroughly, and came to see how deeply it had been coloring every aspect of my life for decades, I had to admit - there's nothing mild about this at all. I had just learned enough coping mechanisms over the years that I'd become very good at hiding it.

Even from myself.

If you look at it as a spectrum, the mean is the neurotypical mean. Aspies and auties are at one tail of the distribution.

Tails on a bell curve are heavier towards the mean, and tail off away from the mean. Thus, there will be more people in the part of the tail tht is closer to the mean - the "mild" end.

I think you (person 2 posts before me) are right.

I am diagnosed autistic and I have a friend who was diagnosed AS. People tend to read me as severe and her as mild based on a few parts of our appearances.

But we both have serious trouble with daily living tasks, in roughly the same amounts and same areas. She gets help from a boyfriend, I get help from the state.

We both had the same kind and level of receptive language delay. She may have just never had the period of lost speech I had in early development. I now have no useful speech and she has some some of the time and none the rest of the time.

We both have pretty extreme trouble recognizing objects and words in our surroundings and have to work hard to perceive more than just lots of colors and sounds. (And both of us have spent enough of our lives like this that we have devised alternate ways to understand and navigate our surroundings)

We both have trouble going out on our own safely. Neither of us have been able to go out much without cops following and stopping us since we were teenagers. We both have trouble understanding when cars come at us in streets and parking lots.

We have the same kind of thinking. Same approach to language.

All that and more the same and we get put on totally opposite ends of the spectrum because of a few superficial differences. It's amazing.