Are most Aspies unable to work or live independently?

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I don't think many are institutionalized. I think that is a falacy.

But alot of us struggle with employment. I often forget transitioning from university to full time employment was difficult for me. Never mind the fact I have a professional doctorate, it was very difficult to transition. I was lucky that I worked at a non-profit that I had an internship. Employment stability is the major issue.

Congratulations. Hope it works out for you.

Although I do work, it is in my own company.

I stumbled from job to job in the early part of my working life and I would probably struggle somewhat today to maintain 'employment', or at least a modicum of enjoyment IN employment.

I think one of my biggest problems was not being a 'team player' and not ever really succeeding at 'fitting in at work' other than at the crudest superficial level.

My solution was to specialize and set up my own business.

I know there are other WP members who have also followed this strategy with some success.

Last edited by Blindspot149 on 11 Mar 2010, 11:49 am, edited 1 time in total.

I agree with callista, there are no real studies that show the true outcomes of all adults who would qualify for a diagnosis of asperger's syndrome.

Most adults with asperger's syndrome aren't officially diagnosed. Many aren't officially diagnosed because they dont know about asperger's syndrome. Others like myself know about the condition, but dont see the need to spend hundreds of dollars and waste time to get the psychiatrist to tell them what they already know when it serves no benefit. Usually the only people who get a diagnosis as an adult are those who need it because or legal concerns, i.e. they want to apply for disability funding.

What this means is that if 10% of the aspie population struggles with jobs, but only 11% of them actually bother to get a diagnosis (mostly because they are having trouble with employment) then you will get figures like 91% unemployment among the diagnosed adults. But this is indicative of flawed data gathering methods which skew the sample population towards those with the most problems.

Likewise, those who were diagnosed with autism 20 years ago were usually far more severely affected then the people who get diagnosed today. The studies done about people diagnosed 20 years ago may be helpful in determining a possible outcome for those with severe problems, but it doesn't do well to predict the outcomes of people diagnosed today with asperger's syndrome. The functioning level is probably very different.

And then of course there is also the societal affect to consider. People who have had a hard time with jobs due to their difficulties are the people who grew up decades ago before there was any assistance, understanding, or help. People diagnosed today are in a far different situation when it comes to the help they receive towards becoming independent.

Uh, and that comes from?

I know for a fact that most adults with AS were actually diagnosed with Chronic Schizophrenia in the past, and they most likely have the same label now if they never bothered to be reassessed (study done in a state in the US of all mental health patients with something resembling AS in the past, who were then tracked down and reassessed and found to actually have AS). So, these people would come under the outcome of Chronic Schizophrenia or Simple Schizophrenia in the past, and the outcome between those and AS isn't much different now.

I found one more publication at http://www.ic.nhs.uk/statistics-and-dat ... urvey-2007

Autism Spectrum Disorders in adults living in households throughout England - report from the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey 2007, Publication date September 22, 2009 - "Using the recommended threshold of a score of 10 or more on the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, 1.0 per cent of the adult population had ASD. Published childhood population studies show the prevalence rate among children is also approximately 1.0 per cent."

I could not interpret the tables the other way round, because the numbers are missing. They give the prevalence of ASD by social status and economic activity etc, but not the proportion of ASD people in each category.

As an interesting aside, this is an automatically generated hospital activity report for people with ASD who had the misfortune to require a meeting with a hospital consultant: 97% of ASD consultations required hospital treatment, 32% as an emergency, and spent 75 days in hospital. http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/a/asperge ... /stats.htm

I never thought I could get a job.

I didn't know that it was expected that I would develop connections with people, so I never did. The idea that people form or maintain relationships with other people for purposes of social and financial benefit is something that had never occurred to me, and even though I know it now, it seems like something a sociopath would do.

When I was young, I had been given a way to get a small amount of money on a semi-regular basis. It wasn't much, but it was more than I needed because I didn't care about doing things like going places with people, and I was terrified to drive or get a car. I didn't realize that people would refer to high school jobs to gain later employment, so I hadn't attempted to have a job when I was in high school, and because I had been told by an academic advisor during college orientation that it was bad to get a job during college I didn't attempt to get a job during college. I think that if I had a job during school it would have been extremely difficult, because being around people made me very anxious, and from elementary through high school, many people had treated me horribly and called me things like "crazy" and said that a lot of the things that I would do were weird. When I would get home from school, I didn't want to do anything around other people. I just wanted to focus on my interest.

My interest is related to a subject I could use to make money, but I didn't have any experience working. I also didn't know how to write a good résumé, because I didn't have any previous jobs. I was and still am very very knowledgeable about my interest, and have even been asked if I had a Ph.D. in it, but the vast majority of my knowledge about the subject was self-taught and known before I got to college. I thought it was ridiculous that I knew so much about the subject and couldn't even think of a way to get a job.

During college I decided that if no one would hire me I would start a business. I looked up a lot of information about how to register, and taught myself about taxes and other aspects. I was good at doing the work, and I was good handling the financial aspects. I really wasn't very good at running a business, because I had very little understanding about how to get new clients(although the ones I did have almost always expressed satisfaction with my work) and still had no concept of maintaining a relationship with others. One time a client said several personal insults about me, and I broke down and decided to stop running the business. I didn't want to frequently have to deal with new people, because I take criticism extremely personally and wasn't good at dealing with people even before being criticized.

After deciding that I didn't want to handle running a business like that, I decided to see if I could get another job. I wanted to only have to interact with the same people if possible. But I didn't know how to get a job.

I reasoned that if I couldn't get people to want to interview me that I would need to make the best possible résumé, and while running a business I did a lot of things which showed that I was knowledgeable about my work. I looked at Google for tips about how to write a résumé, and I made sure my résumé looked good and made me sound capable. I also looked on Google about where to send résumés to get interviews, and read advice.

One major thing I remember was that a lot of the pages I read said that I would need references. I hadn't had any references before, but I asked people who I had done work for. I had worked for several of businesses. And their owners agreed to be my references. So I listed the business owners. And it worked. I started to get interviews! I got a lot of interviews. I was amazed.

I thought that I did well in the interviews, but I found out that I really did. I made several of the mistakes that I have read about. I didn't understand the way that interviewers might want their questions answered, and had very little understanding of body language(and even less of how to express body language during an interview). I watched many hours of videos on Google about how to handle interviewers, major mistakes people make during interviews. I made a lot of mistakes, and I tend to ramble a lot.

After that, I had only two interviews. Because I was able to script a lot of my responses, and because I consciously used certain body language, I got a job. Not only that, but my job is a job about my interest! It's the job I wanted to do even when I was 12.

It took me almost eight years from when I finished high school to get a normal job, but I got a job and am very good at. There are many different aspects about having a job which are difficult, both regarding social interactions and understandings and regarding the sensory issues at my workplace. Remembering to quickly do certain things when interacting with people is difficult, but when discussing the work explicitly and no other aspects, I have been told that I do a significantly better job than anyone who has held my position before.

I have been able to pay for food, but until recently have never made enough money to pay for rent. Now I do, but after many years I have a lot of bills that need to be paid off before I can move.

Next year I think I will be about to move to my own apartment, or maybe even to a house.

I am making that assumption based on the history of diagnosis rates and the assumption that the prevalence of autism is a fixed percentage of the population.

Take a look at this graph:
http://www.fightingautism.org/idea/line ... 8&v0=y&c=b

If we look at this we can see that people my age (born in 1986) only have a diagnosis rate of .1 in 10,000. In other words only .001% people my age are diagnosed with autism. But if we look at people who are age 10 (born in 2000), then the diagnosis rate is 70.1 in 10,000 or about .701% (roughly 1 in 150).

So, the question becomes why are only .001% of people my age diagnosed with autism, but .701% of 10 year olds diagnosed? I doubt that the prevalence of autism in society has increased 700 fold in 13 years. More likely, .7% of people my age are indeed autistic, just not diagnosed as such.

Certainly some of them may be diagnosed with something such as Chronic Schizophrenia, but I as one with personal experience, I can tell you that it is very possible to grow up different without receiving any diagnosis. Based on the adults on this board, it seems that the likelihood of never getting a diagnosis is higher then being labeled with Chronic Schizophrenia.

I've worked part-time at wal-mart for about two years now. I'm definitely a lot slower to pick up on a lot of things that the rest of my coworkers, but i'm able to work. My biggest issues have been from coworkers being too harsh or just confusing.. Most people say that they can tell i'm smart, so that probably leads them to expecting more from me than i'm capable of. There are some situations i can figure out pretty well, so then when there are things that come up that confuse me or i can't deal with, people aren't very understanding and seem to think i'm just being difficult or something. Customers actually aren't that bad usually. I still live with my parents, and i don't see myself being able to move out and live on my own anytime soon. Basic everyday things slip my mind, even with my parents here to remind me, so i don't think i could function on my own well at all.

If this were severe autism, you would be right. But AS is a very different beast in this respect. Most people with AS would not be institutionalized.

BTW Tracker is dead on with this issue. It was really only the most severe types of autism that were diagnosed as schizophrenia, NOT AS (unless it was an extreme form). What happened was there was an increase in Diagnosis as a result of the inclusion of PDD-NOS and AS in the DSM-IV. In addition, mostly previously undiagnosed adults began to seek diagnosis in order to get Social Security benefits, but in some cases, counseling.

The truth of the matter is alot of people who are in the mild part of the spectrum (which makes up a majority of the spectrum) often have to educate thier providers on how this works. People wonder why functioning and severity is important, it is VERY important in making distinguishments from studies. If a person is on the higher functioning part of the spectrum, they were probably never diagnosed, and if they were diagnosed it was because of co-moribund learning disorders. (In some cases those learning disorders were discovered to be a form of autism.)

It is all pretty complicated, but I would throw out the schizophrenia theory, because I do know one of the few psychologists who has been studying AS pre-dsm-IV, he said very few were ever institutionalized. They may have lived with relatives, they may have lived independantly, but almost never institutionalized. (He has been working on ASD for over 50 years). While he said many people with severe autism may have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, that would not be the case with somebody with AS, unless they had a co-moribund Behavioral disorder.

Last edited by starygrrl on 11 Mar 2010, 4:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Pleas eunderstand that there are degrees of supported living/group home/institutionalization. I am institutionalized for example, but there are far more Aspies who ar enot but still don't live independently. I do not know the figures re institutionalization, and also some may be in a developmental center or mental health institution for like six months or a year or so but not permanently because they are there for treatment.

There was this study a few months ago that found outcomes vary considerably for "high-functioning" autistic adults. The reference is Marriage S, Wolverton A, and Marriage K (2009), Autism Spectrum Disorder Grown Up: A Chart Review of Adult Functioning. J Can Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry,
18(4):322-328, and it is available free through PubMedCentral.

I'm 47 yrs. and not yet officially diagnosed. I have worked hard most of my adult life. But I have absolutely hated most of the jobs I have done. I have changed jobs more than most in search of something I could deal with better. I put up with a great deal of crap because I was a single mother most of the time and had no choice, not in my mind at least. I think back and wonder how I ever did it. I can remember feeling so overwhelmed many times. I'm so happy my situation improved. I might of ended up living with family if things had been different.

From most of the posts I've read on this site, it seems like a lot of people with Asperger's work & live independently, or at least one of the two. In my case, however, I'm 28 & doing neither & never have been able to.

Schizophrenia is not the only diagnosis that can be given to an Asperger's individual. Many women end up labeled incorrectly with borderline personality disorder. Depression and anxiety disorders, correctly diagnosed or not, are another possibility. People with violent meltdowns, strong obsessions, and wacky sleep cycles can be given a bipolar disorder diagnosis. Strong rituals and routines can incorrectly dump you into the OCD category. Someone with strong sensory-related food problems can be thought to have an eating disorder. People are institutionalized for many of these things.

Thanks to the interaction of the IQ test with the autistic mind, many people who would be diagnosed Asperger's will even have been given a mental retardation label, just as many kanner's autistics were labeled with it (in some cases correctly, others not). Or, the learning disabilities will have been caught, and everything will be blamed on that.

And, of course, some (especially males with violent meltdowns) will simply have been branded criminals ("antisocial personality disorder", nowadays), and institutionalized in prisons.

I'm not sure if this will be of any help but have a look anyway, http://www.autismjobhunt.com/autism-unemployment-rates/

As for my personal experience, I've had 2 volunteer jobs, one working in a cattery and the other in a pet store. I still live at home though and am currently without a job.

double post..

Last edited by Blindspot149 on 11 Mar 2010, 10:42 pm, edited 2 times in total.