Is There any correlation between childhood symptoms and ..

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When I first started out to answer your questions, I was thinking of how well I got along with other kids up through 5th grade. However, the more I thought of it, the more I realized that I never really played with more than two children at a time, and I always opted out of group activities. This never really has stood out to me because I had a very vivid imagination, and I was good at occupying myself with my environment. This ability kept me from ever being lonely, so the thought that I was different or left out never even entered my mind until now.

I was bullied, but only during middle school. The boys were very mean to me during my 5th-7th grade years. There were two factors that stopped it. One was that half the bullies moved to another school in 7th grade. The other thing was that my home life became difficult at that time. The boys who had been bullying me found out about what was going on, and they started being nicer to me.

High school was bad because it was a much larger environment that what I was used to (6 times larger, actually). Otherwise, I was fairly oblivious of my differences to others and just did my best to get through.

College was probably my most social point in life. Because I wanted to spread my wings, I was much more open to socializing than I had ever been. At that time, I was much more likely to be found in groups, but I still hung back by myself or with one or two close friends during social activities. I did stretch my boundaries and learn to push myself to do things that I would not normally do by nature (like speak in front of crowds or take the lead in coordinating activities).

All in all, I think that how an Aspie perceives the world around them will ultimately determine if they are social or not. When I was oblivious of my differences and could keep myself occupied with the world around me, I felt much more successful socially, even if I did only have one or two friends. However, as I became more aware of those differences and it took much more to keep my occupied, I started developing more difficulties relating to others.

This is the only piece I know of:

http://www.autistics.org/library/more-autistic.html

Anbuend wrote that, too.

Some of us suspect that it's a factor in what currently seems to be called "autistic catatonia" officially, so you could research that. (Some of us who've been diagnosed with that, that is. I know one of them has written to Lorna Wing on and off, I don't know if he included that bit of information.) It's a movement disorder that's got elements of catatonia and Parkinson's without being either, and those of us who have it have a lot of other non-movement-related effects. (Note that autism and catatonia have overlapping traits to begin with, at least on a superficial level. Catatonia is a lot more complex than just freezing in place, you can read more here on relationships some people have considered between autism and a few different movement disorders: http://www.iidc.indiana.edu/index.php?pageId=468 and that page is largely a summary of stuff in the first book in the reference list, I've spoken with one of the authors several times. The paper that resulted in my diagnosis of "autistic catatonia" when my shrink (who'd known me for several years since a point shortly after it began) read it is here: http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/176/4/357 )

Of course that only really covers people whose movement patterns are strongly affected. Luckily (in terms of getting diagnosis and support for it anyway), that includes me. But there are a lot of other people whose burnout either doesn't go that far, or doesn't go in that direction, or doesn't happen at the time period most common for it to happen, etc.

You can find in outcome studies there is discussion of "regression" during adolescence, which is when I happened to burn out so that was useful to me. Again, if you burn out later, it doesn't mention that quite as often, partly because I doubt there've been large-scale studies into autistic people's later adult lives. Especially not into the later adult lives of autistic people who would be considered "successful" by standard views (many of whom wouldn't have even been diagnosed as children -- and even among those diagnosed as children, there just aren't that many old enough for large-scale outcome studies to go that far into adulthood... I mean I'm 30 and autism was put into the DSM the year I was born, but in a very extreme form, and it takes time for stuff that's in the DSM to propagate, when I was 20 there were still professionals going by the 1980 DSM implication that if you could interact you weren't autistic). (Although I doubt it's limited to autistic people considered successful -- it's probably to do with overstepping one's limits too much, not with where exactly those limits happen to lie.)

I think this is an incredibly under-discussed phenomenon, and unfortunately I also think there is a lot of reason for nonautistic people not to want to discuss it. People want to hear success stories. People, especially parents, want to believe that if someone manages to be "successful" at a (comparatively) young age, they'll always stay that way. Many parents and professionals both don't want to believe that the push-someone-to-succeed-and-they-will-do-it-darn-it method of doing things could possibly have any major drawbacks.

One thing I found very interesting, though, is that apparently at least adolescent "regression" was part of the stereotypes about autism. I read a book written jointly by an autistic man and his mother. And when he was diagnosed, the doctor told his mother not to bother teaching him much. Because even if he learned all this stuff in the first half of childhood, he'd lose it all during adolescence. Or something like that. I still want to know how that became "conventional wisdom" in the time (sixties or seventies I think) that this guy was diagnosed. I imagine it had to have happened a few times for that to be known about, although it's certainly never been anything like a majority of us.

It's unfortunate though that most of the stuff is known about adolescence or at most early adulthood. A lot of the people I've known who are dealing with burnout are much older than that. Some of the stories are pretty scary too -- people who literally were pushed and/or pushing themselves so hard that they didn't know who they were or what was happening until stuff started falling apart in their fifties or later and they found to their surprise that they were married, sometimes with children, and now had to figure out how to function as themselves in that role when all they'd known was to basically move as fast as they can through life without taking any time to look around and figure out what was going on.

That sort of stuff makes me a little glad that I burned out as early and as hard as I did. I know who I am. I get support for what I have trouble with, much of which is unavailable to people who can't prove they had trouble before the age of eighteen. While I had to deal with misdiagnosis for awhile, I didn't deal with nearly as much misdiagnosis as a person in their thirties or older who suddenly stops functioning very well would get. (Generally they'd get considered to have a psych problem, possibly one where the meds given for it would make an autistic person's functioning much worse most of the time. People don't usually look for autism in adults who are middle-aged or older when they start having trouble functioning and acting weirdly. They look for psychosis though, and can find it even when it's not there. Either that or they get considered to just have depression or a personality disorder and everything else goes unsupported.)

But yeah one of the reasons I try to remember as much as I can about as many people as I know with problems like that, is that I know there's a huge amount of stuff that pretty much only autistic adults know amongst each other, professionals are barely scratching the surface on this stuff. The only professionals who might be more aware of it are ones who see a really large number of older (I mean older than young adult) autistic adults on a regular basis, including those who would normally be off the radar of professionals.

Anbuend,

Thanks for all that information! It'll take some time to absorb it.

Last edited by Verdandi on 04 Jan 2011, 4:21 am, edited 2 times in total.

I was bullied in Grades 1 to 12. I was bullied due to the fact that I was receiving special education services. I was told by my peers, that I had no brains. I was also asked if I was retorted and if I stroked myself all the time. Kids would also try to get my address off of me. They made fun of my speech patterns until I told them to knock it off. They also tried to get me to dance.

Thanks for that information. The subject does seem very under-discussed and under-researched. I've seen a lot of people be really glad to see that "Help! I think I'm becomming more autistic" article, which would seem to indicate that people aren't hearing about this stuff very much elsewhere.

The part about some parents and others not to want to hear stories like that makes sense; yeah, could call into question the wisdom of 40+ hrs per week, et al, stuff. I think the "brain plasticity" idea gets overplayed for the same reasons. I hope a long-term study of how things go for the current batch of kids over the next 20-50 years is being pursued by somebody.

I had the burnout start when I was 19, and I finally crashed & burned at 30 -- and it was still a bit of a mind-f***. And, if other people (family) had been depending on me... that would've been so much worse. This stuff is also why I don't like people getting overly concerned with people's official dx status. Someone's life is falling apart, they and their family doesn't know what's happening to them, so they write in an get told to go away and come back when they've got a dx. Great, helpful. It's not going to hurt them to know that it could possibly be autism+burnout, especially if shrinks are prone to diagnose middle-aged people with such problems as psychotic (I didn't know that -- thanks).

I had a feeling this stuff was mostly folk or cultural knowledge, at this point. I wonder if anyone has put together a reading list or such anywhere? Maybe I'll put those links and whatever else I can find up on a web page somewhere.

Oh and regarding dysautonomia, I am of course not a doctor and haven't done research and therefore can't be certain if any of the links I am thinking of are real. But I have a family member with more severe dysautonomia. They think it's related to multiple system atrophy. Dysautonomia can also be related to Parkinson's (MSA is basically like a faster-progressing and scarier version of Parkinson's in many ways.) And many autistic people have traits that at least superficially resemble Parkinson's, especially those of us with that mysterious progressive movement disorder I'm diagnosed with. So I do wonder if there are any links, but would be really cautious about saying there were any for sure.

Ah ok -- well that is interesting, though. What I'm dealing with is pretty minor dysautnomia compared to how bad that can get. And overall my "stuff" does fit the CFS paradigm (though not perfectly). It is interesting to wonder how (or if) all of it fits together, though.

I had a CFS doctor a while ago whose idea about treating CFS was to try meds that are normally used for Parkinson's (though not L-DOPA). I went off the last med he had me on about 3 years ago, and ugh, I feel like I've in permanent withdrawl since (it's not really seriously bad, though). Not sure that means much, but more stuff to wonder about I guess.

Huh, about.com says this:

I definitely have panic attacks and anxiety. I don't think I have fibromyalgia but my mother keeps suggesting I might.

But this:



Yeah, this sounds familiar. But a lot of it seems so vague that it's hard to say whether it is or not. Thanks for all the information, Anbuend.

I was very sociable, perhaps too so, but there was a big difference between my sociability and that of other children. I didn't seem to get the benefit from being around kids that other kids got. There was a fundamental difference in the overall purpose of socializing. It didn't help me the way it was helping others. Instead, it caused me problems, stressed me out and I didn't understand why until later when I realized something about myself.
I was definitely more sociable as a child than as an adult but I feel it was to my detriment.

Kids bullied me about the way I looked, dressed, acted. They made up lies about me to get other kids mad at me thinking I called them a name. They would do stuff, like write my name on a cabinet in pencil then lied and said I did it when I didn't.


YES! Most definitely. I needed to be taken out of high school and reprogrammed
Don't know if private school is much better. My mom wasn't about to enroll me in one because it was too expensive.