How many of you here on WrongPlanet are bloomers?

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I'm a bloomer, like the 10% in the article. Severe traits in childhood to high-functioning by high school.

In my case, the cause was learning speaking, language, communication from age eight onwards. I was taught on purpose, otherwise I wouldn't have learned on my own. That was the first switch, the communication switch. Then, I started socializing a little when I was fourteen, and I made friends in high school, and that was the second switch, the social switch. So by the time I was fourteen, my social and communication were up to high-functioning levels.

That is true. You know what? I am going to just let anyone who was clinically diagnosed on the autism spectrum at some point in their lives answer the poll question. The people answering the poll can still assess their level of functioning at the ages I gave based on their memories and what they have been told by their parents even though they might not have been diagnosed on the autism spectrum at an early age.

Based on the posts people have been posting on this thread, I am just going to let everyone who was clinically diagnosed on the autism spectrum at some point in their lives (regardless of whether or not it was before they started grade school). One good thing about this is that it will get more people to answer the poll question as well as higher diversity in terms of functioning levels at the ages given in my OP for this thread.

That's a rather interesting article. They don't have six developmental trajectories as they state in the title, though; they actually only have two--one group that improves rapidly (the "bloomers"), and the other that improves slowly (the other groups).

I am, and always have been, somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. I improved slowly in all the autism-related skills, as you see for the slow-improvement group, from "low-functioning" to "high-functioning".

I wish they had done a bit more analysis on the slopes of those curves. Is there a continuum from slow improvement to quick improvement? Or are they two distinct groups?

I also hope they are following this cohort further into the future. The "bloomer" group showed a decrease in functioning during puberty, but I have no idea if that was a significant decrease or not, since they didn't have error bars on the graphs, nor any discussion that I could find about those intriguing dips in functioning. I am assuming that these were not regressions; rather, a slowing of improvement compared to peers during a time when social and communication demands are increasing rapidly. I would want to know whether that dip continues, or whether it levels off to a trajectory more like the slow-improving groups.

I had a big dip in 7th grade due to sudden increased complexity of eberrything from grade school to junior high. It took a year to make the adjustment, but I was doing well again by the middle of eighth grade.

Would Temple Grandin be considered a bloomer?

Also, there was a thread about a guy who was diagnosed as severe before he was two, and he gave a TED talk, and he is the most socially well-adapted autistic person I have ever seen.

To answer your question, I think improvement (from steady to large) is one big continuum. But I am not 100% sure on that.

To answer your question, in the sense that Temple didn't start talking until she was 4 years old and that children who were diagnosed on the autism spectrum and was non-verbal at 3 years of age were considered to have low-functioning autism, I would say that Temple Grandin would be considered a bloomer.

I feel this way too, my autistic traits were certainly present in my childhood but if anything I feel they became worse as I got older.

There could be many reasons for that (for example, I fell apart progressively more at every milestone in life at which I was expected to become more independent, so perhaps it was aggravated by the circumstances) but I wonder why the regressive direction isn't discussed very much... if it can go one way it can go the other, I would have thought.

Maybe they'll do a study on the regressive direction one day. But I wouldn't be surprised if that study never happens because most people don't like discussing/analyzing changes that they deem to be bad things.

I think I want to post another thread of a poll like this one with slightly different options.

If that's the case, I think that's a pity - you can only understand something by studying it, and only develop ways to prevent or help with something by understanding it. It may be that if the causes were better understood the regressive cases wouldn't happen because they could be helped.

I actually think it's because the focus of autism is still very much on children who display noticeable symptoms. The people whose symptoms worsen with age are often going to be the ones who passed under the radar in childhood but were diagnosed in adulthood, and the current medical system doesn't seem very interested in those people. There are still medical professionals who genuinely think autism is something only children have!

I am not sure that there is a general understanding of the fact that there are autistic people who experience "regression" well past childhood (also known as burnout), or that autistic people can even slowly lose skills and become less capable over time. Most people seem to think that autistic people improve over time, and that regression generally happens at a very young age.

Because, besides the fact the study was tracking children, if you fall in the bloomer category you should have been severe enough before preschool that you should have been caught by then.

Yes, this is true. I think this is also a symptom of the fact that the ones being observed and recorded by the medical establishment are the children who are diagnosed in childhood and have support and tutoring, so they are supported by their environment and therefore improve - which is wonderful and encouraging.

However, there is also an opposite trajectory, of children who are not diagnosed (either because their symptoms aren't outwardly severe enough to be noticed or for other reasons) whose environment can potentially become increasingly hostile to their autistic traits and offer them no assistance. It is entirely possible in this scenario that their ability to cope worsens as the expectations of social capability and independence increase. I see a large number of adult autistics on this forum who seem to fall into this category, perhaps because the demographic here is almost entirely adult and the ones who already have a support system in place are less inclined to seek one out on the internet. There also seems to be a strong tendency for these "invisible" autistics to be female, though there are many male ones too.

With the exception of a few individual practitioners, the medical model of autism seems to resist recognising this important issue, and it is frustrating.

Prior to my diagnosis at the age of seven, I was quite the trouble maker. I wasn't fully potty-trained until I was about three and a half, and I was prone to sensory overloads and temper tantrums. At the time of diagnosis, I was fairly high functioning, and if I were diagnosed today, I'd probably have Asperger syndrome. However, I don't let my condition define me. Most of the time, I forget that I even have it.

If bloomers can significantly increase their functioning levels from MF/LF to HF, can this apply to people who were HF autistics to begin with? Can they go off the autism spectrum and even 'bloom' into sociable, extraverted characters? It seems that HF autistics' level of functioning increases from your data, im just wondering if HF autistic bloomers exist, ones who get rid of the label and even become sociable by NT standards?