How can a autistic person go undiagnosed till adulthood?

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AS and HFA weren't even recognized in most places until the last 20 odd years. So technically, the majority of people with either of those were missed until adulthood.

If your family is kind of autistic too, you dont really stand out. So its normal for you to plan before, its normal for you to be as quiet as possible to not disturb others, its normal for you that you dont have friend visits every day, its normal for you to go to the public bath and ssek the most quiet corner you can find.... If everyone was like my mom, I wouldnt stand out in any way. ^^

Problems started for me, when I was forced to interact with the NT family of my partner or the working colleguas and so on. I lost a job because of my jobpartner telling that he could not stand working with me, because of me never interacting with him in any social way. I thought they were kidding me, because from 8:00-16:30 it was working time, so it was obvious for me to work and not to chitchat. ^^ Thought they were kidding me, when I was told that I lost the job because of that stuff and thought if they expected me to jump around in a clown costume or why the hell did they expect me to entertain my working collegues? Private entertaining time is from 12:00-12:30 and AFTERWARDS 16:30....dont they know anything? ^^

I'm adopted, so it was easy for my parents to blame all my misbehavior and annoying traits on "whatever they did to me over there"

i had to wait till I was 30 for a diagnosis! In my view the problem has been a abject lack of knowledge of the autistic spectrum at a local level. You have to fight with your doctor just to be referred to a specialist, that needs to change. Also there is no proactive effort in schools to intervene when a child may be struggling due to autistic symptoms. We are at least 30 years behind where we ought to be because Asperger's studies were not translated in English until the 1980's. Its only now that health authorities are catching up.

I'm 34 and only just figured this out when I started reading lianne holliday wiley because she specifically describes aspergers in women. I've been thinking they should hav known when I was little. My mother just demanded that I act right all the time and I held in all of my anxiety at school. So I was considered shy and lazy and constantly criticized.

My parents knew I was different, but didn't think there was anything wrong with the way I was. (They still don't, but now they've become pro-neurodiversity types instead of refusing to label me at all.)

I received my first official diagnosis at age 52, after earning an MSEE degree, getting married, fathering children, serving in the military, and holding down a job - no insanity, no retardation, just severe social ineptitude.

This is understandable when you consider that I was born in 1957, and A.S. didn't become a standard diagnosis until 1992, when it was included in the tenth edition of the World Health Organization's diagnostic manual, International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10); in 1994, it was added to the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic reference, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV).

Since then, it seems, "everybody" has been diagnosed with some form of ASD.

I think this can happen with AS because AS is a mild form of autism, and its symptoms are very similar to ordinary personality flaws, like not being a good listener, lack of interest in others, etc. People keep telling you to change, and you can't, and when you don't change they think you're being selfish and just write you off. The word "autism" just doesn't occur to anyone, so no treatment is sought and the problem goes undetected for years. This is what happened to both me and my dad.

I found out about Asperger's by accident. I heard someone describe it in an episode of "Boston Legal," which led me to Google it, and when I saw the list of symptoms, I was amazed. "That's me and Dad," I thought. So I had myself tested and sure enough, I have AS.

I think anyone who suspects they have it should end all doubt by having yourself tested. The testing process is very interesting and nothing to be afraid of. If you find out you have AS, it should be liberating, because you realize your problems were not your fault.

Because I think autism has been generally perceived to be a condition where you are non-communicative, non-perceptive, trapped in you're own little world and that anyone who appears relatively normal must not be autistic. Aspergers didn't even become a diagnosis until 1994. I was an adult by then. I just related in another topic that my mother knew something was going on with me and took me to get my hearing and vision checked, also took me to a child psychologist for evaluation but back at that time (late 70s-early 80s) the notion of me being on the spectrum wasn't on anyone's mind.
My dad has undiagnosed Aspergers and his mother had it too but was just always known as quirky and antisocial.

Last edited by Tori0326 on 13 Mar 2013, 12:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Because 99.99999% of the population do not have any sort of knowledge or education in psychiatry and cannot tell the difference between Autism and a hole in the ground - and they also think that you have to be like rainman or you are not autistic.

This, but less so as time goes on. I was always the bright, but eccentric one...even if teachers would stop me from rocking in class, or try to catch me off guard because they thought I wasn't paying attention.

In my case, I think it's partly because AS wasn't really known about when I was a kid, and the one time I did have extensive testing, apparently nothing was picked up that would indicate my being on the spectrum. And then when I was older, the possible diagnosis was leaning more towards schizoid personality disorder or mental immaturity.

My dad thought I was either "Lazy", "Slow", "Stupid", or that I just had a bad attitude.

He also thought that he could beat it all out of me.

My wife didn't speak at all until she was about 4, then spoke in full sentences from then on, was assessed by 'experts' several times - including several months in a 'special school'. She was incessantly bullied due to this, and even now doesn't really function on her own due to having zero confidence.

None of these experts, the school, her doctors, her teachers, anybody, ever once mentioned Autism, AS or anything similar. I get the impression nobody had heard of it then (this would have been early-mid 1980's).

With me it's more excusable since I didn't have her problems.. It's only really obvious there's something different about me when I'm in a social situation, which I rarely am.. I avoid them like the plague.

So I don't find it hard to imagine people don't get diagnosed at all. I find it more surprising that many people actually do.

When I was a baby or a small child till I was about 6 or 7 years old I was put onto valium to suppress my intellectual development but in the special needs schools they thought I had the form of autism descibed by Leo Kanner as well as having a learning disability. The doctor described me as having lack of awareness and severe mental retardation (now called in the UK as learning disability). My mum was not having any of that since she thought the worst about autistic people only to rigid stereotypes and my dad being a child batterer tried to beat out the communication styles and coping strategies from 1974-79. My parents also thought my co ordination difficulties were laziness for not being good at handicrafts since my siblings one with dyslexia was an excellent artist now works as a carpenter, my other brother who is touching cloth as far as the autistic spectrum is concerned quite good at maths fancies himself as an inventor and my sister works for BT and has bipolar disorder was nearly diagnosed with a developmental disability but now has an IQ of over 130 and can speak Irish Gaelic and is a trekkie.

She had me taken out of a school for children with severe learning disabilities because she described me as 'carrying on like someone with severe learning disabilities' when in fact I was communicating to the others through the use of a form of communication called integrated interaction. Even my stims were suppressed. Years later those ideas changed and I was later described as emotionally disturbed or some other similar pejorative. It was only in 2003 I was identified as having Asperger syndrome. However I was still left with the low social status and traditionally my family were neurobigoted and allistic supremacists. The reasoning for my 'maistreaming was my mum did not want me institutionalised.

Last edited by Aspiewordsmith on 13 Mar 2013, 6:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I was recommended to be tested for autism as a child, but my father would have nothing to do with having a child with it si he refused that testing.