How can a autistic person go undiagnosed till adulthood?

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For me, it was that I'm female, and we don't always show the same traits males do, plus autism wasn't seen as being a spectrum until the mid to late 90's. The only diagnosis available then was autism, and I was too high functioning for that, so it wasn't until I was 28 that I finally got the Asperger's diagnosis. Even as late as the mid 90's, a therapist said that "if there were such a thing as a little bit autistic," that would fit me. I even went to preschool and kindergarten at a school for disabled children, but it became obvious that I wasn't as severely disabled as everyone else was, so I went to regular schools from elementary school onward and graduated from high school with honors at 18. I was bullied in elementary and middle school before my family moved, as that was a time when I wore glasses to fix my lazy eye, and until high school, I saw the speech therapist weekly. The school I first went to was actually for those whose disabilities were too severe for them to be mainstreamed at all.

Funny, doctors thought I was autistic when I was two but if I didn't have a speech delay, they wouldn't have thought that. I am sure my other quirks would have been passed off as something else. My parents didn't buy the autism label when I was little. Then when I was four or five, it was changed to autistic behavior because I had hearing loss so it made me have the characteristics. Then when I as eight, I was re evaluated so I could go to my new school and be in the mainstream class and he said I wasn't autistic because I was too social and said I have some odd behaviors I could work on if I wanted to. he also said my speech delay was not like someone with autism and my speech delay was like someone with hearing loss and he couldn't see why previous doctors thought I was autistic. So the label was revoked I assume and then at age 12 I basically got it back and it was AS. I as even labeled as being multi handicapped in my IEP when I was little. I am not sure if that was the category I was under too or was it always other health impaired.

My son has a slight speech delay and the doctor didn't toss the autism label at me. I would have tossed it out if he did lol because he shows no other signs and NT kids can have a speech delay. I knew one who didn't speak clearly until she was four or five. My son just has a problem with word pronunciation so it's unclear what he is saying.


Rather I still would have had AS or not or even be on the spectrum without hearing loss is unknown. But my parents always knew I had something but they didn't know what I had and none of the other labels explained it.

I still haven't been diagnosed and will be 22 soon. I have all the verification I need, thanks to autism in my family and a diagnosed boyfriend. I feel like the diagnosis will be a pain for me.

Ehh I was written off as being very shy and my parents were in denial. I can see how many parents would remain in denial of anything wrong. What I dont get is how the school system didn't see it. I had to present myself to the school counseler until someone even thought anything. And this was senior yr of high school and I was 18, sheesh. Of course if I really wanted to, I can track down my old dean and inquire him, if he still remembers. Amongst the teachers, dean and whoever you woulda thought someone would have seen something? I went through majority of my school system undetected. I even went to a counseler when I was 8-11 yrs of age and was diagnosed with selective mutism. She worked with me for 3 yrs and no aspergers, nothing even close. Of course this was in the 90s and Aspergers was very new and not recognized in girls.

I went to private religious school for all of elementary school. No school psychiatrists or anything like that there. I did get referred for a developmental disorder evaluation when I was like 4 or 5 because I couldn't tie my shoes. Then I got diagnosed with "depression" in middle school, then finally at 17 NVLD+schizoid/schizotypal, then later people told me I was basically autistic and pretty much fit ASD/HFA.

I think the #1 reason I never got diagnosed is because I was a naturally smart child. I had severe anxiety during test and exam times but I was still scoring 75%-80% on my tests. As an adult I am getting 95%+ on all my courses so my high IQ covered for my relative learning difficulties.

Of course, Aspergers did not exist back then and Autism was only for 'low IQ' children. I was simply 'too smart' to be autistic and that is why I slipped through the crack. How ironic that if I wasn't as smart I would likely have gotten the help I desperately needed back then. I honestly can't see how anyone can have miss it today as I was a 100% textbook case of Aspergers as a kid.

I had PDD-NOS as a child--and became nonverbal at one point-- and my parents simply attributed it to demon possession. They sent me to an exorcist who supposedly managed to cure most of my allergies, but then I was told throughout my teenage years that I had issues because I was unrepentant. I still don't totally disbelieve what I was taught, as I'm a pretty superstitious person naturally, so this creates lots of self doubts.

My mom was in denial. As an OT, she knew I should be evaluated, but she thought of ASD as a fad diagnosis in anybody who wasn't completely nonverbal and extremely obviously autistic. I was "too smart to be disabled", no matter how glaringly obvious it was, so she took me out of school and home-schooled me. When I left home, I was unable to take care of myself effectively.

So yeah, it can totally happen.

Mild AS can pass for eccentric/nerdy personality. Often times it's an invisible disability and you don't "look disabled" so nobody has a clue and you grow up thinking you must be lazy/stupid/badly-behaved/a loser/pick-your-insult-of-choice because you can't possibly be disabled, because you can walk and talk and you don't have Down syndrome.

More severe autism, the kind that's obvious, can get mistaken for other disabilities, or else be thought to be part of another already correctly diagnosed disability. I have one friend who's blind and has AS, and his AS wasn't caught because people just figured his unusual traits were because he couldn't see, even though it's pretty obvious after about five minutes of interaction that he's got an ASD.

Sometimes you get diagnosed with ADHD or a learning disability and your AS traits are put down to that, when in reality you have both.

Sometimes, when a kid is gifted and has autism, the autistic traits are put down to being gifted, possibly bored or rebellious. Never mind that most gifted kids can fit in just fine, unless they're highly/profoundly gifted and doing calculus at age six.

Parents who are abusive or neglectful may also neglect their child's medical care, including evaluations for things like autism. That's why there's so much speculation that some of the "feral children", both modern and historical, might have been abandoned or severely neglected autistic children rather than typical children who were hurt by severe neglect. (Such severe neglect won't leave a typical child untouched, even if he doesn't have a trace of autism. Survivors of abuse, neglect, and institutional care in understaffed orphanages can come away with reactive attachment disorder, which does have some autistic-like features, but is not genetic like autism is.)

In the past (applies if you are older than about 35), people with autism were misdiagnosed with intellectual disabilities or schizophrenia. Some of these diagnoses stuck longer than they should have. One study of a residential care facility for ID adults showed that a significant minority of them had undiagnosed autism, and a few actually had only autism and no ID at all. I know at least one guy whose autism was mistaken for schizophrenia even though he had no psychotic symptoms at all, and have heard more stories of similar mistakes, especially in adults and teens when schizophrenia was well-known and autism was not.

Today, kids have a pretty good chance of getting a diagnosis, but it's still not perfect. If your parents don't want you "labeled", you're probably stuck until you can find help on your own; and there are still many situations where the diagnosis is unclear or complicated. But at least in those cases they know there's something going on and that's better than nothing even if they can't pin a name on it.

Well, I am usually in my own little world, but I am aware that there are others outside of it. I think I was missed by teachers using the old "your not applying yourself" and neurotic parents who were in deep denial.
And since I am 51 now & only became aware of Asperger's & the entire Autism spectrum when I was 49 obviously I was missed..
The most amazing thing is that I had *serious* autistic behavior as a small child, that I do not know how or why that dx was missed. Or was it given & then denied??

Sincerely,
Matthew

I'm 22 and I'm still not diagnosed, though I am trying to get that sorted out. With me it went undetected for a number of reasons. First, I'm female, so some of the symptoms are more subtle. The fact that I didn't talk much as a child (still don't) was attributed to me being very shy.

I actually was evaluated by a school psychologist when I was transitioning between Kindergarten and 1st grade, and she noted that I had some autistic symptoms, but my parents were so far in denial that they never had me evaluated for it. And my mom thought AS was just a fad diagnosis. Then because I've excelled at school and was too afraid to break any rules my parents sort of wrote me off as a "perfect, albeit quirky" child and failed to recognize that I have been struggling. Even when I was getting into trouble they didn't try to find out if there was a reason for it.

Now, here I am in college and it's gotten to the point where the demands of school are a little bit greater than I can handle so some of my AS symptoms are starting to become glaringly obvious.

very simple,

1. some family members have simular traits so Autistic traits will seem ordanairy

2. a person does not have aspergers and hears of the symptoms and subconsiously act them out

3. a persons behaviour will only become apparent in later years