Ever try to make friends with other people w/ disabilities?

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I have tried to make friends with other non-NTs, and I found it more promising once I got talking to them. My mum knows a woman who has a daughter with Fragile-X Syndrome, and my mum can relate to her mum (being a parent with a grown-up daughter who is a little different to her peers), and found she wasn't alone.

It does irk me when people here seem to think that everybody in the world are NTs except everyone on the spectrum. I wouldn't class somebody with severe Mental Retardation as a ''neuro-typical person''. I have actually met a few adults with Mental Retardation, and I must say I had more friends than they did, some could only say one word and had to be wheeled around in a wheelchair and looked after 24/7 (but he wasn't Autistic).

A good portion of the people I know have aspergers, bipolar or something. In one case they are blind. I would admittedly have trouble forming an adult friendship with someone with a considerable intellectual disability especially if they weren't capable of understanding anything I wanted to discuss. I worked with special education, while I was in, with people with autism, down syndrome, etc and while I could relate to them on some level it was still difficult.

It is very possible the parents are overly sensitive about their child because they would wonder why someone who didn't have a similar disability would want to be around them. Especially if you pass as neuro typical in comparsion.

I would love to have friends with Down Syndrome and would enjoy
dating someone who has it or any other disability.

I only have one NT friend; the rest all have either AS or HFA. My NT friend displays several Aspie traits too.

I have a hard enough time being friendly to anyone, so I'm not picky as to disabilities. But sometimes I'm afraid of people with mobility problems because I've been chewed out for holding the door by someone with leg and arm braces. I was just holding the door because it's how I was raised. I'm Southern. I got there first and it's rude to let the door close in someone's face, but they took it as an act of pity or accomodation. I never know how to react in situations like that.

Well, the extra chromosome itself contains a totally normal set of genes from one of the person's parents. So the cause of Down syndrome isn't the extra chromosome itself; it's the fact that the body is getting too many "messages" from having three instead of two chromosomes. (Genes work like this: DNA contains "recipes" for proteins. When a cell needs the information, it reads the DNA and makes the protein.) So Down syndrome people have as much genetic variation as their parents do, because their parents are the ones who passed down that extra chromosome to begin with. That makes Down syndrome a rather diverse disorder. Depending on exactly which genes you got in triplicate and which other genes you have on your other chromosomes, you could end up with congenital problems so bad that you don't survive infancy; or you could be born completely healthy and grow up to live on your own. Of course with modern medicine a lot of the problems that DS causes can be fixed--a baby born with a heart defect can have surgery, for example--so more and more DS people are living into adulthood and old age (which for them happens somewhat earlier--they tend to live to sixty instead of seventy-five, usually).

I've had a couple friends in the past who had autism (one was a teenage boy with AS and the other was a girl a couple years older than me who had classic autism) and I used to know a homeless man who would sometimes have delusions that he was Jesus Christ. I also have a friend who's an elderly woman with Parkinsons' Disease.

A couple years ago at my University, there would be a group of students with Down's Syndrome and autism who would always come over to chat with me/give me hugs whenever we saw one another.

Sure. I've never had any problems with people who are "different". One of my best friends in high school was a girl named Laurie who was in a wheelchair for severe curvature of the spine. Another friend Renee was "off" -- I suspect now that she was autistic. Another friend in junior high was hearing-impaired. I drifted away from our friendship when she wanted me to start helping her cheat on tests by signing test answers to her (I had learned some rudimetary signing to more easily communicate with her.) One of my favorite cousins -- Jimmy -- is 45 but has the reading level of a 7th grader. I had a friend years ago who I believed was schizophrenic at the time, but now I think she was either ASPie or OCD. And finally -- not that this is so much a disability but a difference -- my friend Otto is transexual. He's always believed he was female, and now dresses the part most of the time and goes by the name Peggy Sue. If he is happy with that, so am I, and I don't treat him -- or anyone else -- any differently than I do others.

I have always since I was 6 years old been friends with people with different disabilites. I am still to this day after 32 years friends with a person with a disability cerabal pausy. Friendship with people with different disabilities can work or may not it depends on the situation that the person with the disability is in and whether they have baggage or problems at home or how server the disability is. The friends I associate with now are all disabled mostly Aspergers and Epilepsy. I used to attend a disability centre where I became friends with people there who have Down syndrome, Aspergers, Hearing impared, Cerabal pausy, Bi polar, Epilepsy, Diabities and Torettes syndrome I still associate with everyone from the centre to this day. I also worked just recently in a disability workshop with people with different disabilites Down Syndrome, Cerabal Pausy, Epilepsy, Diabilites, Aspergers, Bi polar, Szchitsaphrina, ( sorry about the spelling) Hearing Impared and Torettes Syndrome. I have become good friends and socialize with them occassionally I have only one friend from work who I associate with regularly who has Aspergers. The good side of being friends with people with different disabilites is that you learn how to communicate alot better with everyone. I learnt to sign language to communicate with my fellow work friends who are hearing impaired I now have become good friends with a person who is hearing impaired and is a pretty funny, outgoing, easygoing person. I personally have had and still have great, funny and good friendships with people with different disabilites where we just click and get along with no dramas, backstabing, fights or any of that stuff NTs do because we are all interested in the same hobbies and interests and rather talk about it and goto places that involve your hobbies and interests and most of my friends really do not understand any of that stuff anyway. You just have to be as with NT friendships pick and choose who you want to be your friend or not. Some disabled people can be nasty or are extremely possesive of you and jealous and will not let you be friends with anyone else but them they can also be very controlling and use you and try to boss you around in your own home like four disabled people did with me and I had to end my friendship with them. I have learnt over the years to put Rules up in your home that are clear and easy for your disabled friends to understand I also involve my disabled friends in the ideas in making the rules we all abide by when in my home. If you have friends who have a intellual disability, low fuctioning autism who are not able to understand what you are saying it is good to have a support worker, carer or their Mum to be at your house to help with supervising your friend because from personal experience its hard and there is noway you can control them. I know I had a friend who is disabled who used to come over my place and reck my home, throw things at me like a pencil in my eye and a orange juice bottle thrown at my head and not abide by the rules of my home. We all have boundries we have written down what upsets us, starts, triggers meltdowns, what we like, dont like, how we like to be treated, what their meaning of a friend is and how we should treat each other. But if you do have problems its always good to have a support worker or carer, councillor to turn too to help with sorting problems out before it gets out of hand and explains in basic to the friends you have that cannot understand.

Most of my mates i had in the past had a learning disability or had asperger's syndrome my experiences with them were mixed.

Interesting comments. I took my HFA daughter to a play group when she was 5 with some boys who were Aspies. She didn't mix with them. After reading your comments I did notice something interesting. While the aspie kids tried to speak to each other my daughter had absolutely no interest in them. I guess added to the speech delay is the issue of lack of social interest.

I was friends with kids in my special ed room when I was six and seven and eight before going to my new school. Then when I was 12 and 13, I was friends with this girl who had Down's syndrome. When I was 15 and 16, I knew a little boy with AS. When I was 17 and 18 my next door neighbor had ADHD and we played video games together.

I did like this one girl in my school who was deaf but she was snotty with me so I didn't like her. I quit trying to interact with her.

I have some online friends with disabilities. One with brain damage and some of them also have AS and the other has mental retardation.

Thank you everyone for the responses. It helps more than you will ever know

Sorry about the emoticons....just trying to communicate an emotional moment here... both a sadness and a gratitude, if the emotions can be mixed

....that I don't know any of you, but am so grateful and appreciative of you sharing your thoughts. Because I am so alone in real life. I've had so many failed attempts at friendships in these past several years that I'm starting to think I only really exist online

I'm invisible in real life. I hold myself accountable for the dismal social failures I've had in the offline world, both with people who have disabilities and NTs. NOBODY LIKES ME

If I've learned anything from this experience, it is that other people with disabilities seem more accepting initially, but even they grow tired of me. I've had the disconcerting experience of people abandoning me without warning (the person with Down Syndrome did) - and with it, no explanation.

I cannot fathom the reason for this happening, other than people just deciding that I'm a bad person.

If they thought I was a good person, they would at least give an explanation, wouldn't they?

(Referring specifically to a couple of people with physical disabilities that I'd gotten to know before they decided I wasn't worth it)

So what I've learned: The same thing happens (social rejection) among other people with disabilites, only it takes longer.

Thank you for letting me vent. I am just convinced I am this awful, horrible person. Whatever social errors I made must be so awful, people can't just come up and say what it is!

However, i'm glad many of you have found friendships this way. If so, wishing you the best in continuing these friendships, as friendships if they can be found, must be cherished.

p.s. Someone here wrote recently to the effect that the last person that is still with you (after everyone has left) is your true friend. Forget all the people who seemed so wonderfully friendly in the beginning, only to change their tune midway.

Recently I met an autistic ADD dude whom became my friend. Though he is still very alien to me, and even more difficult to deal with then normal people, it was interesting when I confronted him with the term ASD.

He used to call me several times in the week to hang out and have a drink, but these sudden appoinments wreck havoc on me lol. So I told him about it and said this is my ASD thingy. And he understood and I wrote the note: "=> it wouldn't hurt to have an autistic friend to learn and share experiences with."

And look where I am now lol, trying to learn and share experiences with other autistic people on WP. But to come back at my friend, I wanted to discontinue the relationship because it just caused to much stress. But the understanding and sharing of experiences might be helpfull for the both of us!

Generally speaking, I have better luck being friends with people who have disabilities, or at least people who have a close friend or family member with a disability. I feel more comfortable around them, so I don't act as weird in the first place. If I do act weird, they're far more forgiving, and are usually even willing to talk about it, instead of just disappearing on me.

Never really meet other people who i know has disabilities.

I've been to many institutions as a kid, never made any difference, ive been in some places as i was older where other people had problems as well, didn make any difference as well.

I dont see why i would, i mean if i have problems with normal people, i imagine it would actually be worse trying to communicate with another person like me or someone who has autism.

I mean the only thing and the nearest to a friend, is a guy on my Steam account, i meet once playing Team fortress 2, is was kinda odd, was just like, i know even know what to call it, but we could just talk. very odd, and still talk with him to this day every now and then on steam.