"You can't be autistic, you can speak/write/have a job"

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I don't think that they would have done so unilaterally. If they had been, there would not be this explosion of late in life diagnosis.

I also don't know how you can be Autistic in 2015 and not Autistic in 1970. What am I missing here?

You're not missing anything.

Autism in 1970 had a vastly different definition than autism in 2015.

An autistic person via the 1970 definition, probably, would have been nonverbal or echolalic, would not initiate social contact, and would stim considerably. There would be no doubt as to the person's autistic status.

The change in the concept of autism is based upon accumulated knowledge, acquired over the decades, pertaining to autism spectrum disorders.

My friend: I'm on YOUR SIDE on the issue.

Last edited by kraftiekortie on 28 Jan 2016, 8:06 am, edited 1 time in total.

Sometimes perception is not reality. My first marriage lasted for 10 years (dated for several years before that), but it was far from a happy relationship. We fought continually, and she deliberately pushed my buttons to the point that I routinely became destructive in rage (towards objects, never her). I was continually frustrated in the relationship, in large part because she denied me the social down time I desperately need on a regular basis. You could say that I "appeared" NT because, hey - I was married after all. And if you didn't know me well, you might have assumed everything was OK. It wasn't. I was miserable.

My career has mostly been in relatively low-level IT jobs (primarily help desk and desktop computer support). I just got lucky enough due to geography to find positions that paid well above average in government contract jobs. I would have made a lot less money performing equivalent jobs in the private sector. Technically, it was a career and had enabled me to get by despite financial troubles due to poor executive function in my 20s and well into my 30s. Now, at age 44, I'm finally in a "real" career path doing photography professionally for my current company. My current wife handles all the bills because I can't keep up with that stuff. Paperwork overwhelms and paralyzes me.

I would have gone out on my own as an entrepreneur photographer years ago but I have no business skills despite being technically competent at what I do. If I wasn't working for someone else, there's no way I could do what I'm doing now despite being passionate for my craft. Left to my own devices, I'd give away all my work for free and starve for lack of profit.

I could go on and on, but the point is this: What you see as outward signs of "success" are often the fruit of years of failure and barely coping, buttressed by ongoing, external support (my current wife) that isn't always obvious to people looking in from the outside. It's taken me a good 20 years longer than most NTs to approach something like a career or success. And I still feel like it could all fall apart at any moment. I am confused and overstimulated on a near daily basis. Somehow I manage to hang in there despite feeling like I'm barely keeping my head above the water.

Autism does not preclude success.

Thank you for sharing that kraftie. Very interesting info. I remember in the article I read him also saying "perceptual problems". Although your case sounds more severe than his. I also had a miracle type breakthrough when I was 8 and became a lot more responsive. And I completely agree that a person does not have to have a similar childhood experience, to have autism. But the less there is of that sort of thing, the harder it is going to be for someone to convince certain others and I just don't think that should come as any surprise.

I feel very fortunate that I've progressed as much as I've progressed. I've never gone beyond clerk/support staff status. But I'm sort of okay with that.

I still don't know how I managed to emerge from my autistic darkness when I was 5 1/2, though.

I think about the story known as The Allegory of a Cave, by Plato. I also think about Piaget and his schemas/scaffolding. According to Piaget, in general, one must have attained a certain cognitive level to advance to the next cognitive level. I might have taken advantage of a little flicker of awareness to gain even more awareness.

Wow you put that so well and I relate to it so much. Darkness, fog, massive jumbled clutter. But in all that, this little bright light managing to find its way through.

Oh no...please don't misunderstand. A lot of all of this is new to me. I take in a lot of information here plus my daily life. A lot of it is overwhelming. I am also getting that my communications difficulties both incoming and outgoing have lead me to many a wrong conclusion. This explains you thinking very clear.

Thank you

If you are self disgnosed and say you are fine it is more likely you will not be believed then if you got a proffessional diagnosis and your traits are obvoius. 7 pages here and many other threads like this are good indications that people with proffessional diagnoses and people who pass well are often not believed.

All the exhaustion and effort put into passing often works against you because it makes you less likely to be believed.

If you say you have been feeling depressed, a bit OCD you are much much more likely to be believed then if you say you are autistic.

I still read posts by some Autistics who still use Aspergers instead of autistic because of stigma reasons. I can't see how this tactic won't backfire. All I know is that I have read so many comments saying basically Aspergers does not exist anymore because it never existed, it is all about elitist excuse making.

So people do need to vent about these things. A place like wrong planet should be the place to do that. Yet there is small but persistent group of members who doubt other members because they have a job or are married of self diagnosed or other reasons. The thing is if you are a middle aged it is likely you have been told your problems are because you are a bad person with charactor flaws your whole life. After a few decades it is pretty tiring.

It is a very different era now and I can understand how what we are describing about the way it was seems unfathomable to someone who was not around then. The fact of segregated water fountains and buses in the 1950's seems unfathomable to me. But I don't go around saying the older folks talking about it are whining and exaggerating it to make excuses.

Wanna know one of the things that occurred to me?

I was always afraid of being called upon because I would be found out to be a fraud. Now I realize that it was a deep recognition of the fact that I was faking every interaction I ever had. So, if that was a fake, I was a fake. I crumbled a lot.

I'm tired of killing gooses that lay golden eggs.

People with AS/HFA were usually diagnosed with other things like learning disabilities, ADHD, behavior issues, immaturity, developmental delayed, OCD, dyspraxia, sensory issues, and this went on before autism spectrum was widely known. They had all these single labels when it all could have been diagnosed as ASD. And of course some were mistaken as being ret*d.

Growing up in the 80's and 90's, I was labeled as having autistic behavior and as having autistic speech delay and I had other labels and was placed as being muti handicapped. My symptoms were not consistent with autism because I could roar like a lion and push a doll around in a stroller and I interacted with adults while I had social issues with my own peers and couldn't really play with them. I also did eye contact off and on if I was engaged in something. I even wonder if doctors thought I was unusual because I had symptoms of autism and symptoms of an NT. I even went to lot of doctors growing up and no one could tell her what I had wrong with me. I was diagnosed with ADD around age 10 but that didn't answer my mom's question because treatment I was getting for it wasn't working so she knew I had something else going on. It wasn't until 6th grade I was diagnosed. But before then my mom just had to do her best raising me and getting advice about how to raise me and teach me instead of assuming I was incapable of understanding or learning like most parents do about their special needs children. I also scored low on IQ tests so people thought I wasn't smart and it's unfortunate that people will only look at the IQ score instead of at the child's abilities and how they think and process things and how fast they learn.

Child of the 70s here. I'm using the word ret*d because that is what Aspies born in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s had to deal with. There is no sugar coating or making "nice" those situations.

There were NO special ed classes until 1978 at my elementary school. I left 6th grade in 1976. Those first classes were for hearing impaired and the "mildly trainable" retared. The trainable were Cerebral Palsy, Down Syndrome. Birth injuries.

Your little Aspie/Autistic kids when they totally derailed, and everyone said, "That's it". we're tossed into state hospital like this...you were just considered "ret*d" and that was enough. There was no real mental health diagnosis. You're a ret*d, and why bother with a reason? No real treatments except beatings and horse tranquilizers.

http://mcp.mihomepaper.com/news/2012-12 ... qpXm3pOmBY

That's where you went in the 60s and 70s. You were considered not bright enough to be bother to messed with. This is a place Temple Grandin might have been shipped off to had her mother listened to the doctors. You can read the article about what went on there. I think my state had at least 8 places like that from way back when to the 1980s.

You head banged, stimmed, acted up, late potty training, screaming, melt down, was a runner, spinned plates...your doctor suggested the above ^^^^^^^ shipped you off because, "Bless his heart, he can't be helped."

IF you managed to not be low functioning enough to be shipped straight off, had the nightmare of dealing with humanity and no one giving a s**t.

You managed to cobble a life together because jobs expectations where different, marriage expectation were different (people married because that is what you did), and everyone had a big helping of STFU about any unhappiness. You're wife bitched about unhappiness, welcome to the club.

If you couldn't hack it at the sped farm, you where packed off to the state asylum for the insane which made the farm look like a paradise.

My psychiatrist friend worked at a children's home for the "Untrainable and Uneducatable" during 1980-1982. It was a snake bit of anyone who couldn't deal with humanity. Lots of seclusion. Lots of Thorazine shots. Lots of tackle mats and helmets.

The early 1990s was the start of children's psychiatry and people really looking at children as not throw a ways or small adults.

They didn't even test adults for Aspergers until 2010 in my area, because child of the 70s, you managed to pass for so long, who cares?

If people knew what utter horses**t an adult on the spectrum had to do to survive 1950s-1990s, you wouldn't begrudge him/her a diagnosis now. You'd give them a flipping medal. All between you and the farm was a doctor looking at your strung out parents and dialing a phone.

Mt husband's parents had the suggestion of a "home" since he had moderate behavior issues. Lucky for him their religious beliefs stopped them. That was 1972.

I bet you break autistic stereotypes in some ways. You said somewhere you have friends, right? And you have enough self-awareness to talk about yourself on forums. Some people might think an autistic person can't do those things. I might be able to have "normal" conversations with others sometimes, but I still struggle socially very much.

The point is that we don't act like stereotypes, but that doesn't mean we're not autistic. Someone might be able to pass well enough to get a date, but at the end of the day they still struggle with their autistic traits. Autism manifests in very different ways, and it isn't always obvious who has it and who doesn't. I admit I have had similar feelings to you; when I read about an autistic person having had 10 partners, I think, "How could they do it? How could they suppress their autistic traits and attract people so easily?" But really, we can't know what it's like to be them unless we've lived it.

And not everyone has the same symptoms. Some people might not be bothered by touch, or enjoy certain kinds of touch.

As I see it, what poisons the well for us is people who preserve their ignorance of autism, whether they're diagnosable or not. I lived for half a century completely oblivious of autism. I was "just like my dad" who, too, was "a lot like his dad"

Now, I know about it. So what? Noone else does, unless they've a child in the diagnose and remediate sort of cycle.

That's quite true. For some of us, however, it can certainly delay it significantly.

I agree with most of what you said, there are stereotypes but im not even talking about stereotypes, im talking that some people seem to completely lack any form of disabling features... Your right, i break some stereotypes and mostly only to a trained eye or someone who knows what autism is can call it out.

and for the record, if someone is missing symptoms, then they dont have autism. plain and simple. You can't get diagnosed just because you have 2 out of 3. There are some cases that fall under PDD-NOS (not even that anymore) but i believe if a person is socially awkward and has "special Interests" but no sign of sensory sensitivity and theyre problems are not disabling then they are not autistic, yet experts still diagnose people. it doesnt make sense, its not like diagnosing a medical disease, Mental disorders are different, (again, what do i know, im a 19 year old high school drop out) I think autism is over diagnosed. I question if i deserved a diagnoses...