Autism and adults

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I have tried to raise the problem of adults with autism here from the start. It's difficult because most adult people don't even know that they are autistic. Most of them are simply diagnosed as suffering depression, or other borderline (borderline with what?) conditions.
I find that the NAS initiative, launched in the last two years, the "I exist!" campaign, is an extremely important one and deserves every form of support.
I give here a link of an YouTube of the NAS:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiDp8qF8-oA
I invite every one who thinks he/she may be an ASD adult to come out and gived his/her account of his/her life. There are some books publikshed in the US. Besides Donna Williams and Temple Grandin there is.
Tm Page, Parallel play.
I also think that many books with no mention of AS or ASD might shed light on an arecognized conbdition of ASD with severe suffering,like Patricia Highsmith's novels (see the very goof bography of PH: Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith by Andrew Wilson ).

Wow, that was a really great video. I have been so frustrated throughout my adult life because I really need help as an adult and often it is very hard to come by. So much focus is on children - or really just getting them through the school system but it's just a free fall afterward - when, in my experience, I needed help the most.

Edited for typo

I liked what Ann Milton, MP, Shadow Minister for Health, said about 3:45 into it:

rather than what their diagnosis is, what do they need (what help and support can we provide to people in our community, regardless of how they're different)

And speaking personally, what I often seem to need, and what I also think is a social justice issue, is full employment or something close to full employment. Close enough so that we'll get the great switch, so that those in hiring positions (specifically corporate human resource departments), instead of looking for reasons not to hire a person, will start looking for reasons to hire a person.

I found that us autistic adults to be simply on our own. If a governmental agency intervenes, it is usually to take something away.

what a great video

I agree. I have been told many times since my diagnosis "Your autism is not a reason for us to treat you any different from anyone else because you are an adult. Deal with it". I do like the video and hope the message spreads from the UK to America.

Autism is a lifelong journey.

I both loved and felt uneasy about the video.

I loved it because it's so great to hear people with power talking about the unmet needs of adults with autism and how services can work better to meet those needs.

I felt uneasy about it because it kept showing adults with autism talking but with no sound coming out and then it showed adults without autism talking about how they were going to help us and then it would go back to pictures of adults with autism and you could see that some of them were talking but again, no sound came out.

And I kind of felt like it was being a grown-up Autism Speaks -- the autistic people were speaking but we weren't allowed to hear what they had to say, only what the talking heads of authority had to say. And don't get me wrong, the talking heads were saying some very important things. But I kind of felt like the images of autistic adults were being used ... kind of like the people were being used to make some kind of emotional impact without actually letting them speak for themselves.

But overall, I'm very, very glad that England is doing this and I also understand that my unease is just with the video because I read one of the I Exist reports and it was peppered throughout with direct quotes from autistic adults so I know they *are* listening to us and they *are* letting others hear (or read) our direct voices but I think it was a bad choice in the video. At first, I thought my headphones were broken because there were just pictures of autistic adults and no sound for several seconds.

Dx should not be a tag for discrimination. But adult and old people are de facto discriminated much more by a lack of recognition of their condition than by visibility. This holds for all forms of diversities. Of course there should be a climate of respect for diversity in society at large. That all humans are created equal is a big lie and reminds me of Ahmadinejad's speech at Columbia, when he said that in Iran there are no gays.
So people are different and have different needs. To hide or deny their differences is the premise for social mistreatment.

If someone made a film where we met three different people with autism, and viewers could see, Wow, all three of them are really different (you've meet one person with Asperger's, you've met one person with Asperger's), and could also see, Wow, all three of them have something to contribute---that would be revolutionary.

Maybe an hour long documentary.

If the entities being diagnosed in children now as Asperger's and autism have not increased in frequency over the past few decades, then there are a very large number of undiagnosed adults with ASD around.

I have read so many stories here from adults who have learned the explanation for their awkwardness and otherness very, very late in life, but recognised instantly that this is what they have.

The NAS actually did the study the woman was describing at the end of that video. they found that the percentage of the adult population (of all ages) with ASD is the same as the percentage of children with ASD, thus indicating that there has been no increase in frequency in England, just an increase in appropriate screening and diagnosis.

I don't recall how recent it is, but I've heard the NAS mention that there are one million people in England with an autism spectrum disorder.

That was one thing I really enjoyed about the book "Mozart and the Whale." Jerry and Mary are so obviously very, very different yet both share the same diagnosis. That's also why I particularly enjoy anthologies from a variety of autistic writers.

I'm a bit put-out that my university has finally decided to pay attention to autism and the Reading Project book is Curious Incident. It's a piece of fiction, written by someone who is not autistic and had limited exposure to autistic people. There are so many good and very engaging autobiographies and anthologies that are written by people who actually are autistic, as well as other non-fiction books written by people with great exposure to autistic people such as professionals or family members.

When one can only choose one book to expose an entire university of students to the idea of autism, I think there are better choices than a novel by someone who "is "now thoroughly irritated" that this term (Asperger's syndrome) appeared on the cover, because people have kept contacting and asking him to appear at lectures about autism." (from the Wikipedia article, quoting The Independent)

Do you have any statistics for that claim?

"By applying the one in 100 figure, we estimate that over 300,000 adults in England have autism,"

source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/ ... m-strategy

"A national centre is being launched in Southampton to offer an assessment and diagnostic service for an estimated 100,000 undiagnosed adults in the UK."

source: http://www.southampton.ac.uk/mediacentr ... 8_23.shtml

Using the estimates from these two sources, 1/3 of autistic adults in England would be undiagnosed. No idea how many of those undiagnosed know they are autistic or not.