Could having other more obvious disabilaties...

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...keep one from getting a proper diagnosis or possible intervention?


I've been doing some thinking lately, and if I remember correctly all anyone ever wanted to blame my troubles in school on was my eyesight, Obviously when I was a kid, I didn't think about any other possibilities. It was pretty obvious that my eyesight sucked (20/60 in left eye, 20/80 in right), but I think it's fairly obvious that had nothing to do with anything else. Looking back, it seems like that was the go to problem if I ever had any problems with anything. I've been wondering if maybe my eyesight would have been normal, then maybe they would have looked for the real cause of some of my problems.

Once you had your eyesight fixed (glasses) and they still saw your problems someone should have noticed. I think people see one problem and case closed. So not true.

Your general principle is correct. I know someone with albinism, low vision, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and a heart condition. Her ASD was missed for many years due to these (mainly the albinism; it was blamed for causing her to be a social outcast, thus the lack of social skills).

But I don't think mild-to-moderately affected vision in itself (my vision is similar and any eye doctor I've been to has told me it's not that bad) would mask ASD symptoms. I think you'd have to have more serious conditions that would affect social development for this to be the case.

I was the opposite. I think my diagnosis of Asperger's made some of my other disabilities more noticeable. I wasn't diagnosed with ADD and Anxiety until after I was diagnosed with Asperger's.

This was right, in my case. Some people didn't want to diagnose me for fear of that maybe my health problems had just caused personality changes and I wasn't actually AS. I am diagnosed with adrenal insufficiency (which if you know about it, affects the adrenals, pituitary and hypothalamus...and those affect just about everything) and have a chiari malformation (which can target most any neurological symptom). So people were very skeptical about my diagnosis.

How very odd! Your eyesight isn't that bad; it's pretty typical for someone who wears glasses. Blaming your oddities on your eyesight doesn't make much sense.

I do have one friend who is blind and whose AS was missed for a good while thanks to his blindness; but he's completely blind, not just somebody who simply needs glasses. His (auditory-centered) special interest and stimming were always put down to his blindness by doctors who didn't realize that he has a classic case of AS.

Just a guess but the OP may have been referring to corrected vision. Still not that bad though, I think my vision was worse than that for awhile before anyone even noticed. ("Look at those people." "What people??")

Of course it could. The more obvious disabilities mostly hide the less obvious problems and unless doctors know what they are looking for specifically, I would think it would be very easy for them to miss them and blame any issues on the current diagnosis.

To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure, I've been told that 20/60 and 20/80 is my visual acuity, but I'm not sure if that is with or without glasses. I've also been told that I'm legally blind, but those numbers don't match by a longshot what is actually supposed to be legal blindness. Although it is pretty obvious that my eyes are much worse than the average person's who wears glasses, just based on lens thickness, and all of those times in school when someone asks to try on your glasses (never understood why anyone would want to do that) and then the nearest glasses wearer then decides to trade glasses. I can't usually tell much of a difference between my sight without glasses, and wearing theirs, while they always reacted with "woah!". If this tells you anything, my glasses are a little thicker than a quorter of an inch. Strangely enough, even though I've always been curious, for some reason I never think to ask when I see the eye doctor.


Still though, the fixes for the problem aren't that complicated, just sit at the front of the room, use a magnifying glass or larger print material when needed. Oh and I was supposed to get printed copies of whatever was ever put on a projector (I swear those machines are evil). My point is, it seemed like all of my teachers/counselors/parents (and even to an extent, me) always worried way to much about my vision way above anything else. There was one counselor who did look further into my social activities as well as my lack of focus, and she was the one who initially suggested AS.