Can this happen?

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Can an indivdual with seveare aspergers overtime go from 'seveare' to mild aspergers?

Easily. Severity / functioning levels are pretty much worthless.

Why are they worthless?

I had worse sensory issues and social problems as a kid. Though not perfect, things still have gotten a lot better for me.

People can overcome obstacles (AS or not) and reach a point in their lives which would not be expected of someone with their particular level severity. But the As remains the same imo. It all depends on the way you deal with it

Over what span of time? And, it also depends on what you mean by "severe" and "mild."

If you mean things that most people typically notice and find weird, a particular person might be able to suppress stims and do other things to 'act' such that they look less odd (by typical standards). If the change is overnight, that's what I'd guess was going on.

If it's from childhood to adulthood, sure. I hear that you can't tell at all how someone will look in adulthood by looking at them in childhood. All people grow and learn over a lifetime, and would be a bit odd for someone not to change at all.

The thing with "severe" and "mild" is that AS isn't a disease, like having a virus, where you can measure the "badness" in a simple way by taking a person's temperature -- and where "badness" or "worse" and "better" has a clear meaning.

As I experience it and I hear from other autists it gets better in time and training, just keep working on it and learn from your less fortunate events.

Could you be more specific ?? This is a very vague question.

yes, im pretty sure you can. 'severe' and 'mild' are just labels- if you can learn social skills and stife stimming if you have it then yeah you can be more mild in the eyes of others. I compulsively touch my hair and snap my fingers when nervous so I'm trying to stop doing it... analytical thought patterns and stuff will remain though, thats neurological and just the way AS people process information.

With AS, severity is SEVERLY limited. I mean like cognitive non social items can't go very low before they shove you out of the AS category.

Sensory issues are given to become worse or improve under various circumstances anyway, so can you really say it has switched? I mean different materials could make things worse, and overexposure can also.

Social issues probably start at about the same level for most AS people. With ME, I never seemed to be able to detect a break I could use, spoke the unvarnished truth, some things seemed OBVIOUS to me, and I seemed to LOVE to talk about my interests. I ALSO have a very tangential way of thinking and speaking. That led to the blunt, seemingly arrogant, monolog type speech of AS people. Not really hard to understand.

With females, things won't seem so obvious. And I doubt it would really get noticably worse.

Eventually, I varnished the truth, understood that some just CAN'T understand, withheld detail and held back on my interests. As for breaks? Well I STILL have problems with that.

Steve

Your level of functionality will vary significantly over time, not just switch from bad to okay, but more like rollercoaster up and down and back up again, depending on other circumstances in your life. I have good days during which I function almost as 'normally as an NT and horrible days when I just fall apart and can't accomplish anything constructive, and occasionally something will happen that causes me to go from one to the other within a matter of minutes. But I find when I have a job, or a purpose, doing something I feel confident I can do well, my mental and emotional states are much more stable. The longer I stay cooped up away from the world, the harder it is to force myself to get back out and interact again.

The way I see it, if you have luck in life it will get better but if you don't I guess it will get worse. There are a lot of different factors involved that can't really be measured or predicted.

yes. An intelligent Aspie can and most likely will learn to adapt to the NT world. Lets face it. NTs outnumber Aspies 99 to 1. It is up to the Aspies to adapt as well as they can. A well adapted Aspie, such as myself, will appear fairly normal to NTs.

ruveyn

99 to 1 YIKES!! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !!

Are there really that few of us out there?

The problem with severity is that autism affects so many different things, not all easily measured, that you can't just give someone a unified functioning level. Also for many, those things change day to day, hour to hour. As well, we don't even know what autism is. There's an idea out there even supported by some research that people with a little autism may do worse than those with a lot of it. But then since we don't know how to measure a little or a lot... yeah.

Also the problem with assuming intelligence (whatever that is) will help a person overcome it, is that... the various cognitive skills that get called intelligence can't always do anything to overcome some kinds of sensory issues, social naïveté, cognitive blind spots, social confusion, etc. That works for some but not for all. I know a lot of very conventionally intelligent people who were labeled with severe/profound intellectual disability most of their lives because they couldn't and still can't overcome extreme sensory and movement problems. Many of them are far smarter(in the way that word is generally used) than I am, and I was labeled extremely gifted back when they were labeled profoundly intellectually disabled (and I'm no longer considered "gifted" at all). Not that I support conventional definitions but most people do. And I know many autistic people who despite current labels of giftedness, are always falling for the latest hucksters because of extreme naïveté, or are trapped in their houses from agoraphobia or severe overload. Cognitive or academic skills only go so far.

I've made a lot of strides, compared to where I was four years ago, to this day. I'm posting about a wider variety of things. It took a very painful experience here at WP, to pick and choose what I post about here on WP and how often. I also try to post about a variety of things and learn about the interests of my fellow members. That's what I mean by making strides. I'm also more interested in people than I am in buses, now.