Please help to dx my Dad...

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here are a few features of his/notes from his life ..
--- no friends...there are were a few people who like him, but not many.
--written language was by far richer than spoken language;
--pretty cold with his family, not much of kisses or hugs;
---didn't tell his own mother that he got married and got a son already ( that would be me ) for at the very least a year or so after my birth ( they were married for 3 years or so before me ) ;
--highly intelligent but spent all his life doing hard manual labor ( I guess to avoid communication )
He entered the Uni twice but had to quit because of the foreign language ( German ) , he lost his father and 7 or 8 uncles in WWII, and refused to study it.
-- once he went to prison for 3 years for minor issues with his management that could be easily solved ( in fact they went as far as to fabricate the case to put him away, he was the only guy to be convicted on that penal article in a decade or so in a country of 270 mln people )
-- in the military service, he refused to honor one of his higher officers, after he ( the officer I mean ) claimed that he spent 3 wars on the front lines. He starved for 9 days in the military prison and by a lucky accident avoided a lengthy military sentence.;
-- can't say that he had limited interests, but he did concentrate his hobbies aggressively : photography; then fishing; then bee-keeping. He had money to buy quite a few hives, instead he decided to cut the trees, cut the planks, dry them for several years, make actual bee-hives, and never got the bees. He asked a relative for them once,and gave him a beehive or two, he refused, it never went far from it.
-- he was procrastinating everything he possibly could;
--- he was afraid of doctors, and for people to know that he or anybody of his family is sick ( with anything, it didn't matter, it was like a shame for him )

I could add some more lines here... like never been able to keep one line when walking with everybody, calming himself with monotonous movements ( he was making fish nets by hand -- a profitable hobby at the time ) and other... His uncle was very smart in math/physics, literally borderline genius level, but in his late 20s he was hospitalized in mental hospital , where he spend most of his time after then, until he killed himself , in a very brutal way, at the age of about 45...


The reason I wonder, I have life-long depressions ( since I am 13 or so ) and my only son was dxed with autism recently... So welcome me to the club, I guess..

To me it sounds plausible that he could be somewhere on the Autistic spectrum. However, I am a pizza delivery driver, not a doctor. Your guess is going to be better than mine as you have known him all your life and you have probably spent as much time researching the subject as I have.

well I'm really looking for opinions, not degrees, that's all.. For me, he looks like a high-functioning autist, but I am really new at this.. My son was dxed barely 1 month ago...

I wasn't trying to come off as rude (if I did) but rather point out the most logical argument that came to my mind. I am in much the same boat as I suspect myself of having it but not being educated in it, beyond what I can find online, I can't be certain. I also suspect a few people close to me of possibly being on the spectrum as well, but can't be certain.

What I would suggest is to try and have him take an online assessment test (stickied at the top of this forum). It won't be conclusive proof but it may lend credence to your hypothesis. Likewise, you could also answer one of the tests for your dad by trying to estimate what his answers would be.

I do stand by my original statement that what you posted sounds like he is somewhere on the autistic spectrum, if that helps.

I can't help you.

by reading you're story i started thinking,
you're dad sounds like he might have had a ass type condition just like mine sounds like he had either aspergers or hf,
my dad used too collect strange things because they might become worth something later, in some he was right,
he kept them catagorized with a catalog number on the box and a written catalog what was in the numberd box,
he had some friends but most he'd only write letters with.
he also lived by the rule that if anyone could invent someting you could invent it again, like a gun somebody thought of it so how hard could it be to recreate, so he recreated a working gun...
he could never keep a job verry long and has done almost every strange job you can think of with troubleshooting being the one he was best at.
he was also in the army and got himself in big trouble there especially when somebody told him he should take orders litteraly and then told him to paint the windows white... so they had white windows not window sills..
we also used to have some diffrent house rules from others (my mom also shows signs of aspergers) like if a door is closed you have to knock and wait for awnser before you go in, my parents always had there own seperate rooms and slept apart if they felt like it,
for me the knocking rule started from the age of two, so if i had shut my door my parents would knock and wait for a reply.
oure lives where all about artistic and inventive stuff wich was great as a kid, but in later life makes it hard to understand "other peoples" rules.
i was raised in a hippie household with barely any rules and a lot of freedom, the shock of "real society"hit pretty hard.
but then again i would not have wanted it any other way, and loved it, wish the rest of society would be that understanding.