What were you diagnosed with during the 80s?

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Hello, everyone,
I'm just doing some research.
Before Asperger's became well known, what were you diagnosed with in the 1980s?
And if you were later diagnosed with Asperger's or A.S.D or something else - what year?
Does anyone one know when Asperger's Syndrome became more well known and used?

Thank you, everyone.

If I recall correctly Aspergers was first recognized in the USA in the DSM-IV manual used by doctors to diagnose people. DSM-IV came out in 1994. I also heard that Aspergers was removed as a diagnosis in the latest DSM-V about to come out. I read Aspergers is now included as part of the autistic spectrum, and that there is quite a bit of controversy over this revision. I do not know whether or not the final version of DSM-V will include Aspergers or not. Of course that does not change my condition at all. A rose (or neurological disorder) by any other name etc.

I was put on SSI Disability in the late 1980s but I honestly do not know what diagnosis was used then. My mother gathered many school and doctor's records from my childhood as evidence that something was going on with me. I was born in 1960 and when I was a child I think I was diagnosed as hyperactive, possibly manic depressive or maybe even schizophrenic.

In the late 1990s I self-diagnosed with Aspergers after a counselor suggested I might have it. I had never heard of it before, but when I read the list of symptoms it was like light bulbs going off over my head. Since then I have been officially diagnosed in two states, and I am now set up with the developmental disability branch of the local health department which is where I should have been decades ago.

I have been receiving some badly needed assistance with daily living the past three years from a Regional Brokerage and I am very grateful for their help. The help didn't start until I was already fifty years old, but "Mieux vaut tard que jamais" (pardon my French).

I was not diagnosed with anything during the 1980s, although I was already an adult at the time.

I was first diagnosed about two years ago - although I did (with hindsight) have Asperger's back in the 1980s (and 1970s and 1960s...).

I wasn't diagnosed until I was in my 50s.

Many people with AS back in the 1980s just struggled or coped as best they could without any diagnosis. Unless you had a "breakdown", or were caught trying to commit suicide, or were in trouble with the police ("delinquent" or "troubled") you were usually left to sink or swim.

I left school in 1980. There was no such thing then. The child protection laws didn't come out till the mid 80s. Corporal punishment was still used in schools. Generally, if you were disruptive you copped a frequent belting, and if you were quiet you just sat down the back and left there. There was one system that everyone went through, and they either swam or sank. The focus on children has only come about in the last 20 years or so. Before then it was still the old rule of children are to be seen and not heard. Family was seen as sacred then. Even if you suspected or heard screaming every night people just left alone. You didn't go into peoples homes and meddle. People just took what is as the way it was. Behaviour and development just happened, if it didn't turn out Ok then there was obviously something wrong with you to cause it, and bad luck. It's not something people thought about until more recently. I was diagnosed about 5 years ago when my kids were going through it.

To my knowledge, nothing. It was suggested by a GP when I was 20 I might have ADHD and OCD although I never really followed up because that didn't completely fit even though I had many symptoms. As a child, I was just labelled as extremely shy and a fussy eater because there were no words to describe me back then. My mother stopped taking us to a pediatrician when he wrote on his report that I was "deliberately defiant" and "thinks he's a class clown". This coming from a kid that was practically mute (outside his weird special interests) and literally stood still while bullies took turns beating him because he was such a rule follower and would not fight back since 'hitting was against the rules'. Nobody even thought I had Aspergers until I suggested it myself and now it's almost common sense that I have it. Still not quite formally diagnosed due to finances but it is literally a formality at this point.

Autism in 1978 but the papers danced around the subject throughout the 1980s.

OCD, major depression, bulimia, bipolar (1984-1986, adolescent/teen years)

AS dx year 2013

In 1977 (age 9), I was wrongly diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, then in 1980-ish, it was hyperactivity disorder, then some time in the mid-80s, clinical depression, and you name it; I've been misdiagnosed with it!

Finally the accurate high-functioning autism diagnosis came formally about 2 years ago (suspected for about 10 years prior).

Charles

I was diagnosed with a farting disorder.

i fart every three seconds. no wonder i cant get a gf

In the early 90's I did something stupid and ended up in a psych hospital for two months. For whatever reason, the psychiatrist seemed to think I didn't belong with the general psych population so he moved me to a more remedial location which contained people with severe developmental problems. I stayed there for two days before they moved me back to the general population.

Looking back on the experience, I think the doctor probably thought I was autistic or mentally ret*d. He wasn't far from the truth, but I just didn't need the remedial help like he suspected.

In the early to mid 1980's I saw a child development psychologist. I don't know what they diagnosed me with, however I know that they intended me to be put into an asylum for children, where I would have permanentaly lived.
Part of the process required my Mother visiting it. She was appalled as according to her the children were so heavily sedated that they were like zombies. As a result she refused to give her permission/consent for me to move there.

I now know that most of the symptoms that manifested when I was a child were a combination of ADHD, & aspergers meltdowns.
I had a very dysfunctional & chaotic home environment.

For years psychologists & psychiatrists kept giving me all sorts of 'labels', including: Emotional Unstable Personality Disorder/Borderline Personality Disorder, Narcolpepsy, Schizophrenia, Anti-Social Personality Disorder, & Depression.

EVENTUALLY when I was 30 a very good psychiatrist felt that actually I had ADHD & Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder/Borderline Personality Disorder. He concluded that the ADHD & EUPD/BPD were interacting, and prescribed ADHD medication.
With the ADHD being successfully controlled with medication there was no longer an interaction between both conditions, and so I began the slow journey or recovery from EUPD/BPD.

7 years later I was told that I had recovered from EUPD/BPD, and my diagnosis was ADHD (which continues to be medicated), and traits of aspergers (which could be explained by the ADHD rather than requiring a seperate diagnosis).

Recently the proffesionals feel that there is more going on than just ADHD, and that I also have full-blown aspergers.
People don't suddenly get aspergers, so I must have had it all along as well as the ADHD.

My diagnosis is now ADHD, Sensory Processing Disorder; and I am at the final phase of being given a diagnosis of aspergers.

If I was a modern day child (a child now) no doubt it would have been a far simpler proccess.
It's been a long, hard, and difficult journey.

Autism and then autistic traits and I had hearing loss and a speech delay.

Then in 1997 it was AS and I had other labels before that in the 1990's. No one knew exactly what I had and they thought it was ADD. I would say it was the late 1990's when it got well known and early 2000's because more doctors knew about it.

In the 1980s, I was in my 20s and wasn't diagnosed with anything; autism was only beginning to be discussed in the media and only Classic Autism at the time. I do, however, remember watching an ABC news 20/20 story in 1982 on autistic kids, in which a reporter asked a researcher why the kids did things like rocking and banging their heads. The doctor said "We really don't know that yet." I vividly recall sitting at home watching that and saying aloud: '"Ask me, I know why they do it."

I knew then that I had something in common with those kids, but at that time nobody was talking about High Functioning Autism or Asperger Syndrome, so I couldn't connect the dots, but I knew that whatever was affecting them, I had some version of it. Many times over the years, people I worked with would interrupt me during a conversation because of my constant stimming from side to side and say "Can you stop that, you're making me seasick - what are you, autistic?" - to which I could only reply "Yeah, I think so - 'lil' bit."

So when someone sent me an email link to a webarticle on Asperger Syndrome, with the header 'Read This, It Sounds Like You,' I can't say I was shocked. Finally, it all made sense. Getting the diagnosis was just a formality.

ADD, ADHD, clinical depression, you name it, I had it. School was a living hell and corporal punishment was still in effect so I had my share of getting my a$$ whacked with the paddle. I've been on and out of mental hospitals and it wasn't until I was 20 that I finally walked away from everything to lived on my own. I never got the chance to find out I had AS because the DSM-IV came out in 1994 and I was 23 at the time and I was tire of dealing with my mental problems because nothing at the time ever seem to work. What made it bad about having AS or HFA in the 80's is that the teachers and your parents thought you where nothing but a spoiled rotten misbehaving little brat.

I never was diagnosed with anything but in the 80s I went to so many special classes, special schools, a mental hospital, and a reform school. I was tested so many times and saw so many counselors that they must have thought I had something. If I was diagnosed no one told me or my mother.