A lost Generation of Autistic people?

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This idea has just occurred to me and I am beginning to wonder whether it is the case. Over the months I have been on wrong planet I am beginning to notice a trend, that being many people in their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s have struggled to adapt in time to the world around them due to being misunderstood at an early age. I am beginning to wonder could this be some big phenomenon in the autistic community whereby a generation of baby boomers have been left behind and deprived of support?

I feel this might apply to many people, not just people with autism.

People tend only to care about their immediate environment, and about conformity. About people when benefit them immediately. People who are "odd" are just not in their radar.

Hence, they are ignored and lost in the shuffle.

I have learned to just enjoy myself on my terms. I create my own shuffle.

Kinda like asking "is water wet?".


Kanner discovered the hard core extreme kind of autism in circa 1960 ( what they later called "low functioning autism", and we now call "Type III autism").

But aspergers wasnt officially recognized as a diagnosis in the US (or in most places outside of the German speaking parts of Europe)until 1994 (and even then most of the dummies who make up the American mental health profession never heard of aspergers until about a decade later).

So...yes... at least two generations of American aspies, and other type I autistics, grew up unrecognized between 1960, and 2004. And being unrecognized meant being unsupported.

So obviously folks in those two generations are only now learning about how they did NOT get proper support.

Temple Grandin was lucky to be born in wealth and in a place where she could access the most modern mental health professionals of the time.

Temple Grandin was born in Boston, Massachusetts, into a highly educated and wealthy family.

Contrary to widely published reports, Grandin was never formally diagnosed with autism in childhood or in youth

One of the great secrets of life, that.

This is certainly my experience, but a data point of one is not a statistic.

This study would seem to support your hypothesis (although it's about PDD-NOS, not AS): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21713590

If anything, long-term social prognosis is not good even with diagnosis and intervention.

Most talent has been wasted throughout history. It also takes great luck to find the right people to interact with. I'm not yet impressed with the results of the professionals who make a living trying to help us now, either. There's a lot more focus on teaching us stuff that is hard to learn instead of finding partners who can team up with us to make our unique talents useful.

That is the the privilege of the wealthy. They have the time and money to find really good personal instructors for their children.

That's because if they made it easy for you to learn
and you actually succeeded,
you would become independent from your teacher,
such that your teacher would no longer earn money teaching you.

I've learned well over the years because in large measure,
I've been my own teacher.

Me too. I'm a high school dropout, but I've lectured to graduating engineers and gotten applause. Bad education is planned from the top not so much to employ more teachers as to hobble independence and democracy. The bad teachers are just selected for having enough Dunning-Kruger that they know not what they do.

We were not "lost", we were never known about in the first place. Although changing there is still significant belief that we do not exist.

Yes.

If I were an evolutionary biologist or an evolutionary psychologist, I'd say that natural selection in our particular environment favors people who do not have autism. And beyond that, it favors people who are 100% psychologically healthy, which would mean they don't have any mental disorders at all. Disorders are, in a way, political and social constructs, because Nature doesn't know anything about disorders, but it does know about survival and reproduction.

When a trait becomes unfavorable for survival or reproduction, the trait disappears from the population over many generations. If autism continues to be considered an unfavorable trait by natural selection, which is does seem to be now, then we may see autism disappear in 300 generations.

Something that's strange to me is that, even though homosexuality occurs about as frequently as autism - about 1% of the population - homosexuality is not considered to be a disorder, while autism is considered to be a disorder. Why is that? If two conditions occur at the same rate, why is one considered normal and the other is considered a disorder? The answer is: politics. This is a purely political decision, and separating "normal" from "pathological" is more about the values of society than about scientific reality.

And we live in a society that doesn't put a lot of value on autistic traits.

Actually, homosexuality is about 10%, with a gradual progression to heterosexuality. Also, it is still considered a disorder in some countries, and was in many until recently. A disorder is that which makes normal functioning improbable.

https://www.mentalhelp.net/articles/sch ... -patterns/
Schizophrenia has an incidence similar to autism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handedness
Left handedness has a incidence similar to homosexuality, while cross dominance has an incidence similar to autism.

Last edited by BTDT on 04 Feb 2017, 6:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Red haired folks are about the same percentage of the American population as autistics. And so is the proportion of voters who voted for Jill Stein. But neither of those stats has any bearing on whether or not autism is a disorder. Lol!