Is it possible to have an ASD and not develop depression?

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It's a question I've been thinking about lately. Is it even possible to be born with an autistic spectrum disorder and not eventually develop depression? Kind of a hypothetical question and I have no empirical evidence but to me it seems inevitable. After all, how could one possibly maintain good mental health with a condition that alienates you from so much of the world? How can one develop self-esteem if nobody really likes you? But during our formative years especially, when you're most vulnerable and impressionable, such experiences surely must distort your self-image and your mind in general in unhealthy ways. When you're a child with an ASD, unable to thrive and make important connections with others like the other kids, always excluded or victimized, the very experience of childhood itself can be traumatic. Is there any way anybody could escape unscathed?

I've been battling depression for the better part of my life and I'm just so frustrated right now. I feel the need to reach out. Perusing the forum, I see lots of questions about depression and other mental health problems and it got me wondering if there was anybody on here who has an ASD and has never had any other problems with their mental health, so I decided to ask.

I think over time I've become less prone to depression, though what I had in the past was a mix of things between being confused about how to socialize and working the night shift. I think lack of sunlight compounded it.

As for the predicament of isolation for so many it makes me think of a comment I heard about how the most desperate acting people in the world are those who's Identity is threatened or they have no Identity. I sometimes wonder if this lack of communal identity has a profoundly disturbing effect on the mind.

I thought this was shown in an interesting way in the movie Castaway with Chuck Nolan who is literally isolated. He tries several coping mechanism like drawing pictures on the rocks or even confiding to a soccer ball before he considers hanging himself. In a strange way people living in homes with modern conveniences and comforts are nearly that socially isolated and desperate.

Probably but its not very common. If you get diagnosed early, get the supports you need and consistently have them. Develop very NT like skills be the time your in Highschool. But thats the best possible outcome, the one all the parents of aspie kids hope for.

For most of us, autism doesnt go away once we hit adulthood. And many of us higher functioning people are undiagnosed and misdiagnosed with a psychiatric condition or have the co-morbid condition that covers the autism. Tho ironically we develop the co-morbid condition due to our social isolation and our inabilities to fit in.

I was selectivly mute when I was 8 which disgusted the aspergers. I later figured out it was because the social demands exceeded my social capacity so I went mute. By 12, I developed social anxiety, by 14 I developed OCD, and by 17, I developed depression when I overcame my mutism. By 22, I mostly overcame depression. Now I'm probably Im probably borderline, occasional depression. But yeah depression sucks, once I ended my depression, my life improved drastically, half of my psychiatric problems were gone.

http://www.asnz.exofire.net/Photo-Album ... rrings.jpg

I believe there would be a very high prevalence of depression among ASD people, especially young people who are still trying to figure themselves out.

I battled depression throughout most of my teens and 20s, but overcame it in my late 20s with a lot of effort, determination and supportive friends. Getting an actual aspergers diagnosis helped enormously, though that wasn't until this year.

I suppose there may be a handful of lucky ASD people who were diagnosed early and have very wise and supportive families who can help them develop good self esteem. For example, by making sure the ASD child is always aware of his/her own strengths and positive traits, raising him/her safe and non-judgmental environment, allowing him/her to pursue special interests, choosing the right school, etc.

Hopefully with increasing awareness of ASD there will be fewer cases of depression.

I am not sure, since I too have succumbed to horrible depression in the past, exactly from what you said: being alienated from the world. Mine also came from my cats dying, and being bullied at college.

I still very much don't belong in the world, but I'm only okay because of the medication I'm taking. I have no purpose, though.

I have AS, but I have never experienced depression. I think the reason is that I am severely affected in the area of social functioning, and this lack of awareness has actually protected me from depression and self-esteem issues.

I never really had the chance to develop good mental health......the AS did not help in that aspect. I mean if someone with AS or autism in general has a healthy family environment and support at school and all that then maybe they could go through life without developing depression. But I think more often than not there is not a healthy family environment and a lot of unpleasent social interaction at school.

So yeah now I feel pretty messed up mentally, but anyone could have seen it coming....I mean how was I supposed to learn how to deal with things if at home I got the messege to supress things and put on an act, and at school I just got picked on and made fun of more if I tried to do anything about it. If I did not have AS maybe I would have socially interacted better and would not have been such an outcast on top of it all. I mean my sister and my brother have no problems making friends and interacting and both of them seem to be doing better than I am...they certainly have problems of their own as much as anyone denies it social skills can make up for just about everything it seems.

I have Asperger's and I also was diagnosed with chronic depression.

I haven't got a depression yet! But I'm only 16 years old though. Don't think that I will get one because life is too awesome for that

I was depressed for years-- pretty much all of adolescence and into my 20s. A couple of years after I self-diagnosed, I decided that I wasn't defective, I was just different, and set about finding ways of getting along better with the NT world. The self-diagnosis made a lot of things make sense, and it wasn't too hard to either come up with work-arounds or embrace the idiosyncracies and accept the consequences. I was happy for about 8 years. Married, made some good friends, had kids-- life was excellent.

Then the consequences changed. My dad died and I got really depressed. My stepmom's family kicked me out, I started having a lot of problems with my in-laws due to not having the energy to "act neurotypical," I had to deal with a bunch of ambiguous facetious society crap, I had an ER nurse try to take my kids away because I was having a panic attack without a baby sitter and told her I had AS (hoping she would understand that getting scared is just par for the course for me, I just need someone to help me down out of my tree).

Now-- I don't know. If you can build and maintain a pretty good self-image, if you can find workarounds for the more awkward social crap, if you can find ways to deal with being lonely (or don't care much for a lot of human company), if you can stay away from a lot of the insensitive crap the experts say about us or at least manage to not see yourself through their lens, maybe. In short, if you can keep from seeing yourself as broken, neurotypical society as being by default out to discredit and destroy you, and difference as de facto deficit, you might very well be OK.

Doing that, however, might just take a very idiosyncratic miracle.

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have developed depression at all if I had not been abused, because I don't want to fit in, I want to be able to support myself and want to be myself, but don't care about fitting in.

As it is I've still not been diagnosed and don't know whether I would be diagnosed because my symptoms are so highly interconnected with my ASD traits at this time, and I was shown on my questioneer for my AS diagnosis to be only slightly higher than average for depression traits, yet I am fighting major hopelessness and its had huge affects on my meltdowns. (If anything I have reactive depression and the best description I have is that if you take PTSD and make it into depression instead of anixety that's what I look like)

So I'm not sure whether I actually would be considered having depression at the moment, but I can tell you that I'd be surprised if I had if I hadn't been abused.

I think it would be if a child was given strong family and school support.