Caroline Hearst's autism was only diagnosed at the age of 55

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"After battling with social awkwardness and depression for most of her life, CAROLINE HEARST was finally diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at 55. Now her mission is to raise awareness of ASD, which is often under-diagnosed in women and girls":

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/art ... ge-55.html

Good for her. I can relate a lot to what she says because I was diagnosed at age 55 also.


I can relate to Caroline Hearst's comment:





I've seen several therapists, psychologists and even psychiatrists becoz, even tho i understood why my parents were (for the most part) unable to be there for me, & had heard that many people become estranged from (eg) junior school friends, i've had no one appreciating the things i'm able to do, and have been given no suitable guidance regards how to be as productive as i thought i could be; I was unable to navigate 'society' ...& i was constantly being attacked for being me. ^^^^^ The fact that those therapists were only interested in my parents failings and refused to believe i didn't hold any grudges shocked me ...at first, then, as time went on, it annoyed me ~ they were meant to know all about the brain, and society, yet there they were basically accusing me of lying; they insisted i was the one dwelling on the past, and they refused to acknowledge / consider the realities of my present. Of course, my witnessing (when i was 11) the adult world use gender and race and class as an excuse to break up the group of kids my best friend belonged to, and then seeing her whisked out of the city, traumatized me ~ i went from having very little support to having none, and was suddenly surrounded by adults who were allowed to be openly hostile towards nice people for stupid 'reasons' ~ i could not function in that environment, yet 'helpful' people were only interested in trying to fix my 'self imposed' isolation. ^^^^^ Nothing i said could convince therapists that i wasn't missing my family for the wrong reasons, and they didn't believe that the culture shock i experienced prior to secondary school led to my 'obsession' with social science / politics ~ they figured i was 'in love' with my dad and had 'turned against' white people becoz i have an inferiority complex. Truth is i have always seen everyone as equals and am very uncomfortable around people who don't. I was stunned when therapists decided my anger at the adults who had turned my childhood upside down was innapropriate ~ the fact that i couldn't hide my disappointment over those therapists' ignorance was used as a 'reason' to identify me as someone with "an anger problem". ^^^^^ I still didn't give up on psychology (in principal), because i knew someone out there had to have figured out what was really wrong with everyone, but i've yet to meet a therapist who doesn't pathologize every little thing, or who doesn't get so hung up on one detail that they ignore all the other details. ^^^^^ My research into the history of psychology hasn't been appreciated by mainstream therapists either ~ i'm a little better at defending myself now and they resent it. I'm supposed to blindly and passively trust them, even when they give me reason not to ~ i'm supposed to believe they mean me no harm, even though they've never done any good and have, over time, supported each-other's belief that i couldn't possibly know what i need. ^^^^^ If i had been diagnosed as (eg) hfa or aspergic when i was young i wouldn't have spent my entire adult life trying to prove that i don't simply have low self esteem, let alone 'an unhealthy longing for [my] abusive parents'.

I get a lot of grief ALL THE TIME for my quietness and lack of eye contact yet it took 18 years for "experts" to finally get the autism connection.

It just annoys me when kids get diagnosed like that for the smallest social introversion yet people are still bewildered when I tell them I have AS.

She did a presentation at Autscape 2012, about exploring personal responses to similarity and difference in the context of autistic community:
http://www.autscape.org/2012/programme/ ... ers#hearst

I felt very sad reading this and there were many things in it that I could identify with as another "late discovery" person. Yet despite the sadness (over the waste) it was also validating. Thanks for posting it. The 50 plus group is usually so overlooked or ignored in the thousands of articles printed about ASD every year that sometimes it feels as if we are invisible, and even on WP, it does seem that some of younger members' posts reinforce the assumption that everyone here is under 50, like them.