Autism was recently brought up in another thread and I thought we might be able to continue the discussion here. Please jump in anywhere.

Autism is often misunderstood. I've worked with people on the spectrum, ranging from high functioning to middle/low (including non-verbal) and I can't say I always understand it. The symptoms and expressions of it are varied and range quite a bit - in fact, it's called a spectrum disorder.

One person noted that some people equate autism with stupidity. That's wrong. Autism is not stupidity. Some people with autism have cognitive or developmental delays that are part of their condition, but others are geniuses in certain areas. I have some thoughts about autism, but I don't know how accurate or true they are. I remember reading about autistic brains having a larger gap between the two sides (is that hemispheres?) than the average person. Since many with autism often suffer with issues related to speech and social interaction, it made me wonder if a symptom of autism is bigger differences between one side of the brain or the other. Is this a way of describing autism overall? I once heard a learning specialist describe autism as a disorder of language, but it feels like an inadequate description to me.

One of my teachers (who is also a nurse) described it as having a difficulty of sorting through sensory input. Kind of like being bombarded with sensoric stimuli (like everyone is every day), but having difficulties sorting out which imputs are important and which are not, something that people who does not have autism manages to do just fine. I think she also meant that where the person is on the spectrum depends on how difficult it is for them to sort through the sensory input, and how well they're able to deal with it. Those high up on the scale learn to fuction very well, even if they might have difficulties with things like deciphering face expressions - but they might deal with it by being extremely good at perhaps one or two things that they manage to put all their concentration into (the genus thing). On the other hand, those near the bottom of the scale kind of "shuts down" so they won't have to deal with all the impressions.

I'm not sure if that's how it works, but it sounded like a good description. Better than describing it as a disorder of language, anyway. I'm pretty sure there's some brain chemistry and brain differences in there somewhere, too - but that's true for a lot of brain disorders.

You can't always boil conditions down to how the brain looks like, as with enough time the brain can learn to work around the damaged parts (plasticity). I remember a patient from my work practice who'd gone through a very serious stroke, and while a large part of her brain was damaged, even the doctors were surprised at how well she functioned, despite the injury. Just a few days ago I read about a woman born without the cerebellum (the part of the brain that controls fine motor skills), and she was just a little dizzy but otherwise quite well functioning.

Do you mean a difference in the size/capacity of each side of the brain or less of a join (lateralisation) between the two sides of the brain? I seem to possess high lateralisation but low tolerance for visual and aural stimuli.

This is unbelievably creepy. I was just looking at something from a book I own about women with Aspergers Syndrome (a form of high functioning autism) and I came to this board to start this exact thread. How awesome :P

I am one such woman! Half self-diagnosed, half formally diagnosed. I found out about autism, specifically Aspergers and it was like reading a description of myself. It was eerie how precise it was.
I went to my doctor, who luckily had dealt with autism before, and she strongly agreed and put me forward for a professional diagnosis. Unfortunately when they FINALLY called me for the appointment (after 2 YEARS on the waiting list) I was in such a bad state of mind that I couldn't make it. Back to the bottom of the list I went...

In the book I mentioned, called "Aspergirls", as well as describing what it's like to be a woman with Aspergers, growing up with Aspergers and such, it also describes the differences between males and females within the disorder. They present so differently that until not too long ago, many doctors believed that Aspergers didn't affect women. The official diagnosis of women with Aspergers is still much lower than the rates for men, but many believe that's simply because it presents more "subtly" in women, and is just often missed, and that in actuality there are just as many female aspies as male.

Here's the chart from "Aspergirls" that convinced me I was an Aspie followed by a list of differenced between the males and females with Aspergers Syndrome


I feel my obsession with sims is a direct result of my Aspergers

It's so important to talk about women and girls with Autism Spectrum Disorders, but it is so underdiagnosed in women, especially women of color (and in men of color, actually)!

I think the latest research suggests that Autism stems from a dysfunction with mirror neurons, which helps process information by mimicry. That's a really simplistic explanation, but the current thinking is that Autistic folks have a hard time learning and understanding by watching others. For example, if an alistic (non-autistic) person was getting on a bus and didn't know how to pay, they'd have a much easier time figuring out how to pay by watching other passengers than an autistic person might. That's a generalization, of course. It's a spectrum, and there's a huge range.

That's why the earliest signs of autism are delayed speech, avoidance of eye contact, and relative expressionlessness. Most alistic infants will smile in response to being smiled at, but an autistic infant will see the smile, but won't respond in kind or attach any significance to the expression. Which makes sense! Like, whatever, you're making faces at me, why should I make faces at you?

http://www.autismspeaks.org/what-autism

Just some basic info about autism.

Rats! I started the discussion and then my life ran away with me and I haven't been able to participate.

@simbalena - I think it was the part in the middle was larger and deeper so that the two sides did not communicate as well. I guess that information or neurons or something is supposed to flow back and forth between the two sides...? I don't really understand the brain....

@supersimoholic - I think I read that book. The subtle and different presentation makes sense. I think one could make the same statement about ADHD in females, too. It looks different. When I looked at that book and the list of things that might point to it, it felt like too many people I knew fell into that list. It's tricky because I don't think everyone I know has Aspergers, but that, at times and in some cases, there must be a fine line between what's considered neural typical and autism.

@Graveyard Snowflake - I'm glad you put up that link, it's a good place to start for getting information about autism.

How do you all feel about the elimination of the diagnosis of Aspergers from the DSM?

My husband is the asparagus man. That's a term HE coined when I told him my diagnosis. It surprised me that he wouldn't investigate it, but he was insulted. Talking to his sister (what he was like as a child), my sister (nurse) and research has convinced me he has aspergers. He is absolutely brilliant, speaks 4 languages, has 2 degrees, does some kind of math FOR FUN OMG! Like a person who is color blind, he doesn't "see the world" like other people. In ways he seems like a 14 year old; he just cannot understand a lot of emotional things. It's hard to explain, but while being married to him is frustrating at times, I would rather be aggravated with his inability to relate, than with the sorts of things that SOME wives are aggravated with..

As I said earlier, my brother is a very low functioning autist. He's turning 18 this year. He has learned to say around 10 words, and his mental age is around 3-4 I think. He has an IQ of 50, according to doctors.
It's.. nearly torn my family apart. My parents spend their whole day taking care of him, and because of this their marriage is failing. They have lost most of their friends, because they don't understand why they can't go out like other people can. And of course, my brother himself. He'll never get married, never get kids, never get a job. He can't even tell if anything is wrong with him. For months he had an infection in his ear, which was only discovered by accident. Now the doctors are saying that he might have a depression as well.

This is why I get so angry whenever someone say that "autism isn't a disability, it's just a different way of being!". That might be true for high functioning autism, but anyone who want to argue that my brother isn't disabled in any ways is gonna get punched in the face.

Thanks for making this topic, VDT. This is a really hard topic for me.. shit, I'm almost crying from writing all of this.. but it's an important topic.

TotallyJW - I'm the same when it comes to the anger with people who act like all autism is like their autism.
I've been around a lot of people with low functioning autism and it is heartbreaking.

There are a lot of people in the high-functioning and aspergers community who feel personally offended when ever the subject of a "cure" is brought up, saying things like "we don't need curing/we're not sick/socialisation isn't that important/I don't want to change" and to me that makes them just as ignorant about their own disorder as those who give them trouble or refuse to understand the disorder.
For some people, austism is great. I don't think I'd be half the person I am today if I wasn't autistic (for many reasons I wont get into).
But for others it's a curse. A life sentence.

How can we in the community ever expect the outside world to acknowledge and understand us if we refuse to understand ourselves!?

Same goes for those outside the disorder who "knows someone with autism" and they claim "I know what autism is, and YOU/YOUR CHILD doesn't have it" - Those people really piss me off. I know a few people like that unfortunately :/

And for those who "disagreed" with me. Wish you would JOIN this discussion and tell me what you disagree with (unless you just generally hate me, in which case, go eat grass).

FWIW, autistic friends of mine dislike Autism Speaks because the organization focuses on "curing" autism and on the experiences of families of Autistic people rather than on the needs of autistic people themselves (for example, they don't have any autistic people on their board). I'm not trying to tell anyone what to think, obvs, just passing along information relayed to me by friends.

The idea of a cure or preventative measure for autism is obviously, super-duper contentious for the reasons JW and Simoholic mentioned, but it's worth talking about. I'm not autistic, and I don't have any very close friends or family members who are, though, so I'm talking as a total outsider on the issue.

No it's not. AutismSpeaks is a horrible place to get your information from.

A great place for people with autism to speak to each other and talk about their struggles is Wrong Planet. Anyone can view the forums but you have to make an account to post (obvs) and also an account opens up hidden members only boards which are for more personal threads.

In my opinion it's the best place for people who have autism or suspect they have autism to feel less alone, and also great for families and loved ones to get some understanding from real people with (high functioning) autism, instead of "experts".

Speaking of experts, The National Autistic Society is a good place. It's a UK based charity.

I read those sentences about girls Aspergers..and feels like it's writed about me..never thought that I could have someting like that..but well, at least this explain why I'm so weird

@Nemiga, I was the same :P
When I was in school (years before I had a proper idea of what autism was) I saw a poster with some very bad generalisations about Aspergers and I noticed a friend of mine did a lot of those things (I can't remember all the things but it was stuff like "constantly repeating themselves/being rude but not realising they are being rude/interrupting people mid-sentence/very stubborn and thinks they are always right") and I brought it up with my school counsellor (I saw her a couple of times a week) and she didn't seem to agree with my thoughts, because, she'd actually worked with autistics before and knew that these were bad stereotypes and not what real autism was like. And then she turned it on me, and asked if I thought maybe *I* had it. To which I replied "no!" because in my mind, from what I'd read, that would mean I was rude and annoying, and I didn't see myself like that. and she dropped it.

I sometimes wonder how different things would have been for me if she'd gone into what autism actually was, and why she thought I would see myself in the condition. It wasn't until years later that I even connected it to the fact that she must have seen the autistic tenancies in me, after all, I shared more of myself with her than anyone (even closest friends) in my life at the time.

@supersimoholic - I'm really disturbed that someone would put such a stupid and misinformed poster up in a school.

@TotallyJW - Worse! I saw it on the wall at the doctors surgery on my way to the dentist! That would have been about... 7 possibly 8 years ago.

ETA: Holy shit I'm old.

It's probably different for everyone. For the longest time no one, myself included, had the slightest idea what was wrong with me. I was a model student and perfectly normal kid (if a bit shy) in elementary school with close friendships and all that. It was a really quiet private school in a monastery run by nuns, so when I entered a public middle school I blew up. It was so goddamn chaotic. The noise during class was even louder than being in a stadium in the middle of a soccer game's last goal...constantly. I got overstimulated every single fucking day from the moment I walked in until I got out. *sigh* it felt like a living hell.

That said, and to brag some more: I can draw, paint, sculpt, speak 4 languages fluently, socialize fine, but feel like I have the emotional complexity of a sloth sometimes.

@CulMiku, @Mammal, @SuperSimholic - Thank you for the clarification about Autism Speaks. I had never heard the criticisms of it, before. They're valid. On the other hand, I truly appreciate TotallyJW's point about autism being a disability that requires help and treatment for many (not all). It can be draining for all involved, from family members to the community and to those who have autism, just getting through the daily grind. A couple of students that I worked with would leave me wiped and on edge by the end of the day. They would require all of my energy and focus throughout the time I spent with them and I couldn't always predict when something would set them off and there would be a full scale tantrum. I firmly believe that positives and negatives are connected,and that these individuals brought something special to our world, but that didn't make it easy to help them function in it.

My brother has autism. I get offended when people call autistic people retarded. They're fucking not.

Some of them are (by general definition of low IQ); then again, I think ALMOST EVERYONE is retarded, in one way or another. I can discuss rabbit husbandry (anyone?) and the philosophy of Poo, but I can't spell.

Everyone is different, my son with PDD-NOS is somewhat retarded or cognitively impaired as they put it these days, with an IQ of about 69. My husbands nephew who has both low functioning autism and Down syndrome is severely retarded. He is 14 and on the level of about a 12 month old and isn't expected to improve.

My son has high functioning Asperger Syndrome, which is a type of autism. He is kind, very funny, very bright, and has a lot of potential. I home school him (since he was in grade 7 or about 13/14 years old for you non-Americans) because they tried to dumb him down in school and not give him a chance to take the subjects he could excel in. He is far and away not your "typical" aspie. People think they are all robotic and unemotional and cannot understand humor. His problem is he is a bit scared and intimidated by kids his own age (older teens). He also tends to repeat things over and over and fixate on certain topics (video games or a certain character). It can be rather frustrating for people around him who don't understand. By the way, both my husband and me have "traits" like AS--I love statistics, video-games, facts and my husband has the social deficit part (likes quiet, dislikes a lot of people and noise).

I homeschool both of my children with learning challenges. My daughter is NT and bright but has profound dyslexia and dyscalculia. Our family is a mess geneticly as autism is on DH side as we feel his brother probably could be and their oldest son is also on the spectrum. While I have an epilepsy condition which is probably genetic which can cause dyslexia. DD will be going for an MRI soon which will tell us if she has my disorder.