Has anyone ever thought you were autistic before?

In My Humble Opinion
1

So around 7th grade randomly, people started saying I had autism and the whole school thought I was autistic. I had no idea why, and I thought it was a rumor that a bully said. I moved to Europe in high school, and on the first day, a boy asked me if I was autistic.

I don’t know how anyone thinks that? I’m not sensitive to sound, I’m not socially awkward, and I’m relatively normal. I think it could be me just having a strange personality, and teenagers thinking it’s a developmental disorder.

I could be though, because I do like geography and numbers a lot (especially when I was very little) but the negative traits just don’t align with me.

2

My mother and sister used to call me Asperger’s. I don’t think I have it though.

3

Ignore any of the negative traits associated with autism. Some of the brightest people I know are on the scale. That includes me. I’m neurodivergent, but I think that helped me finish my doctoral program in record time and well before anyone else in my cohort.

4

Someone suggested that I was autistic after my son was diagnosed autistic. I said, “I think I just have really bad social anxiety.”

I did go to a therapist to see what’s what, and she couldn’t make up her mind, because there is a lot of overlap between what autism looks like in children and what trauma looks like in children. And people with ADHD can have a lot of social issues too, just for different reasons. She kept trying to dredge up my past and it made me feel worse, so I quit. I think that question’s going unanswered for a while.

I do, however, have diagnosed ADHD - predominantly inattentive. I’m pretty sure my son is also ADHD, judging by the beleaguered expression on my husband’s face when he cries, “Now I have two of you!”

Well, I don’t know. It’s a mixed bag anytime you have a neurodivergence. My son is absolutely brilliant, smarter than his parents, but extremely mentally rigid. He’s having a hard time adjusting to kindergarten. With autism in particular you have people with a wide spectrum of support needs. Some people need little or no support and others require 24/7 care for the rest of their lives. My son is somewhere in the middle. Great potential, significant challenges. My grandfather, who was a highly successful engineer, is now 86, but he’s still prone to violent meltdowns when things don’t go exactly according to plan.

I’m sure my ADHD contributes to my ability to write creative fiction, and to concentrate for long periods of time on things that interest me, but it’s the same ADHD that makes it hard for me to get the book finished, to get started on things, and oh, god, especially at my age, my working memory is so bad. The research on ADHD indicates it really is more of a cognitive deficit than a super power. I think in the very least it’s a trade-off.

All things considered though, I wouldn’t change my brain, and I hope my son wouldn’t want to change his, either. But a lot of us have limitations due to our neurodivergence.

5

Moderating:

I moved this to In My Humble Opinion from Factual Questions. More conversational threads generally belong in IMHO or MPSIMS. Factual Questions is for questions with specific factual answers and should have rigorous replies at least until a factual answer is given.

In fact the replies by both @Velocity & @Alli were inappropriate for Factual Questions, but understandable as this was not a FQ type thread.

6

I am most likely some form of high-functioning autist, but that wasn’t something that was bandied about when I was a lad where I grew up. Instead, I was just weird/a nerd/a super-geek.

7

12 and 14yos have no friggin’ clue what “autistic” really means. At their level, it simply becomes a taunt-word for anyone who’s kinda off in the corner socially.

There are lots of ways for a normal 14yo boy = you to be socially awkward. Very few of them are diagnosable conditions.

And yes, among all the middle-aged and older people here we do have lots of people with every diagnosis under the sun. Who can regale you with tales of them gaining understanding of themselves via that diagnosis.

You’ll also find lots of people here with no diagnosable issues. But who had a socially awkward adolescence in one way or another. Too smart, too dumb, too wordy, too silent, too shy, too extroverted in ways out of tune with the crowd. Always just a little out of step.

It’s hard to see from where you are, but age 12-18 is a tough time for everyone. There are intense pressures to conform to a very narrow set of social expectations. Expectations that the entire school of amateur apprentice humans are making up as they go along. Tweens - teens are not little kids. But they are very much amateurs as adults; they’re trying, bless them, but they suck at it. Badly. But they’ll all get the hang of being an emotionally funcitonal adult eventually. Took me to about age 35.

8

It is completely true that you can be socially awkward and not clinically diagnosable as anything. A lot of people are socially awkward. A lot of people feel like weirdos. It’s almost guaranteed at that age. And you mentioned before you recently moved countries - I mean that’s a pretty dramatic change and it will take some time to fit in.

9

There probably isn’t anyone over 50 on this board who doesn’t recall being called “retarded” when they were in grade school. The language may have changed, but the cruelty of children hasn’t.

10

Rub it in, why don’tchya! :wink:

11

I have a friend who seems to think that I am on the spectrum, with these two symptoms: I do have social awkwardness or anxiety, such that I general shun social gatherings that will be full of people I don’t know (further such that I am seldom invited to any such); and because I favor facts and logical inference over unsupported generalizations (for example that if I see two of something, I think all of those somethings are like those two), and “how do you know?” is my go-to question about any new assertions. I don’t think she is very serious about it, but may have stored the idea for future use in arguments.

12

The definitions and categorisations of neurodivergence is constantly evolving and broadening, so that people who would not have been considered on the spectrum a few years ago now would find they fit more recent descriptors. I don’t think I am Autistic, but I keep checking in just in case they finally have decided that my particular forms of mental health and social issues count.

13

I’ve suspected for a while now that I was somewhere on the spectrum. I told my wife recently of my suspicions, and she said “Yeah, that makes sense.”

I don’t think I’ll get diagnosed, though. What would be the point? I’ve more or less figured out how to deal with the world anyway, and I don’t need someone giving me excuses to act like a jerk.

14

My husband who is diagnosed as autistic thinks that I am autistic as well. Sometimes I agree with him and other times I don’t. The biggest thing going against a diagnosis is that I do know how to read a room. Otherwise, though, I’ve got lots of similarities. At one point I was going to seek a diagnosis definitively, but yes, at 51 I’m not sure that it really matters. And, I’ve got plenty of other diagnoses going on already (bipolar 2, anxiety, binge eating etc.)

15

I think this is key. Autism is the latest and handiest answer to “what is wrong with my kid? He’s too smart, too dumb, too wordy, too silent, too shy, too extroverted in ways out of tune with the crowd.” Well, then, he must be autistic!

No, he’s just being a normal kid. Especially in the tween years, I’m pretty sure that each of us was one or more or all of the above. Heck, if I remember my middle school years, we had extroverts, introverts, kids who never said a word, and kids who would not shut up.

But they were not autistic. I’ve dealt with an autistic kid before, when I refereed a pickup hockey game on Saturday mornings at a local rink. He was fine when we picked teams, but he would screech like a banshee if he wasn’t allowed to play goalie for the team he was selected for, and at his favorite end of the rink. (Yes, he would only play goal and only at the west end of the rink.) He had been properly diagnosed with autism by a doctor, as his mother often told me, while she thanked me for letting him play with the normal kids.

To me, that’s autism. It’s more than just being a weird kid, too good at school, too dumb at school, too talkative, too silent; rather, it’s behaving outside the norms of kids his own age. Nobody at that age should scream because they’re not assigned as goalie at a pickup hockey game, as this kid did. But merely being a weird kid, as we all were? Maybe that’s not so much autism as it is adolescence.

16

I most certainly was. And not just by other kids. In elementary school, I had behavioral problems. In Grade 1, my teacher, on telling me off once, said: “You’re, like, mentally retarded!”

This was in the mid-80s. In elementary school, I went through a battery of assessments of by psychologists and I was moved in – and eventually out – of a “gifted-learning disability” program. If I were growing up in the 21st century, I might well have been diagnosed as “autistic”. I don’t think my case was that extreme, however. I think it just took me a long time to internalize socially acceptable behavior (things slowly shifted in Grades 7-8 and I finally entered high school relatively “well-adjusted”).

17

Have you ever talked to any of your friends about it? You could ask them if they think you might be autistic. And, either way, you could ask them why someone might think you are.

I do know at least some autistic people who never realized they came off as awkward and who never had the noise issue.

You could also consider taking a more reputable onlin autism test. None of them can diagnose, but they can give you an idea.

As for your question? Yes, one psychologist thought I was on the autism spectrum. Because I was young and horny and asked about his daughter.

I’ve since been told it was a misdiagnosis, and then tried some of those aforementioned extra tests to be sure.

I will note that autistic people often have no problem with social cues among themselves. I do have trouble with them, though I do also often get past it.

18

Yep. Same here. What would a formal diagnosis mean to a guy at my age who has managed to apparently muddle through life relatively successfully. What would be the point, indeed.

I recognize that “self diagnosis” opens the door to blaming everything in life on one’s imagined condition, possibly disrespecting those who have indeed been diagnosed.

What sealed the deal for me was how I explained it to my daughter, a teacher who often works with autistic children, when we were talking about my suspicions. It wasn’t just the tons of social cues, but when I mentioned to her stimming she admired my use of the word and then said “wow, I never realized that you do that, but now that you say it…”

I told her how I can’t stay still while driving or doing intense activities. I told her that it even strikes when I’m playing the bass at church, to which she said “I just thought you were grooving to the music”. I replied “I really try to keep my motion in time with the music so nobody notices.”

Memories of these physical activities as a child (e.g. stimming) pretty much convinced me.
And no, it doesn’t mean a darned thing other than “Wow, now I know why this happened…and that…” and so on. I have only God to thank for where I am now.

19

I don’t remember knowing anything about autism when I was a kid, although I have what may be a vague memory of confusing “autistic” with “artistic.”

I do know that I was a full-grown adult when I first heard of Asperger’s syndrome. As I read about it, I seriously wondered “Could that be me?” before eventually deciding that, no, the description doesn’t really fit me.

Still, over the years, whenever I’ve heard/read about someone who only discovered later in life that they werre on the ASD spectrum, I’ve been able to relate to some extent—but mostly to the more general stuff like growing up wondering what was wrong with me, being awkward, feeling like I was essentially different from other people, having a hard time making friends or fitting in or connecting with people, rather than to any specific traits of autism.

20

As a classroom teacher I struggled with the reality of “diagnosed conditions” in the form of accommodations that were accorded to some students but not others, depending to some extent on who could afford the clinical assessment processes. The entire enterprise seemed to make the situation worse for everybody.

What I observed is that everyone “has” every trait and tendency but in wildly varying degrees, attempts to draw crisp lines that differentiate us make it more difficult for us to be sensitive to what each individual actually needs.