About adlut autism?

Question

Will autism just appear in ppl's adulthood? or they must have

developed in the childhood? Plus, how do u define autism and

social disorder?

Answer 1

I'm autistic, and I'll try to answer your question.

Autism is a neurological configuration that exists from birth, so no, it wouldn't just randomly develop when a person is an adult. However, a person can appear autistic when they haven't before if they have been pretending to be non-autistic their whole life and have either crashed or have decided that they don't want to pretend to be someone else any more. We can also experience shifts in skill sets throughout life that lead to us appearing more autistic. The article "Help! I Seem To Be Getting More Autistic!" over at autistics.org elaborates more on the reasons that we can suddenly (or not so suddenly) appear more autistic.

I don't have a brief definition for autism (most of the definitions that I've seen on the web have major problems), so I'll use a modified version of the answer I gave to someone asking the same question yesterday, editing out the second person pronouns since, as far as I know, you're not autistic. The "us" and "we" are in reference to other members of the autistic community and me.

Being autistic means that one has a neurological configuration different from the norm (those of us in the autistic community call non-autistics neurotypicals or NTs). It doesn't mean that one is wired defectively, just differently. Our senses are different from NT senses: we tend to be either hypo- or hyper- sensitive to sensory stimuli of different sorts, have an increased incidence of synesthesia (a crossing between senses, to use an example from my experience, the ring of a telephone looks like a red spiralling corkscrew), have difficulty parsing speech (central auditory processing disorder). Some of our sensory sensitivities can put us at a disadvantage in a society designed for NTs - for example, many of us can see fluorescent flicker, which can result in anything from minor irritation, to headaches, to falling asleep. We do something called stimming, which includes things like flapping our hands, rocking back and forth, listening to the same piece of music repeatedly, and jumping up and down. This allows us to deal with sensory stimuli so that we don't become overloaded, and also lets us get the extra stimulation we may need. Lots of NTs try to stop us from stimming, but while bigots may dislike it, it's necessary for us to function in this world.

Most NTs and many autistics think that being autistic means that one has poor social skills and lacks empathy. In reality, we have autistic social skills and so have trouble interacting with NTs, but are usually just fine with other autistics. While NT social interaction generally takes the form of intrusive give and take interactions, we do better in parallel. We can be successful with NTs, as long as they are willing to do their half of the work to communicate with us and we can have trouble interacting with other autistics if they have been trained to pretend to be NT or if we have not been allowed opportunities to interact with our own kind. We're also just fine at empathizing with other autistics, and no more lacking in empathy than neurotypicals. Most normal-brained people have difficulty empathizing with autistics. That's why they bully us, why they think that a particular therapy (ABA) that invalidates who we are and tries to replace us with a neurotypical person is helpful, and why they so often excuse the murder of autistics. (Not saying that all neurotypicals are like that, just that many are.)

We also tend to have 1-3 very intense interests, called perseverations. Mine is autism, specifically autistic advocacy, if you couldn't tell already. *g* These are a good thing, and we need to have time to focus on these interests. Monologuing on them isn't bad, in fact, it's one of the parts of natural autistic interaction. If one can't do that, though, it doesn't mean they're necessarily non-autistic. I'm the same way with sharing my interests through speech, I learned to hide them from the time I was about 8 years old. I just don't consider that a good thing, since I would like to be able to discuss my perseverations in real life and not just online.

Oh, and we tend to have difficulties with spoken communication as well, though some of us are eventually fine with it. We're almost always better with text than with speech and usually have trouble with telephones. We have trouble with the figurative language that NTs use, often have trouble with slang, are straightforward in our words, and are often echolalic, meaning that we repeat things that we've heard over and over again.

So far, it seems that autism is genetic - our parents tend to have autistic traits themselves, and we usually have relatives on the autistic spectrum. Autism is not mercury poisoning, and not food allergies.

Social disorder? Hmm... I'm guessing you mean in the context of autism and not just in general. The term is generally just used to mean difficulty with social interaction, but like I've pointed out, autistics aren't disordered socially with most other autistics.

Read through the autistics.org information library and through www.gettingthetruthout.org for more information about autism. What's especially important to understand about autism and autistics is that we don't necessarily want to be cured and that whether or not we want to be cured depends on whether we've been raised to think of ourselves as defective based on our wiring and not on what arbitrary functioning label we have been given.

Answer 2

lots of good info on www.autismweb.org