Dropping out of university or not?

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So we are unanimous in believing, with supporting evidence, that it is possible to survive, nuh?

That is the point I think I thought I was trying to make. My 20-years-ago self requires zero sympathy now: he no longer exists, except in my own memory and some dusty hospital files. The point is: you can have A.S.D. and you may struggle to breathe in the university environment, yet you can survive even in that hostile environment, and things may even get a little easier than they are to begin with.

Nobody here is trying to deny or minimize the pain and suffering in the Original Post. We're actually here to prove you can wade through all that. Because we have (otherwise we'd be dead, which we are not). Take courage, dear friend!

No-one is trying to deny it's hell. All we're saying is, this hell is a hell you can actually survive, should you so choose. Up to you, old bean...

Oh poo, were you thinking I might inadvertently encourage someone to try and do what I tried to do? Aaaargh! Unfiltered Asperger's over-sharing strikes again...

Was only trying to illustrate how deep the pain evinced by the OP can be and emphasize he is not alone in feeling that kind of pain, in the bewildering social context of university. And sometimes on here some posters seem to minimize it or oversimplify it or dismiss it.

It would be wrong to assure someone unconditionally that everything will be absolutely 100% wonderful in the end, but my intention was to illustrate it is possible to flog through that kind of hell and come out the other side and find you're in a place way better than you would ever have believed you had any chance of reaching.

I don't know the "norms" so to speak. So went with this for myself: I thought trigger warning are for issues that might invoke strong feelings. It meant that **I** have strong feelings about this (still) - I can't even say they are bad, but I know they are strong (PTSD like?). At least that's how we did it on an infertility board talking about pregnancy loss (warning: pg loss), but on the pregnancy loss board we didn't b/c then Every post would have a warning (no warnings). So if it's common place here then there'd be no warning, but if it's not, then I'd think a warning. I went with the latter. I am glad to discuss tough topics, but I've been kicked out/excluded from (NT) support groups for my big feelings (exposed or overly suppressed), so am shy about it.

Um. Well unless you count eBay I've never been in an internet community of any kind, so I definitely wouldn't know!

I've also run a mile whenever anyone suggested joining a support group in real space, but I can imagine the NT populace reacting adversely to an A.S.D. way of participating (or not participating), which is indeed among my reasons for running a mile from that kind of scene...

Sometimes I quip that I'm still suffering P.T.S.D. from my time at university. However, with regard to the OP, that needn't necessarily be his experience I trust, especially if he takes steps to deal with the inherent mismatch between A.S.D. and university life (such as posting on here, I guess): if only I'd had a diagnosis, even the official knowledge (as opposed to the secret personal suspicion) that I had Asperger's would have helped me to make sense of my struggles and feel less bad about them, and certainly in England at that time a lot of help would have been available to me which I, alas, was unable to avail myself of.

So good luck to the OP and let's hope we hear back from him.

I would drop out if you are feeling bad and try to find a job. Not everyone is cut of for college and college leaves some with less chance of getting a job. because of no work experience and older.
The stress and pressure of the college and not fitting in makes social anxiety and depression worse.
The inability to fit in, form friendships that are valuable for networking will make your college degree worthless.
I graduated from college years ago and I did not fit in and did not have any hope of finding a job and my college degree was a waste of time.
I wish I never went to college it lead to nothing but debt and regret.
If you can not get job with your college degree you have wasted time and money.

I have a lot of sympathy for such a viewpoint and there are indeed times when I wish I hadn't put myself through the trauma of persevering at university; sometimes I think it left me scarred for life. Fortunately (if you call it fortunate...) all my student debt was eventually written off on the grounds that I was so severely and irretrievably messed-up I was never going to be in the position of being able to pay it off anyway! The debt was not the thing that left/leaves me feeling scarred, though.

However, most of the time I'm glad I did persevere. I'd have spent the rest of my life regretting giving up if I'd given up, and loathing myself as a failure. And the degree allowed me to qualify as a teacher, and I always wanted to be a teacher, and during my short-lived career in teaching I was told I was good at it; and, although it was physically exhausting and in every way too much for me (overload, anxiety, etc.), it was truly fulfilling so I'll always be glad I had a chance to prove myself and experience a little bit of "vocation" or whatever it was.

Ultimately my degree is now a worthless piece of paper in the attic, very true. But it has not been valueless altogether.

So there are powerful arguments on both sides. But the OP was talking about giving up after only a few weeks. I'd have thought it worth trying to continue for at least the first year, if at all possible, and then drawing breath and reviewing the situation.

Dropping out & trying to find a job in the hurly-burly of the outside world might prove just as challenging and depressing and disorienting as coping with university life.

I agree with that, and it's pretty much my tale - I guess I'm the fence-sitter (aren't I always!?) between the two extremes already mentioned. I quit after a year and a half of my degree (very shortly before you started, I would guess), and it's fair to say that I was not a pretty sight (or smell) nor a happy bunny by that point. Never mind my autism, the University medical centre staff didn't even manage to notice that I was slowly (hmm, well actually not very slowly) drinking and starving myself to death (the prescription for Milk of Magnesia was a nice thought, though - I wish I were kidding!). Waking up the morning after yet another melt-down in a field somewhere several miles from town , often wearing no coat or footwear and with no idea which way home was, became pretty routine after a while (I have sometimes wished that I had been picked up by the police). Not being able to explain my behaviour even to myself (much of which I have elided, for the sake of my delicate disposition as much as anyone else's) led to the obvious conclusion that I was just going insane.

However, I have no regrets at all (now!) that I stuck it out that long, nor that I ended up quitting. Despite the state that I got myself into, I managed to cling onto to my independence, and I'm very thankful for that. I could very easily see myself having ended up living with and dependent upon my parents for most of my adulthood had I turned tail and slunk off back to my teenage cocoon when I had been temped to earlier. And I did make a handful of very good friends (it was they who intervened to get me to the medical centre), and I'm still good friends with a few of them now (though I tend to go a little quiet when they start reminiscing about the "good old days", it has to be said). The sheer diversity of people at a University or College has a lot to be said for it if you're a bit of an oddball. I also found some new interests, which I carried on after Uni, some of which were instrumental in starting to build my confidence and social skills. Yes, nerdy me, who never ran unless pursued by a bully and never kicked a ball unless under duress, becoming not only a caver, but a leader of "teams"; the responsibility for other people's lives quite directly in my hands (you have to be a bit weird to enjoy caving, so that helped!)

Whether being an academic in-betweeny has affected my employment prospects is hard to tell, but I suspect that any negative impact was more than compensated for by having fought through those formative experiences - and I doubt that getting my degree would have made me any less prone to the burn-outs which have often cost me my employment.

So even without having got my little certificate and a photo of me wearing a silly hat, overall it's something that I'm glad I put myself through. Very much a case of "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger", and with more modern support services and autism awareness, a journey that I hope is a little easier for young adults these days.

Um. Very instructive. Just goes to show how each case of A.S.D. is different and each decision has to be the right one for that particular person, and it's a big decision with real consequences, not to be rushed into or taken in a momentary seizure of despair (I say that as though I'd never taken a fatal, epoch-making decision in a seizure of despair; this is far from the truth, alas...).

Yes, quite. I had a suspicion that I must have A.S.D. but my useless psychiatrist couldn't be arsed to take my diffident suggestion seriously, nor even to give it more than a millisecond's consideration. So I was trying to cope, in the hostile environment of university, not merely with Asperger's but also without a diagnosis of Asperger's. Like trying to row a boat against the tide without any oars, yet not actually being aware that one reason you seem to be struggling with this whole rowing business is your lack of oars. If that makes any sense.

I too came to the conclusion I was going insane, and it nearly became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Recently I had to go through my own medical records (for form-filling purposes): turns out the university doctor was convinced I had Schizoaffective Disorder! I do recall my home G.P. saying at the time he'd had to write a lot of letters to persuade the authorities to let me go back to the same university for a postgraduate teacher-training course...

So this is why I would urge anyone in that kind of position to get an A.S.D. diagnosis and then make sure he or she is getting all the help which ought, these days, to be available in consequence of that diagnosis. Specialist help is not necessarily that special or that helpful, but still, help is help, as far as it goes, and at least you can flag up with your tutors etc. that you do actually have a disability.Strongly agree. I only wish in retrospect I'd made some effort to tap into that; maybe with a diagnosis and some help or encouragement I could have done. We'll never know. But I think it quite likely.Hmm. No, my degree did not immunize me against burnouts of that kind, nor ultimately against total and irretrievable burnout.Never actually got the photograph: couldn't face the graduation ceremony; just then, I never wanted to set foot in that particular city ever again...Considering the palpable awfulness of the experience you summarize, this is a pretty damned strong vote in favour of perservering for at least a year, is it not?

At the same time, it proves giving up can ultimately be the right decision for someone, and need not lead to a lifetime of regret and self-reproach (it would have done for me, but that's just me).

Yes, I think so - though in my case, I didn't even have the remotest inkling what the problem was. Even was it was first suggested to me in my forties, I was perplexed at what this "autism" thing might have to do with me.


I think that's another one which can cut both ways. I wish I hadn't pushed myself quite so hard to be as social as my peers. In desperation to fit in better with the partying and flirting, I made the mistake of thinking that "magic socialising juice" was the answer, and the more the better. By the time I realised that alcohol was actually hampering my socialising rather than helping, I was already acutely depressed and drinking alone in my digs. It's only decades later that I was able to see that it was just interfering with what few compensatory strategies for my autistic traits I'd developed, and that once I'd started self-medicating, slipping into dependency was always likely. My obsession with "fitting in" ironically ended up wrecking a lot of the social life that I could have had. Not that I'm a proselytising teetotal party-pooper, but I'd advise any autistic student to watch out for alcohol not affecting them quite the same as it does their peers, and to take a break from socialising if it's starting to burn them out.

Somewhat agree: this advice would certainly be worth anyone's while to at least keep in mind, if A.S.D. either had been diagnosed or was at least strongly suspected.

In my own case, alcohol and cannabis did me more favours than harm, socially at least; but, everyone is different, plus I'd been (ab)using alcohol since the start of my teens so already knew how, and how not, to administer that medication before I started university (nearly got expelled from school more than once, while I was still on that learning curve...); and, luckily for me, the cannabis we had in England in the 1990s was a lot more felicitous in its effects than the "skunk" which is all that seems to be around currently (olde-tyme marijuana was brilliant for bulldozing smoothly through the A.S.D. issues I've always struggled most severely with: social anxiety, autistic inertia, pathological demand avoidance, sensory overload, and not least insomnia; alas, "skunk" seems to induce merely a discontented, listless immobility, and isn't even guaranteed to get me off to sleep).

Stop me if I've said this before, but well-wishers (including mental health professionals) do have this habit of urging one to "get out more" and "make more of an effort to socialize" and "try and join in" and all that malarkey; for some of us, this is not the answer, or not always.

If you have A.S.D. you may need a lot of "down-time" between any attempts at social interaction. Or you may need occasional periods of reclusion so you can remember who you are and get yourself back together. For instance, I believe I have a number of psychiatric reports referring to "weak self-concept" and "lack of sense of self" and similar, and this apparently can go with the A.S.D. territory. Too much company melts what little "sense of self" I possess (even now) and then I just begin to fall apart. Plus the sensory overload aspect of places like the student bar, the dining hall, etc.

Sitting quietly in your room with a cup of tea, or disappearing somewhere on a bus for the day on your own, or whatever, can be a sign that you're dealing very intelligently and very appropriately with your condition, not "moping" or "being antisocial": this is not readily apparent, however, to the typical NT undergraduate, nor even to the typical university doctor or tutor or counsellor, any or all of whom may reproach you for "not trying" when you dare to bemoan the fact you don't seem able to have quite as much fun as everyone else.

Stay for a semester or complete first year and still in same position as now with no friends and not being accepted.
It is a fact that extroverts and NTs fit in from the start because they have more out going, friendly personalities.
With Aspergers you are an introvert, socially awkward and people do not accept you because you are seen as weird.
A smart person with Aspergers will quit college straight away because you are unlikely to ever fit in with others, form friendships or build networks that are critical for employment.

No friends in high school/college, achieving high marks did not improve employment chances because of no social network. Normal people that do not have Aspergers fit in and get along and they get the jobs instead of the more intelligent people with Aspergers.

If it makes anyone feel any better, actually some NTs struggle with various kinds of anxiety & depression at university also: Asperger's does not hold a monopoly on finding university life difficult.Is that definitely true in every single case? I seem to have met one or two disarmingly outgoing people with Asperger's, tho' this didn't mean they were without some degree of social anxiety or other difficulties of course.Um. Well, there's weird and there's weird. Depending on how weird I actually was at the time (other comorbid mental health conditions have sometimes made me very weird and unlikeable ... I mean even more weird and unlikeable than now, ha ha), on a good day my weirdness seemed to be cherished and celebrated by some; I was never, and never expect to be, universally admired, but the older I get, the more I develop some semblance of social skills, and the more I get my other mental health issues under control (ish), the more my weirdness seems to be accepted or even appreciated, and the less it seems to work against me: so, while there will always be those who cruelly mock weirdness (this seems to be some ancient atavistic evolutionary bias against difference or nonconformity, which especially persists among the stupid), weirdness need not always be an albatross round your neck! Sometimes weirdness can even be among your superpowers.

One time, just over two years into my second attempt at university, on impulse I gave up and disappeared home and tried to kill myself. Someone found me and called an ambulance etc. After a week or so in hospital I returned to my university accommodation, thinking I was just going to pack up my stuff and load it into my car and leave forever. Among various notes stuck to my door, to my amazement, I remember one which simply said: "Raphael, where are you? We need you!"

This was followed by another note from someone who knew something of what had happened. He'd written something along the lines of, Don't worry folks, Raphael will be back among us soon, everybody calm down. And this seemed to have had the desired effect: it was chronologically the last note on the door. So I opened the door, went in, and sat there in my room and cried for a bit, and eventually decided that although I couldn't face carrying on that year, I might be able to face trying again the following year once I'd sorted myself out a bit. And in the end it was "third time lucky", because I did go back the following year (and eventually did get a degree); and, in the interim, I kept in touch with all those friends at university that I hadn't even realized I had, and whenever I went to visit they seemed genuinely pleased to see me. And I really was pretty weird in those days!

So weirdness and acceptance are not mutually exclusive, honestly!Well, that is a bit of a "counsel of despair", isn't it? I'm truly sorry if that reflects an unhappy experience you've had, and nothing I say can remedy that past trauma, obviously, but I would urge anyone reading this thread to see also some of the other posts indicating that it is possible for persevering to prove worthwhile. Asperger's does tend to make things more difficult, but it needn't make them impossible.

Last edited by Raphael F on 16 Oct 2019, 4:05 am, edited 1 time in total.

I cant fit in with university but dropping out is also bad for me. If i drop out ill be at home all the time. Either way im miserable and dont know what to do.

That's a pretty lousy choice to be stuck with, then, undeniably. It won't cheer you up to hear that I was stuck in the same position in 1993, and again in 1995; but at least you'll see that I say what I say with experience of being trapped in the same kind of black hole.

So I hope it doesn't sound (to anyone) as if I'm oversimplifying the problem or suggesting it's easy to cope with. Not only are you stuck in this grim position: I'm betting others with A.S.D. will be right now, too, especially having regard to the time of year and the academic calendar. And maybe some of them are reading this as they struggle with their own similar choices: to persevere or to give up and go home?

University was never going to be a walk in the park for someone on the autism spectrum, and you knew that (if I've understood correctly), but there are others on this same thread besides me who managed to find ways to cope. In my case admittedly I did give up, twice, before discovering that I could just about exist in the university environment after all and complete the degree course (eventually).

Bearing in mind it's still only October, although I'm not saying it will ever be possible to fit in as most students do, I would, if I may, reiterate that it really is far too soon to be certain that you will never, ever find some way of fitting in more comfortably than you have found as yet. It could take you at least your first year there, maybe longer. It could take less time than that, of course, but let's try to be realistic, and don't let's build up potentially false hopes (I hate it when well-wishers do that). So there's no knowing how long it could take, but we can be certain it's going to take some time, and it was never going to have already happened by now, was it?

In a way you've kind of answered your own question, because if you're going to be miserable at home and you're going to be miserable at university then (and I do not mean this glibly or facetiously) you really may as well be miserable at university, and then within a finite period of time your miserableness will at least earn you the academic qualification which you (presumably) desired in the first place, or else why did you sign up?

Seems to me if you give up and go home and are equally miserable there, your miserableness will be of indefinite duration, whereas at university you at least know how long the torture will last, so you can pace yourself and resolve to keep plodding on. And while you're doing that, there remains the distinct possibility of life at university becoming a little bit more bearable than it has been so far. It doesn't sound as though your situation at home will get any happier than it would be right now, within the foreseeable future. Plus if your family is anything like mine, they'll give you hell for having given up, and that is definitely not a fun trip.

Is any kind of extra help or support available to you at your university, by virtue of the condition you have?

Indeed, given that many NT undergraduates also struggle, and particularly during their first year, is any help or support available to anyone that happens to be miserable? Surely there is some kind of pastoral support and some kind of medical centre?

My recollection of my university in the 1990s is that half the undergraduate population was getting Prozac from the university medical centre, and they weren't all A.S.D. sufferers! And that university retained its own private psychotherapist, free of charge to members of the university, and although my Asperger's then remained undiagnosed, she did help me to begin turning things around. So are you getting any kind of help, and if not, is there any you could try to get?

I stupidly didn't attempt to seek any help until after giving up for the second time. Can't believe how much unnecessary silent suffering I put myself through, in the preceding years! Too shy, too diffident, too convinced that I was just doomed to be miserable and no-one could help me. But they could, and they did, and I wish I'd sought help a lot sooner than I did.

Meanwhile, and I do not say this lightly, it really is a case of putting one foot in front of the other, going to the lectures, and forcing yourself through it, one day at a time. It can be very depressing and very demeaning when everyone around you is so visibly enjoying the university life, but some of us are just not wired for that, unfortunately.

Best of luck, for now.

There seem to be quite a few people here who are rooting for you. I don't know if you've noticed that, and I don't know if it helps at all, but they do appear to be here.