Seniors and Aspergers?

Post Reply New Topic

Just for the record....I wasn't trying to insinuate that Howard Hughes had Aspergers. merely that he was super eccectric, & most people put up with his quirks because he was wealthy.

I am a 61-year-old Aspie, and I suspect my high-80s mother-in-law is also on the spectrum somewhere. Other than my wife, I only have regular (near-daily) face-to-face contact with one other person (a neighbor), and I make a lot of effort to let him know I understand my own oddness so he and I can each/both be comfortable with it while he and I are together. We happen to have a common interest that first brought us together, and I mostly stick to that around him while occasionally venturing off into something else and trying to let him "set the pace" for that kind of thing. But as to the matter of "senior" ...

You have mentioned "the parallels between Aspie symptoms and those of a stroke, senility, etc (for example, stilted speech, rigid posture, social absentmindedness...)", and those fit my mother-in-law fairly well. She has never been diagnosed, however, and doctors and other medical staff either cannot or just will not understand she is *not* actually suffering from senility or dementia. Now that I have come to better-understand myself over these past couple of years, I can easily see what is going on inside her ... but she is just like the doctors in the sense of not being willing and/or able to believe somebody like me can possibly understand. So overall ...

I am glad to know more people are getting diagnosed in their early years today, but that does not mean they will never suffer the same kinds of problems faced by us older Aspies.