Un-categorizing Your Autism

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I don't understand how you can use those two together in that sentence and make it sound right or correct (the bold bit).
I don't want to anger you, I just was confused about the statement.
I don't want to anger you because I have seen you around WP and I think you are very smart and I like what you have to say.

In terms of IQ I would also be described as HFA, but I was also oblivious to my differences.
But even with a higher IQ autistic symptoms can be severe like with Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, whose IQ got measured at around 186, but he has severe autistic symptoms which make him appear severely low-functioning.

its about having respect for the writer,but not for the words, am saying the words are BS;as its a widely held belief;not the writer themselves being BS.

I'm not saying people who have intellectual disabilities do not have anxiety or depression, I'm saying statistically as in what has been researched about people with intellectual disabilities, their is a higher correlation between people with higher IQ and anxiety and depression among people with Intellectual Disabilities. Oh course this is a correlation and correlation does not equal causation, I'm just going by what I learned in school and what the statistics say, but I'm sure it doesn't create the whole picture, but that's what I learned in my course on intellectual disabilities and there was research behind it. I am not just saying that.

I was also oblivious to my differences.

?

I didn't understand that either.

I think I can understand that.

There are things I don't try to talk about because I can't continue the conversation after and it gets confusing and stressful....not exactly the same as what you're talking about, but sort of similar I think?

Then the first bit of the message applies (not quoted bit).

I like your notcategory -- it's straightforward.

Do you think it's not recognized/understood as much in LFA because of it the increased communication difficulties? Or because it presents differently? Or because of people not recognizing that people with LFA can experience the same emotional things as people with HFA and non-autistics?

I am another one of the people who has a high IQ, but was pretty oblivious of my differences. I had them pointed out to me at age 13, and then I went through a phase of trying to understand how people had different preferences, and if it was actually that they perceived different things differently such that they actually had the same preference if they had perceived them the same. (i.e. I saw "yellow" in the same way that someone who's favorite color was "blue", saw "blue".)

Before that I thought that people actually had the same preferences as me. I had no clue that I was different in terms of any of my autistic symptoms. I just wasn't aware.

I wouldn't know how to discuss my autism without mentioning functioning levels and severity....so trying to do so might make my head explode.

Now I don't always agree with every category or how functioning labels are used, for instance I think the term moderate functioning could be useful as it would account for people between high functioning and low functioning....but when I express that idea most people reaction seems to be: which makes me feel like an idiot for suggesting it.

Also I have a hard time with the idea that IQ alone determines ones functioning...having a higher IQ doesn't=better functioning, sometimes having a lower IQ doesn't=worse functioning, it should be based on how the individual actually functoins. If they are severely effected in even simple day to day tasks due to the autism I can see low functioning being fitting if they have autism symptoms but are still largely functional and can hold a job and live on their own I can see high functioning being fitting. But say someone on the spectrum has a job, lives independently but their IQ is low so they get defined as low functioning......or someone who can barely function in daily life due to their autism but has a higher IQ gets called 'high functioning, seems like this happens which I find to be inaccurate.

"I'm autistic, if you insist on more information, I'm verbal unless a shutdown (or migraine) has taken speech from me for a period of time, I can't drive or have been declared "unemployable" by professionals in the field of vocational rehab due to sensory issues on their own before you even get into my sociocommunicative challenges, and my largest sociocommunicative challenges frequently are in the field of being able to initiate any sort of interaction at all, because I cannot understand how to, when to, or what to do, so instead do nothing and have this cause problems for me time after time."

Total run-on sentence there, but that's one immediate response for how I might describe myself. I don't know if its good though, because at the moment I'm in enough sensory overload that I'm barely processing vision enough to read what I'm typing. I also know that one doesn't give some really important information about me, but gives other really important information about me. It also, more importantly, opens up a conversation about who I am, and what I'm like, instead of treating me as a stereotype.

I'm not high functioning or low functioning I'm
1. Tuttle, I have my own set of symptoms that nobody else has.
2. Autistic. I belong to the set of everyone with autism.

High functioning/low functioning is used to hold people down, on both sides of the split. It's used to tell people they must do things, or they can't do things. It's used to tell people what has to be true, and how they are, rather than listening to the people. I'm not any of that. I'm just me. My symptoms, my traits which are significantly different enough to be diagnosable, match the diagnostic label autism, which means I have this group of people I can identify with where all of them have that. They all have differences in traits, in those traits and in others. Some grow up poor, some rich, that affects things for them. Some have high IQ, some have low IQ, that affects things for them. Some are extroverted, some introverted. People have different social knowledge, and people have different interests. But we're all autistic.

And that's the only level at which people are reliably described at the moment. We can't say "oh, someone with this one trait won't be able to work", because some will, and some won't. And we can't say "someone with this trait must be able to live on their own", because some will and some won't. We all have things we're good at, and things we struggle with. We all have our own symptoms. They don't need any severity descriptors or functioning levels. They're just there.


I will use severity descriptors for my SPD, as a shorthand, because in SPD, there are less complex symptoms at least in some manners. I prefer to not do so, but I will. I'm trying to train myself not to though, because I really don't like doing it. I'm very strict about not using them for my autism though.

If you ask me, I'm just autistic. That's all. That's all I use, is "I'm autistic".

hi animalcrackers,
am of the belief that clinical depression in us is badly under researched and believe its because its partly because we show our depression in the form of severe challenging behavior; which always routinely gets put down to our autism and intelectual disability and NOT to a comorbid mental illness such as depression.

we are also often thought to be emotionaly empty,and lack the complex thought to know we are suffering-which isnt true, we just dont understand emotions and dont output them correctly but it doesnt mean we dont have emotions nor suffer from depression.
one older lady that used to live with had profound autism and she suffered from severe depression for many years before they finaly got off their arses and got her assessed by the pysch-she was then given SSRIs which improved her quality of life,like self she had severe challenging behavior to and so unsurprisingly thats what her depression was put down to.

yes,we suffer from anxiety to high levels but not social anxiety-we do not have the social awareness nor interaction levels to suffer from social anxiety however its wrong for people to think we dont have anxiety,HFAs will suffer from social anxiety more than us as a result,however reactive depression is something which can happen just as much in LFA as in HFA because we are acutely taken advantage of and abused thanks to our extremely vulnerable nature.

the pyschologist of mine is an awesome pioneering autism & intelectual disability specialist pysch who has worked in the job since at least the seventies,he helped to change the way ID institutions such as the old mary dendy unit ran,and he admits he is on the spectrum himself.
he says autism to any degree is built on anxiety, and we have high arrousal systems as a result.
in terms of LFA we have anxiety on the go all the time;so many of us are on a permenent script of diazepam as a result, to name a few issues that send our arrousal systems over the edge; abusive staff/ones who take advantage of us, routine changes, unpredictibility, sensory issues, struggling to communicate to others and not being listened to as theyre to busy filling it in themselves to hurry it up,not being able to buy something as we commonly do not understand the concept of money and dont know why family or staff are saying we cant have something, being told we cant go out because we have had challenging behavior- we dont understand why we arent being let out as our behavior was sub concious communication to something that we didnt understand or something bad someone else did....

there are so many causes of depression and anxiety in us,this is why am of the belief it is BS that HFAs suffer more from depression and anxiety,and its just further promoting the prehistoric stigma and stereotypes about us.
just to make a point again,am not calling anyone BS as that is being nasty towards others,rather am disagreeing with what was said.

That was a nice message.
Thank you