How come people with Aspergers can't work ?

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I think a lot of people on WP have difficulty shopping and doing normal errands for many different reasons. Some may not leave the house unless absolutely necessary. It's easy to underestimate peoples difficulties when all you have to go by is text.

Certainly. I do have severe anxiety in such situations because of the overwhelming environment and I don’t leave my house often, but I also understand that most things in my life have required this jump into cold streaming water. And if I drown as a result, I drown. Staying at home doesn't keep me away from the flood. It actually might drown me quicker. Going against my inner desire for sameness and predictability has done me mostly good.

I understand that people will get defensive even if not needed and read things not meant as accusations as such. I am not underestimating anyone. We are in different boats at the same sea.

Where's your evidence for this? Many people with Autism can't work either due to severe sensory issues or because of other peoples' ignorance. I currently can't work. It's a mixture of the two I mentioned. I have been told that my Autism can't be that bad and that I should just get over it. Get over what, exactly?

Everyone should try - nobody is saying otherwise. But you can't take your own personal experience and assume it's the same as everyone else, even if it's similar in nature. Intensities can vary greatly. You're lucky to be able to swim, once you get into the water. Appreciate it, and pray that it lasts. I am not sure how old you are, but there are people here in their 40s, 50s, and beyond who have had good, succesful jobs for years sometimes, who have jumped into the water, swam halfway to the other side, and then drowned. There are others who don't even make it that far. You're making a demonstrably incorrect assumption here: that people haven't tried, or haven't tried hard enough, and therefore don't know what they're talking about. This is patently false.

Perhaps you are projecting your own experiences from when you were younger, and assuming that must be the problem everyone else is talking about.



How would you know?

Quoted for truth

I apologize for the Rain Man comment. I was trying to break a myth and stereotype that the OP and another person had about us as people and I went a little too far. I've edited that post.

I think society has mixed ideas about it. Ordinary people are probably reasonably objective about it on the whole. Bosses are just nervous about hiring anybody with a question mark on their credentials, because bosses are too busy to go and find out the answer to that question. Politicians are trying to assume the opposite - that disabled people are perfectly capable of competing in the normal jobs market.......but I think they're only saying that as a convenient and disingenuous way to promote a spending cut and increase the number of people chasing the same number of jobs - i.e. making it more of an employers' market so that pay and conditions can be driven down. But the whole thing comes unstuck when they implement it because the underlying assumption - that you can starve and BS the disabled and the "undeserving poor" out of their "laziness" and force them into bad jobs - doesn't work. Ever wondered why so many right wing administrations have failed to deliver on this, when public opinion was on their side? There's been crackdown after crackdown and all it's done is to scare the living daylights out of people who have done nothing wrong.

I started this thread becuase I was curious as to why people with Aspergers say they can't work. I can understand why some are not able to, and legitimately apply for government benefits. However, I must say that it quite reasonable to have considerable doubts as to the status of some here, due to the very intelligent and articulate way they present themselves in written communication.

So if one can type intelligent and articulately they cannot possibly have a disability that makes them unable to hold a job? what kind of BS is that? I for one am quite a bit more articulate typing than talking, how I type hardly reflects how I socialize or how well I verbally express things. If anything being intelligent just makes it worse because then you are more aware of what your symptoms are doing and what difficulties they cause.

I mean I really wanted college to work out, but it turns out typing articulately was not enough to override the way the symptoms interfered with my ability to attend college....its ridiculous to assume being able to type well=being able to hold a job or function in the work place. Mental retardation is not the only mental disability, there are many intelligent people with severe mental issues.

I would never think that after being on this forum for a while. I've seen people here that seemed pretty articulate to me but were nonverbal or mostly nonverbal in real life and were pretty disabled and required a lot of support.

If I seem intelligent and articulate online that is because I have all the time I need to think about what I'm saying and to proofread and edit my post. I might not seem the same way in real life because I'm so socially anxious. In real life I've been so quiet at times I've had people think I was mute or mentally deficient.

Just because I can write a good post doesn't mean I could go out of my house all day every day and be around people I don't know and interact with them all day. It doesn't mean that I'd be able to do most jobs.

Even though I manage to write posts when I was in school writing essays and stuff like that was very difficult for me and something I mostly managed to avoid.

It's nothing to do with intelligence. If you applied that logic, then surely anyone, disabled or not, with a degree should be able to work? I have a friend who doesn't work. She has Aspergers. She also has depression, which makes working difficult. (and possible side effects of the breast cancer she had)

I could be wrong; but don't many with any form of Autism, also have physical disabilities alongside? I was given a link a few weeks ago, which talked about learning disability and visual impairment. Having both isn't that unusual.

As I mentioned before, a lot of it is ignorance from others. They either assume we have no issues or that we can't do something.

We're all different. Some can work and need no adjustments, some will need adjustments and some will struggle no matter what the manager does to help them.

This is meaningless. How intelligent and articulate one may be on the internet does not reflect how capable they are of working. It doesn't reflect an ability to consistently post well (or post at all), it doesn't reflect any other problems that may be related to typing - for example, I am frequently in pain simply due to typing. I also do not post when I am less eloquent, outside one or two occasions during which I was fighting a shutdown.

Intelligence doesn't reflect how well one can work. When disability is at play, intelligence is not a good predictor. In fact, having a higher measured IQ does not actually mean that you'll be any less impaired. Bringing it up is irrelevant.

Sure, many of us are very strong with the written word, and could probably pass ourselves off as NT as long as we didn't have to face any real time, face-to-face tests. Give me enough time and privacy and I'll give you a great essay. But it's often very slow, and nobody seems to want to pay me even the minimum hourly rate for my stuff. Even with musical services - one guy paid me £100 to record my vocals onto 2 songs he'd written. But I'm such a perfectionist that I took ages to get it done, and could never have made a living at it, not at those prices.

A guy I knew with Aspie traits used to make model trains out of bits of tin. They were beautiful. I asked him if he'd thought of making a living out of it, and he said that the pressure for efficiency would take all the satisfaction out of it. And I think he would have been a liability in most jobs. He told me that he'd once got onto a train, expecting it to move off within a couple of minutes. For some reason it was delayed, and after a few minutes more he was so stressed out that he had to get off and waste his ticket. He said that things had to happen at a certain rate for him or he couldn't cope. Show me a job where they'd hire you if you fessed that one up at an interview. He was scared of the benefits officials who used to tell him not to be such a baby, but for all their "tough love," they never got him into a job.

I know another Spectrummy guy who had a whole armoury of skills.........he runs a music club all by himself and is doing a better job than a committee of 10 people did before he took up the challenge. He's on benefits and is willing to work......he says they never threaten or hassle him to find work at all. Meet him face to face and you'll see why - he's got "unemployable" stamped all over him. Body language, communication style, blanking out, humming over the top of you when he can't handle your input, couldn't put himself into your shoes to save his life, and absolutely no aggression at all.

Also, did you ever try to pass an interview with pathological honesty? The moment you admit there are some things you wouldn't tolerate, or that you're not Superman, you're finished. Put truth serum in the water supply, and the whole jobs market would collapse.

Edgewaters, I do understand your (hopefully) good intentions, but why does my experience become forbidden when it doesn’t fit to your opinions or agenda, while at the same time so many have highlighted that we should appreciate Tuttle’s experience? And believe me, I do appreciate her experience and like so many times I have said in this thread, I understand that some can’t work. After all it was me who got the first chances to work via social workers in my mid-twenties. But what does it mean here anyways, since I am the new Cavendish of this thread.

Did I use the words I, therefore everyone? No, I said in my life.



Yes. That is called life. All swim, all drown. Not just us, all. You get a job, might not make it, you fall in love, might get hurt, you get a baby, might lose him/her, you go out, might get raped, you might get better or you might get worse, but no matter what, you'll face the underwaters eventually. What to do when your biggest fears come true, for they are true already as possibilities? Do you start to fear for real or do you stop fearing altogether?



That assumption is solely yours.



No I am not. What is the problem everyone else is talking about? How would you know? You tell me.





I know what I meant. That is the only thing I know. The receiver may interpret it the way they want. I have no saying to that. I know myself, not you. You know yourself, not me. You read everything I write with your own intentions and eyes.

On my part I end the discussion here. Good luck to everyone applying for a job or disability.

Yeah, and I'm going to continue trying, but its such a non-reasonable thing to expect that I'm going the attempting to get government help route at the same time as continuing trying.



I have a mask that if I wear around increases the amount of time I have before I start developing the migraine to about 15 minutes, this is sometimes long enough for shopping. However, beyond that - I'm very particular about all details, things like all my grocery shopping done by me has been being done at 2 am in order to avoid the other customers. I also make sure to route my way around the store around the people restocking shelves. This drastically reduces the probability of problems. I carry ibuprofen on me always - its attached to my keys, and take it if I start showing any signs of problems, sometimes pre-medicating even for the headaches in particular (which doesn't help the overload, but does help with the migraines). If its unnecessary for me to be somewhere or do something and I start having a problem, I leave. If i'm in the middle of grocery shopping, I only buy the half of stuff that I've picked up, don't bother picking up the other half of stuff. If its bad enough I just get out (but that's not often at the grocery store because short lines at 2 am). Also, amazon is amazing and amazon prime is even more amazing . I rarely go to stores that aren't for buying food.

My boyfriend is also very helpful. He does a huge amount for me and doesn't actually realize how much. I won't do anything like go get take out food without him, because if I need to leave, I need to leave, and then he picks up the food and meets me elsewhere.

Overall, very carefully, with huge amounts of avoidance, and far more help than he realizes from my boyfriend. And people looking at me like I'm insane and sometimes taking pictures of me as I walk down the street.




As much as possible. I was unable to do that with people in college classes with me in the past, but just about. I couldn't avoid taking classes or doing group work with people then.

However things like, I'm on a puzzle-hunt team. We last year during a puzzle hunt merged with another team. Our team leader went through and made sure the other team had none of those types of things for me before we merged (I could only check via smell the people who were there at the moment).

Unfortunately, for the past 32 years or so, Western governments have sworn by a Milton Friedman travesty called the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment, a deliberately-maintained Reserve Army of Labour designed to suppress wages. This has permitted the bosses to be extremely fickle when it comes to choosing employees and AS people tend to not be those they want because of the emphasis on certain qualities that they tend to lack. Moreover, the NAIRU permits bosses greater control over workplaces and working conditions and these tend to emphasise their own profits and not the well-being of the employees.