Is autism running in your family?

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I like this! I don't know or think my mom has any issues on her side, but my dad's side is a cocktail.

Thank you. I actually thought about doing a formal genogram (with all the standard symbols):

http://www.genopro.com/

But I decided that I did not need it. The line drawings were enough.

I am self-diagnosed and for a while I thought I was the only one in the family with AS or autism. However, thinking about it recently, I realised that both parents had poor social skills although they might not merit an AS diagnosis. Of my 5 other sibilings, 1 can be rather intense, and one is naive to an extreme.

I think it runs in my family, of course they are undiagnosed but my father who is a nuclear engineer and even spent time at 3 mile island during the crisis to assist has more signes of AS then I do, and his father was a physics teacher who loved everything about the subject.

My parents are deceased, and I'm sure my mom was bipolar (I had the experience of a 9 year dysfunctional marriage with a bipolar/dissociative to see what one is like), and I have an intuition that my dad was Aspergers. His brother once told me I seemed to have a quality similar to his of "reaching beyond". The rest is just a general feeling of who he was and what our family relationships were like. There were plenty of emotional conflicts for me, and when I was very young there was lots of loud yelling sessions between the parents when us kids were supposed to be in bed asleep (though I doubt they were thinking about that).

We know, too, that there was some kind of obviously related disability in my maternal grandmother. Unfortunately, my fathers side was Russian immigrant, and any deeper knowledge of that side is gone. Also, Russian culture has a heavy alcoholic content to it, and my dad had that too.

Do you keep track of the research?

http://news.google.com/news?ned=us&ncl= ... en&topic=m

My parents told me who my real ones are? Certainly you jest. You're reaching with that one. Pretty hard for them to do, unless you're good with an Ouija board. I suppose in the really odd case it might be true, but come on, most are pretty upfront about it or you figure it out later yourself.

My great grandmother was definately autistic, but was undiagnosed. She refused to see a doctor about anything unless it was life threatening
I highly suspect that my father has AS, also, if he did have it, he would be undiagnosed. He doesn't like doctors either...especially psychiatrists ....I think not liking doctors runs in my family more than autism itself, heh.

Seriously though, there are a few other family members who do have some AS traits.
My mother likes routine and doesn't have many friends...also hand flaps. I wouldn't call her an aspie though...just someone with a few of the traits.
My youngest cousin who just recently turned 5 years old I suspect has AS. She reminds my mother of me A LOT when I was her age. She has a complex vocabulary for her age, has problems with clothing material and lines her toys up like the stereotypical AS child. Also, she has a really obsessive interest with fairies...which in theory, may seem common for a girl of her age...but if you met her, you could definately see that the interest goes beyond the "typical" enthusiasm level.

I just realised that ASD seems to run primarily in females in my family...isn't that uncommon?

AS heavily permeates my mother's side of the family...

My mother and grandfather have both been diagnosed (the latter shortly before he died), and almost everyone else in that half of the family shows AS traits...

Well, maybe a little. I have an uncle on my mother's side who's a likely (undiagnosed) case of AS. Personally I think my father has some of the traits without the social impairments, but my mom thinks he's just ADD. My sister is NT, but she has a tendency towards obsessive behavior, though that often manifests in very social ways. Both of my paternal grandparents obviously have something going on--mild OCD maybe? I'm not sure. I'm the only one in my immediate family who's diagnosable as on the spectrum, but I can definitely see threads of mental oddities running throughout my family. And of course my boyfriend is also AS, so if we have kids they're likely to be on the spectrum too.