Don't you think the mercury myth cheapens our existence?

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Thank you - that makes sense, and would agree. One possible consideration, however, would be a structural flaw that, when sufficiently overwhelmed, suffers a failure of some degree... have to play devil's advocate and try to find any potential answer that has been left unexamined. *shrug* I think the incidence of regression may depend on the severity of the condition, to some extent - wrote elsewhere about plateau effect, and how when systems disintegrate how there is the internal and external experience of dramatic regression. For those less adversely affected, the damage is less devastating, but the process can control throughout one's life; I consistently encounter this plateau/surge phenomenon, in music, in relationships, in almost every aspect of my life.


M.

Yeah, that's a possibility.



I think it also might depend on whether you're building something from the ground up each time, or building a permanent structure, climbing it, getting securely on top, and building another.

My brother and I are a good comparison to make there.

We were both born autistic, as in had recognizable differences from typical babies, although there's obviously no criteria for infants.

He looked at first more severely affected than I did, or at least more severely aggravating -- he screamed constantly, especially when anything changed, whereas I was pretty quiet. He avoided touch whereas I just sort of flopped into it. He was socially 'aloof' even among family, I was socially 'passive' among family (but could look 'aloof' in some other situations).

I think he actually had a consistently higher comprehension level of his surroundings than I did, though, and that might actually explain why he got more frustrated by them. (It's hard to be frustrated with a lot of seemingly random sensations, I have suspicions that his brain was already trying to gear up and comprehend things rationally, and that that contributed to a lot of frustration. But they're only my own suspicions based on what happened for me when building up that kind of rationality from scratch, something he didn't seem to have to do.)

Anyway, throughout his life, he seems to just, with the things people are expected to gain over time, he gains them and that's it. He might gain them slower, more clumsily, and with less comprehension in some areas than others, and others quickly, but all of them seem to have this slow and steady quality to them.

So he gained language a little early (although he talked too fast to be understood for a little while), and it stayed there and just went and went and went from there. (His baby book is full of more and more and more words, going on to sentences, question-asking, etc.) I also gained language a little early, but I lost it early too, and the form it came back in didn't involve comprehension until a lot later. (My baby book has a few words in it, then it stops. I used to think they just hadn't written the rest down, but that turned out not to be the case.) When I did speak again, I remember echolalia (first with no meaning, later with meaning), my brother remembers me as using the third person ("Mandy wants a sprite"), etc.

And so he gets labeled AS and I get labeled autistic even though socially he was a lot more "aloof" than I was for a lot longer (I was always way more "passive" than anything else, he never was).

So anyway, he just seemed to gain things and keep them, then gain more. And I just seem, throughout my life, to have not only hit plateaus but just lots huge chunks of stuff. And a lot of what I remember is that even when I seemed really good at something, I was starting from scratch. He might not have always been as good at it, but he was starting from a lot higher level. So I was a sprinter and he was a marathon runner in the cognitive department, at least for things that are commonly expected of someone. (I have things where I'm more a marathon runner and he doesn't even seem to know they exist, but they're not skills most people care about whether you have or not.)

So I've often thought the difference has something to do with where you're starting from -- where your "stable ground" is located. Not how far from that "stable ground" you can climb. A person who can't really climb quickly, but who walks uphill on stable ground, will get further on that hill in the long run. But a person who goes really fast building a rickety structure that gets really tall, but then falls down again when the structure collapses and has to start over... that'd be the story of my life.

I do have an area that seems to be all about amassing huge amounts of information and slowly figuring it out without knowing I'm doing so, but I have little conscious control over it, and even little conscious access to it. So I also have abilities that eventually seem to pop up out of nowhere, as well as things I don't even know I know until something triggers the use of that knowledge. But those things are rarely consistent enough for living the sort of life that the non-autistic world has built things to accommodate easily.

So my brother started off looking more stereotypically autistic than I did, by elementary school could attend with some serious modifications (like building a giant divider around his desk so he didn't get overloaded) while considered "both gifted and ret*d" (that's what they told him), and by adulthood he is now in a steady job with very minor modifications, although the job took him a long time to get, and he lives on his own in his apartment, although still does things in unusual and sometimes non-optimal ways, but doesn't get any extra help except having seen a social skills coach and going to an autism support group.

I started off different but not so stereotypical (or perhaps not so intrusively so when I was), lost language and regained something that looked like it, managed to bluff my way through school with very few modifications in the same way as I was bluffing my way through language despite severe incomprehension, was in fact considered gifted and almost a child prodigy despite the other kids sometimes calling me 'spaz' and 'ret*d' (they could tell I was very different from them), was skipped a year for academics and held back a year for social skills, then at puberty hit a burnout that not even my bluffing could solve (more stimming, less speech, less academic skills, less comprehension), was then both sent to a neurologist (who immediately recognized some classic complex-partial seizure symptoms, but who then classified autistic shutdown as part of that instead of something different) and put into college (because other aspects of shutdown were seen as boredom), which accelerated the burnout/

It was only by early adulthood that I could handle academics again, and then those burned out again within a year, by the end of which the slower loss of speech I'd been experiencing (in the form of only being sporadically vocal, more and more often since puberty) meant I had only a few times of the day I could speak, and I could no longer suppress stimming except for short periods, completely crashed and burned at university, had to leave and crashed and burned even worse living on my own, and in a few years was getting services, which by now are pretty intensive, and lost the ability to have any useful speech at all sometime between then and now, as well as most of the remaining ability to suppress stimming when it's happening. And I might be getting part-time work in the near future but it's far more customized to me than any modification my brother's ever had to experience to anything.

So... yeah, compared to other people, he's a straight line going diagonally upward, and I'm a line that goes all over the place over time. Although I think in my own way I'm a straight line going diagonally upward in areas that I'm good at, they're just again not things that are considered essential to survival for non-autistic people, so they're not recognized as much. And at a glance someone would say I'm "more autistic" than him (although frankly I think we're too different to quantify one of us as milder or more severe), whereas if you got us at two years old someone would say he was "more autistic" than me despite having way more speech, and if you got us at the height of our passing I would have passed better than him.

Er... sorry for taking the thread on a long self-descriptive tangent. But I wanted to contrast our developmental paths in enough detail to see the difference. I also want to note that this is compared to non-autistic development, taking non-autistic as the norm, which might not be the best way to examine autistic development. In comparison to me, for instance, non-autistic people regressed in auditory discrimination at an early age, in order to gain more sophisticated language comprehension. But it's not called a regression, so it becomes invisible when viewed under the lens people normally view such things under. I have often wondered if all I am doing is taking another path that sees different things as vital and different things as expendable, and therefore I am always struggling to do tasks that my brain isn't built for because they're in the majority, but excelling at tasks that aren't even on most people's radar (sometimes not even on my brother's). (At the same time, even when struggling more at a task, I can sometimes perform it better than someone who doesn't have to struggle but is always at the top of their abilities, which absolutely baffles and sometimes angers them when I then drop to far below their level on the task, suddenly and without outside warning.)

And I hope this has made enough sense that a person can see the point of it under all this detail. (The point of which is, both to contrast my development to the nearest available "non-regressive" autistic person I know in as much detail as I can write about right now, and to point out how it has been this way frequently throughout my life, and it's just plain hard to tell which external events did what, given that many of my periods of 'regression' have taken place during periods of extreme changes to the brain as well as extreme pressure to perform more and more complex tasks. Another flaw of what I've discussed is obviously the fact that my brother and I are only two people and have incredibly different personalities and life experiences as well as different talents and difficulties, and this is obviously just an extended couple of anecddotes, more for the point of raising questions than anything else. One thing I know is that my periods of 'regression' can't all be tied to vaccines, because not all of them involved vaccinations at that age. I also know that I'm one of the few people I know whose parents admit that I was both different from birth and 'regressed'.)

Another important thing to remember is that a sizeable portion of autistic people experience regressions later in life, such as adolescence or adulthood.

So having skills and then regressing, doesn't mean the person wasn't autistic before and suddenly "becomes" autistic. Sometimes this is known prior to "regression", other times, the person wasn't diagnosed before, so people who aren't too familir with the autistic spectrum can easily see an autistic person who is "passing" start stimming a lot and losing some skills, and they think that it's a normal person who is becoming autistic.

If an adult can pass as being non-autistic and then experiences loss of skills to make it more obvious, then how come it gets assumed that parental notions that their child is normal (especially if they think negatively of autism, disability, or other divergence) beforehand are probably right (and I believe there's a study showing that, from home movies and stuff, there's evidence that the child wasn't typical prior to regression like they thought).

I am being lazy again, I have skimmed through the thread but not read all of it, so I hope in answering the original question I am not repeating what a lot of other people have said. Basically I veiw MY aspergers as a diagnosis that I have been searching for all my life, now that I have it and can discover what it is that makes me tick I am happy to call it a disorder and work on myself to better integrate with those that do not have it. So in that sense I dont care how I came by it and so therefore nothing can cheapen it or conversly give me street cred for having it.

I think many of the kids who 'regress' in the toddler years were always autistic to begin with. The weirdest case study here: Evan McCarthy. He learned to speak, and was beginning to use sentences, before losing speech at three years old (and gaining it back thereafter). But his history makes it obvious that he was autistic from birth. (Why his mom is against vaccines with such an obviously autistic-from-birth son is anyone's guess.)

It could be that regression is not the beginning of autism, but something that happens during the course of an autistic person's lifetime. And, if it's going to happen, doesn't it make sense that it would happen from ages two to four--when you're expected to learn new skills at a very fast pace?

Exactly - at the times of my own 'regressions', the most prominent time was at high school and college, a time when not only are demands increased on already present skills, but also one is expected to pick up on a lot of new skills (such as laundry, shopping, fixing food, independence-type stuff), which is the case throughout childhood, and especially around toddler-hood. In trying to not only maintain current skills, but also develop other skills, it can not only make things increasingly difficult, but also increasingly apparent from the outside.

When I was really young, while I didn't have a notable regression per se, I developed single words by about a year like my other sisters, but by about age 3 I was still using echolalia, though shortly after developed more communicative speech. This history is pretty tentative, though, considering that my parents' memories are a bit fuzzy on these things, but I was about 3 or 4 when I had the allergic reaction to penicillin, and both myself and my dad remember that I had little speech at that time.

It is, however, unclear if I had had more speech, but due to the stress from the allergic reaction temporarily lost some of it, or if I maintained roughly the same amount of speech. The losing-speech-due-to-stress idea is more likely if the reaction occurred when I was four, as I am inclined to think my parents would remember if I had not developed communicative phrases by then, though as we know that I was still using echolalia when I was three, then it's just the amount of speech skills I had at the time.

Lol. I think my head might go splode.

The idea that autism is simply the result of "toxins poisoning our brains" is overly simplistic and degrading. I don't think any real research scientists have that opinion though. It's just a result of the general public being too stupid to comprehend the true complexity of it.

My hunch is that autism is linked to some kind of subtle genetic mutation. It might get enhanced by the presence of mercury but I seriously doubt that is the sole cause.

Or when your brain is gearing up to learn those new skills, but really failing at it for various reasons, or learning new things at the expense of others, yeah.

The two other times I had really prominent changes were at puberty (lots of both brain changes and changes in expectations at that age) and when I moved out on my own (lots of changed expectations very fast). In both later cases it also coincided with a lot of actual substantial and important learning, too. (In the earliest, I can remember things from the general age but I can't remember what if anything was learned at what time.) There was also a more slight one around age seven.

If that's so, then most of the human race is too stupid -- doctors, after all, have been fooled by that stuff too.

Emphasis mine.

The first bolded part, now that also describes toddlerhood a lot, as well as adolescence. The thing is, that since it's when many parents first start seeing their kid is different (at least, to the degree that they are), it gets seen as the beginning, rather than just a part of the course of their life.

The second part, that's a lot like what happened in the last two years with math skills for me. I lost most of my arithmetic skills, but at the same time I was learning number theory, modern algebra, calculus (re-learning), and topology, stuff that math majors don't usually get to until college, yet I was learning this stuff when in 10th grade.

Due to the way that they administered and scored the KTEA, though, the report said I had kindergarten level math skills, because they saw that I couldn't do the multiplying 2-digit numbers without a calculator, so they moved it down to questions like 2+2 and 5-1, which I can answer without a calculator. Then they got into 2-digit adding, I must've slipped up enough that they stopped the testing.

It's quite odd though, because if the test is taken at face value, without knowing more about my math skills, it could very well look like I am about to major in physics in college with kindergarten math skills.

After all, I would assume that most people wouldn't be tuned in to how someone who's been called gifted in math and skipped both physics and pre-calculus to go into AP Physics and AP Calculus, could be tested as having kindergarten math skills.

They did ask me about this, considering that I had gotten a B in AP Calculus the previous year (it would've been an A, as I got a 94 and a 99 on two exams, except that I didn't turn in two units worth of homework that I lost). I explained this about how my math skills had been changing like I described above (A Woodcock-Johnson test, either 1 or 2 years before, indicated math ability well above average, with grade-level number being about 13 or 16).

However, this explanation didn't find itself in the report, though a description of my being under a desk in animation class, a class where students often sat on the floor and under the desks, did.

I'm kind of upset about them not including an explanation, especially since they directly asked me and I gave a similar, albeit shortened, explanation, as this is the paperwork I'll be submitting to the disability office and academic advisors, and since I intend to be a physics major, I just KNOW I'm going to have to explain this to people, and I'm worn out just typing it, let alone saying it. I think I'll make a paper about it, and whenever I go into an office or somewhere where they've read my reports and they ask a question about it, I'll hand them the paper.

How is a doctor going and researching something because a lot of people are saying it's happening 'being fooled by' it. Nobody is being fooled by anyone - this stuff needs research. If doctors were to start thinking "Oh no, these parents are irrational, no point in doing any research" nobody would get anywhere. It's when you make blanket assumptions like that that you miss out the big pieces of the puzzle.

You know there's never been a proper study of autism in non-vaccinated kids vs vaccinated kids?

I don't find it degrading at all that there is a chemical and an anatomical cause to my suffering.
The mercury could have come from my mother's toothfillings or from another source.
Having said that, there is very likely also a genetic factor without which the mercury cannot trigger autism.

The many symptoms of mercury poisoning are exactly identical with that of autism, so I don't understand why there should be any scientific doubt about there being a causal connection.

I don't understand people using autistic regression as an argument to "prove" the mercury myth.
My own brother regressed; then progressed. It's a rarer form of autism, but with easily explainable genetic factors!

Early regression which is diagnosed as classical autism (here) is actually really common were I live.

I think it would be very interesting to know just how many babies below the age of 12 months/before they acquired words show ASD symptoms. And how many of them will lose language a few months later or get diagnosed with any form of PDD or ASD later on.

It would at least show that these children probably did not develop exactly typical before, regardless of whatever causes autism.

I think most people do not at all recognise many apparently mild and even some severe symptoms of ASDs if langauge isn't affected (yet).

I posted a list here once and asked around, parents and therapists whether they think all other signs of ASDs are alarming if the language delay isn't in it. And most said no. They said all other symptoms don't worry them as they can appear in any typically developing child too.

Yeah, one of my cousins, when he was younger would bang his head (and probably showed other characteristics of ASD, considering both me and my dad are autistic, and his parents both show traits). His family thought it was funny.