Differences between mild Aspergers and severe Autism?

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I agree. When I was about 8, I had a best friend who had a brother with severe Autism. I went to mainstream school, but there was no way that they would put my friend's brother into mainstream. When he was 12 his mum was still changing nappies for him. I stopped wearing nappies when I was 2 and a half. His mum could never bond with her own son because he just could not say a word to anyone. All he could do was dance around with no clothes on, and he respectively threw his favourite object, (which was an old pen with no ink left in it) and he would throw it then run to pick it up then throw it again then run to pick it up.....he would do that all day long. And when I went round to play with my friend, he would scream if he saw me or any other children who were friends with his sister, and he would have a big meltdown - I have seen it. Now he is 22, but lives in a special care home, because his mum couldn't ever cope with him.

I am nowhere near like that, and his sister said that to me too.

All that means (if it's true that you're nowhere near that person -- for all you know you are, in ways you're unaware of because you didn't look beyond a few surface traits) is that one autistic person is very unlike one other autistic person. It doesn't necessarily mean all people said to have a whole type of autism are totally different from all people said to have another type of autism. You actually have no idea, maybe despite his appearance his thinking style was more like yours than, say, mine is. You never know. And I think it's what's inside us that matters more than our outward begaviors in terms of who is similar and who is different.

I'm starting to see a major pattern on this and several other threads. It seems like there are people who see exactly what everything they have heard tells them they are going to see. And people who just see what we see regardless of whether it's what the social world tells us to see or not. And the first sort of people say that their views are just obviously true and have the backing of mainstream opinion behind them. The rest of us just have our observations without mainstream opinion behind them. And even if our observations took no thought at all, we are supposedly "thinking too much". As if it takes thinking to notice things that challenge mainstream viewpoints. It's all very strange and disturbing to me. Especially since I have to live with the consequences of those mainstream viewpoints every day, but to disagree with them and propose a fairly easy way to deal with the real differences between us, is thinking too much. Or something.

i don't think the label of "high functioning" or "low functioning" has anything to do with when you were diagnosed... i was diagnosed ADD and i think NLD (or something, my mom likes to dodge questions and i have no memory of it) when i was about 6... does that make me "low functioning"? (i know NLD isn't really on the spectrum, but it should be)

then, my mom spent the majority of my childhood refusing to treat my ADD/NLD with anything other than like... leaves (homeopathic stuff that did nothing) and yelling at me when i didn't understand social conventions or got distracted by things or got obsessed with things... i'm 99% sure i'm actually aspie but i haven't been diagnosed formally because my mom prefers to ignore my problems (i have been diagnosed informally, by that i mean when i got a regular doctor rather than a pediatrician i told her i thought i was aspie and she laughed and told me she had 2 autistic kids and that she was going to ask if anyone had told me i was aspie)
does that make me "high functioning"?

i can somewhat function in social situations because i really really want to and try hard at it. but then when i'm stuck in a social situation and can't escape and get overloaded i end up having a meltdown. i clearly need support but get none. my girlfriend is usually the one who has to help me with things... so where does that put me?

i think it puts me on the autism SPECTRUM, where people have different levels in every area, so it's pretty hard to pin someone as "high functioning only" or "low functioning only".

My exposure to autism as taught me one thing - never assume that what is happening on the outside is a definite indication of what is going in on the inside. I've heard too many stories of autistics that were uncommunicative an the once an effective mode of communicating is found demonstrate far more awareness and cognition than their outward behavior suggests.




Part of this is the all too human trait of egoism. I know that I dislike being wrong about things. Our egos don't easily admit to errors. Mainstream ideas build up a sort of group think momentum that resists change even in the face of evidence because change requires admitting incorrect ideas. Yet, as a solidly scientific disciplines, psychology and related fields are very young and we should expect rapid change in theories and concepts. Cognitive science still as no consensus on the nature of consciousness. Brain imaging is still a coarse grained tool. Objectively measuring personality traits is fraught with difficulty. It should no surprise at all that the study of autism keeps generating surprises.

I don't know. I'm trying to imagine it. And I think it must be like "Everyone knows it's this way, why do you keep going on about it?" or something like that. More of a group thing than necessarily an ego thing.

I guess I can't say anything for certain other than I know my own ego gets in the way when I have to admit my thinking is wrong.

Connor our son with asperger's, high functioning autism
Type in this on Youtube. This child is not much different to what I was like when I was a child of his age. Of course I wasn't exactly the same as him, but by the way he's speaking normally, it looks like he has the same sort of development I had.

I know no 2 people are the same, whoever they are. Just like no 2 trees are the same, or no 2 snowflakes are the same. But I've done so much research on AS in the last few weeks, and everywhere says that Autism and AS have the same symptoms but a person with LF Autism have less developmental skills than a person with HF Autism. I'm not talking about personalities, because no 2 people have the same personalities, desires, anxieties, ect, but the language and communication development can be different in lots of different ways. It's a complicated thing to explain, but it's there.

If you went onYoutube and looked up ''children with high functoning Autism'', you will see that most of the children talk like any normal kid to the camera. If you typed in ''children with low functioning Autism'', you will notice that all they seem to be doing is either having a screaming meltdown or fiddling about with something on their own without any verbal language or eye contact, or doing something repetitively.

Try this case study:

http://psych.wisc.edu/lang/pdf/Gernsbac ... _study.pdf

I had normal-sounding speech (sometimes and not others) at certain points in childhood. I doubt that my language development was anything like yours however because I did not understand a word of English for some of that time that I produced normal sounding speech. I was able to produce that speech by echoing it from others either exactly or by combining phrases from different people. Close to none of that speech communicated my thoughts so I had as little genuine communication as someone who could barely speak or someone who had the common autistic trait of never speaking except in occasional bursts of perfect language for a second or two. (Then I lost speech almost entirely but that's a different story for a different time.)

Compare that to this case study of an autistic boy deemed low functioning and nonverbal (those words aren't used much if at all in the paper but I know the boy and they were and continue to be used about him):

http://psych.wisc.edu/lang/pdf/Gernsbac ... _study.pdf

His language development was closer to yours than either of yours is to mine. Except his was likely more advanced.

Do you understand what I'm pointing out? You can't go for surfaces.

Meanwhile defying the categories all the way, not on purpose but just by existing, I sometimes talked superficially normally. I also had spectacular meltdowns. And I spent a lot of my time moving strangely and interacting with purely sensory aspects of my environment and engaging in repetitive behavior.

I question whether looking at a camera is the same thing at all as eye contact. I have never been much for eye contact but I sometimes look at cameras (including before I knew what they were for).

I would also question the ethics of anyone who filmed me having a meltdown and put it on YouTube without my consent (especially if I were unable to give consent). I just barely gave consent when someone put one of my meltdowns on television (it was explained to me they were trying to show me in a sympathetic light... whatever, I think they just needed a warm body to put into their story whether or not my life fit that story).

I don't mind if anyone sees me stimming though. Although I am fairly sure if you didn't know me you'd just add that to your list of videos that proved the LF/HF divide.

Anyway I'm not talking about personality. I'm talking about (in terms of what makes people similar and different in a true way more than a superficial way) things like:

* Do their minds form ideas easily? If so, what kind and in what way?
* Do they use various non-idea forms of awareness? If so, how, what kind, etc.?
* What is their understanding of language? Not outward use. Not whether they speak or type. But how they understand it.
* What kind of thinking (or not-exactly-thinking) do they have?
* How do they perceive their environment?
* Are they able to understand each other on a basic level more than they understand others? By basic level I mean thought and perception, not personality.
* Do they have sensory interests? Intellectual interests? What kinds?

And lots of other things. But I'm talking about thought and perception, not outwardly "obvious" abilities. Those things are more important to who a person is than what they look like on YouTube. And those things totally cross traditional boundaries of HF and LF in ways you wouldn't believe.

BTW, a lot of what some of us are trying to get across is that reading something everywhere doesn't make it true. "Common knowledge" about autism has been grossly inaccurate for generations and is only slowly catching up to reality.

Yeah, that is basically the definition, isn't it?

I remember hearing a while back that I would be considered too low-functioning to run a chapter of an (autism related) organization, due to not being able to help people with their martial problems (since I know nothing about that/relationships). I'd bet there are people I could stand next to who are married who would be tagged "low functioning," while I'd be seen as "high functioning" by the same surface glance. And under it the differences wouldn't be what people might think.

I can speak without too much trouble, and someone who can't will face problems that I don't have to. That's a real difference. But to assume something like "'no speech' means 'no thought'" is a giant, unwarranted leap. Maybe people are thinking this thread is about the former, rather than the latter. I dunno.

I think it's a little of both -- I'm sure I remember LFA being explicitly defined in this thread in terms like "has no understanding of the world around them". But even if it's about speech differences and the like the idea seems to not be just important differences in some contexts, but more like that there's nothing in common between those labeled mild AS and those labeled LFA (a point which has been repeatedly brought up). I just have a problem with the whole construct of functioning labels because it doesn't seem to match reality enough to be worth keeping especially given the problems it causes. It's like a mental shorthand that causes people to switch off their awareness of who is in front of them.

Anbuend,

That's exactly what was said - that LFA means no awareness of the world around them, which is where I came in. It seemed to me like there was a kind of definition where LFA is strictly defined in such a way that anyone who is labeled as such can never ever speak for themselves, and that is the first thing I learned about how autistic advocates are treated ("you can talk, you're not autistic enough to speak as an autistic person"), which leads me to think that HFA is an explicit "You're not autistic enough" label, hence my asking what the term is supposed to mean further up in the thread. Not that I think anyone here is saying whether anyone is autistic enough.

I also feel like the two terms are used in such a way as to imply that autistic people are HFA or LFA (I see moderately functioning autisticis - MFA - occasionally, but not often), while LFA is defined very strictly, and a lot of assumptions are made about HFA which seem to leave a lot of space where you have autistic people who apparently would fit neither (I guess they'd be MFA?). But of course these labels assume things about everyone who receives one (notionally all autistic people).

Thank you for the links and explanation upthread.

That's one usage in one context yes. But I think most people who use it use it more innocently (as in for instance I don't see anyone in this thread using it to manipulate people, and the ideas on this thread are very common elsewhere as well). Unfortunately the consequences are far from innocent even when the beliefs are.

OTOH the manipulative usage is not restricted to autism. The "If you stand up for yourself and disagree with me you're too high functioning even though people just like you who agree with me may be low functioning" context is used in every kind of disability context I have ever heard of.

Last edited by anbuend on 13 Jan 2011, 9:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Right, I mean I doubt anyone here is using it that way, but that's how I've encountered it discussed/explained elsewhere so my initial reaction is "Why would you say that?" every time.

This is probably a big part of my problem every time HFA and LFA are used here. I should do something about that.

I didn't show any Aspie symptoms until the day I started school - which worried my parents. The doctors and social workers were also very confused because my parents were saying that I was a typical baby and toddler, right up to I was 4 years and 5 months (which was exactly how old I was when I started school). So it took proffessional social workers and doctors and teachers 4 long years to actually discover the diagnosis, and I was diagnosed with ''mild Aspergers Syndrome and Dyspraxia''. And all the other children they diagnosed with Autism spectrum disorders had shown at least a few symptoms before the age of 4, like having an interest in objects, or not smiling or making eye contact, or having non-verbal meltdowns after the age of 3, or having special obsessions, or lots of other little signs what seem different to other people's small children.

I didn't have any special obsessions until the age of 11.

I've never had a non-verbal meltdown in my life. Always been verbal and still are verbal.

Even my doctor has told me that most people born with mild AS show no signs until school age.

Right, if you've seen one autistic person, you've seen one autistic person, and everyone's different, but observations in early childhood do not necessarily translate to specific life outcomes.

Nor do behavioral observations necessarily tell you about everything going on in an autistic person's mind.

Well, it sort of can, because people with a disability aren't showing the symptoms delibrately.

By the way most Aspies seem to think that all NTs are all the same.

Mild Autism and severe Autism have the same symptoms but they come out differently, depending on how severe the person it with it. Just think of rain. Sometimes it rains lightly, sometimes it rains heavy. It's still rain, whether it's light or heavy, and it still make things wet, but heavy rain falls faster whilst light rain (such as heavy drizzle) falls lighter.