Do you Think HFA and AS are the Same?

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For some reason it sounds like HFA is lower on the spectrum than AS even when people say it's "parallel." My rather literal mind tries to make sense of this and I see a branching point where one spectrum becomes two, and we're dealing with different things. I spoke with a counselor who said he thought they were the same for a while but realized eventually that they're not; HFA is more severe and involves more communication difficulties, which as some on here say, may include complete inability to speak. Are there people here who identify or were diagnosed with HFA who experience any of the "hyperlexia" common to AS? As far as I can tell I have Asperger's or "light autism" although sometimes it feels pretty "heavy" to me. I think plenty of people in the general population use the terms interchangeably, or each term (AS and HFA) carries with it a different kind of stereotype. I've definitely heard derogatory things about both, as if people with either condition is necessarily somehow more "difficult to handle" than anyone without, which I think is quite odd because I'm pretty easy-going and low maintenance, in my opinion. It's like this big insight for NTs that someone is Autistic or has Aspeger's, like it's draped over the entirety of everything about the person. I find it very odd. I don't find I do that with NTs overall, or didn't for a long time, but more and more am having to rationalize what I don't understand in others to myself as "just some weird NT stuff."

"SOUNDS" like is the problem. Again, it is so subjective that it is almost useless.


My literal mind can make NO sense of this because virtually every professional seems to have a slightly different spin on the question.

Part of this is because so much of current diagnosis seems to be based on outward behaviors and very little on states of mind. My outward behavior is nothing like classic autism, but it has taken my entire life to develop a passable approximation to "normal". Does it matter that I can talk? Are there less verbal autistics than me that are more functional?

Personally I think that people see differences among autistic people, see the labels "AS" and "HFA", and then assume that those labels explain the differences, and start assigning those labels to the differences.

Like the poster on here who described her experiences as totally different from just about everyone here. Well my experiences are totally different than nearly everyone here too. And yet, my experiences are also totally different from nearly everyone labeled "HFA" who posts here as much as they are different from nearly everyone labeled "AS" who posts here. That's because there are many genuine forms of autism that have nothing at all to do with these labels. When I do find people like me, they can have any possible autism label -- AS, HFA, LFA, just autism, PDDNOS, you name it, they have it. Because the core traits that make up what people like me are like, have nothing to do (or only something tangentially to do) with the traits professionals use to separate these categories. (Plus, some people like me end up with an AS diagnosis by mistake, because the professionals see the apparent lack of language delay and miss the echolalia, pronoun reversal, idiosyncratic language use, and massive receptive delays, which would normally put someone into the autism category if the professionals were using the same criteria that more careful researchers use.)

I do think the reason you see less people like me online in general, is because the receptive delays probably very frequently result in a lack of language use at all, rather than people like me who figured out how to fake language use long enough to actually begin to figure out how to use it to communicate. When I look at actual books on autism, I seem very much more typical than expected, the main difference from what they think is typical, is that I retain many if not most of the characteristics that in the books I read are considered hallmarks of "more severe autism", while at the same time having a few abilities that don't go along with those stereotypes. I have my own suspicions of why that's true. But anyway it seems that people with my pattern of abilities are more common than I recognized, just not all that common in places online, where I basically find a small number here and there.

Meanwhile, while many people pigeonhole me (usually as LFA), they expect me to have something in common with other people based on a small number of superficial traits. I have virtually nothing in common with people who have always understood language but are unable to speak it, and that makes up a lot of people labeled LFA, many of whom seem much like stereotypes of AS only without the ability to speak (which can then lead to further problems, especially in understanding things that they were never able to ask questions about and/or were never educated about because thought ineducable).

Anyway, while I see many different "types of autism" all over the place, very few of them have an exact match to any of the official "types of autism".

My particular "type of autism" (as I see it) usually involves these traits, among others:

* Major receptive language delays (with or without the ability to appear to use expressive language)
* Whether or not expressive language appears to start early (including appearing to be communicative, if the person manages to pattern-match it well enough), the ability to actually use it to communicate always starts late if ever.
* Difficulty reaching or maintaining idea-based thought
* Well-developed ability to do what Donna Williams in an earlier-quoted post calls "sensing pattern, theme, and feel". ("Pattern" here is used in the non-abstract sense of the word. Mathematical-type patterns need not apply.)
* Difficulty getting traditional meaning out of the environment
* Abilities that shift all over the place, rather than stay in one fixed pattern most of the time
* Difficulty learning "directly" from being taught (including conscious attempts to teach oneself), while learning very well "indirectly" without intent or even knowledge of the learning taking place.
* Often having to learn and relearn things over and over again.
* Often 'stimming' actually helps us understand our environment in ways that are really hard to explain in a brief list like this, but have to do with every single movement being almost created by aspects of our environment.
* Usually, people with this "type of autism" will be able to understand each other's body language, sometimes shockingly well. (Although a person doesn't have to always be of that "type" in order to understand our body language, it just helps.)
* Usually seems to involve difficulty learning self-care and daily living skills, regardless of other abilities. (Because those skills require a certain kind, level, and speed of understanding and responding to one's environment)

There are probably other traits I've just forgotten or never connected together that well.

As you can see, although that list skews towards autism (and towards autism where a person learns language late if ever, since obviously not all of us will learn to appear as if we're using language on time or early), it's quite possible to end up with an AS diagnosis, although autism or PDDNOS would be more common because this type of autism would probably cause more language delays than usual. And a person like this could be labeled HFA, LFA, or both at different times of their life. So it really transcends these categories because it just isn't about the things that differentiate one of these official categories from another.

I suspect that most real types of autism (by which I mean, people diagnosed with some autism-related condition who happen to have experiences in common) work the same way. Even what most people call AS... as I mentioned, there are people with language delays, even lack of spoken language altogether, who inside of their heads experience the world exactly like many people on this board. Much more like many people on this board than, for instance, I do. But when the presence or absence of speech (or speech at a certain age) becomes a "defining" characteristic of a "type of autism", this sort of thing gets lost. Same goes for what Donna Williams describes as people with trouble understanding body language who compensate by lots of use of intellect and logic at the expense of sensing. There are people just like that who are completely nonverbal. And people just like that have almost zero in common with me (except certain basic autistic traits) whether they're nonverbal or whether they never stop talking. But the official categories have no recognition of this. But believe me I have run into such people after they discover typed language and they make no more sense to me than do a lot of people here.

So... yeah. It's very hard to even begin to understand the question, when you're aware of many of the real types of autism, and know that "AS" and "HFA" don't even begin to qualify as that, because they don't differentiate between autistic people's lived experience of the world, merely superficial aspects of language development and a few other things. So how does a person argue whether two imaginary constructs are the same or not? I do say though that all of it should be called autism, and then the real similarities and differences can emerge, because if we keep the AS/HFA/LFA/PDDNOS garbage then people won't recognize subtypes like mine that cross all of those lines as if they don't exist (because they don't).

Anbuend, I like your take on the subject and don't have a whole to respond with, but I was wondering if you could elaborate more on the "sensing pattern, theme, and feel" which Donna Williams apparently alluded to. So what kinds of patterns do you mean which aren't mathematical? I'm thinking this rules out music as well, since musical patterns are largely mathematical, rhythmical, tonal, etc.

By not mathematical, I meant not the sort of thing that can be conceptualized in the abstract conceptual realm. They're very very heavily tied to direct sensed experience. Some people use patterns in a way that means something very abstract, and this is nearly the opposite of that so I'm trying to differentiate it.

I'll take a stab at this. Mathematical patterns are abstractions.They are effectively symbolic representations of ideas. You need to attach the symbol to the idea. To talk about mathematical ideas you invoke these symbols. All this happens in a certain "cognitive space" so to speak. Now imagine separating your perceptions from this symbolic representation. Shut down the verbal parts and just live in the senses. These patterns of sensory information will sort of wash over you, almost without any sense of time. The trouble with this explanation is that in order to communicate it I have to use symbolic representations (words) and the act of doing that immediately forces the pure sensory experience of patterns into the background. So this explanation is not even close to the experience because the experience exists in a cognitive space that has no symbols.

^^ Yesthat. Thanks.

And, to bring it full circle, outwardly to all standard measures, you are "low" and and I am "high" functioning. Yet, how is it your descriptions of pattern sense so easily resonate with mine? If Asperger's is so different from HFA/LFA, why do we understand each other? I really have to agree with you that dividing things into low/high asperger's autistic really misses a lot of what is really going on.

It's like abstract art, or music. It doesn't have to have a meaning; it just is.

I've recently been thinking of patterns and indirect learning, in the sense of realizing that I "knew" things without having even tried to study or understand them, and wondering if there was a connection.

I've never experienced that.

This is another point anbuend brings up regularly. It seems that there is a lot of contrasts in autism. Little middle ground, either you have one of these traits or not. So that the presence or absence of a particular thing isn't enough to divide autism into neat little categories.

Yeah, Donna Williams (who's the only person who's really written much about this sort of thing, not that I agree 100% with all her interpretations) sometimes refers to some things similar to that as "unknown knowing".

More books to buy, apparently. Not a bad thing, Women From Another Planet? was an excellent suggestion and I've run out of ASD books to read.

It's never anything necessarily obvious or even necessarily something anyone would bother to study. But there are things I've done from just working out weird troubleshooting techniques for my computer that other people have said "I would never have figured that out in a thousand years" to working out where a particular kind of enemy that seemingly randomly appeared in a video game would appear. I mean, just practically random stuff that often has limited applicability but is pretty useful to me at the time, and sometimes (as in these two examples) involves activities I can "disappear" into, which is to say I don't think of myself having conscious thought while engaging in them, just perceiving what's happening and reacting to it.

I may be overanalyzing right now, or working from a limited understanding and thus not presenting what I want to say as clearly as I like.

Yes, I believe AS is a form of HFA. That is my opinion.

I think HFA and AS are pretty much the same. AS is slightly different linquisticly etc though and I believe it is possible to have both. I have been diagnosed with HFA as a child but also diagnosed with AS as well. HFA due to speech delays and AS due to routines etc also ever since I have been able to speak I use alot of scientific terminology in my speech. I am also very keen at learning foreign languages at an alarming rate as well. Sometimes when I stim though I tend to be conflicted whether it is my HFA or AS lol. People with both HFA and AS can be known as Aspinauts. I am not just an aspie but an aspinaut as well.