pre-90s born "mild" Aspies - would you be dx as a

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If you were growing up now, with the current awareness of AS, considering the way you were as a child, but not left to yourself, your parents and teachers to deal with your Aspie personality not knowing it was AS, the way you might have been back then, do you think you would be diagnosed?

Personally, based on my parents' accounts and my own memory, I most certainly had the literal interpretation, the overly formal use of language for my age, normal language development (accelerated, actually, and possible hyperlexia), obsessive esoteric interests, occasionally noticeable odd gait or posture, I don't recall stimming other than a tendency to "mouth", but not pronounce, words that I had just said or that I was thinking. I started kindergarten a year early on account of my high intelligence but was kept back to repeat on the advice of the teachers that I was not "socially ready" for school, my mother's recollection was that I "didn't play like the other kids" and that "the other kids didn't get [me]". I was "logic boy", obeying only the rules that could be explained to me so that they made sense or that I feared being punished physically for. And anyone - child or adult - moving any toy or household object appropriated by me as such that I had carefully placed would be on the end of a frightful tantrum. If I was assessed back then, If /anyone/ was assessed back then, I would have been a good candidate for an AS diagnosis. I was born the year before Lorna Wing's paper was published.

Well, I was born long before Asperger's was diagnosable but I know there was concern over my social development. No one back then would think autism unless there was significant impairment. I was in therapy as early as 3rd grade (this was the 60's) and my parent were told when I was 17 they thought I had Schizoid personality disorder. I think if I was born more recently I might very well be diagnosed with PDD-NOS. My son is diagnosed with Asperger's.

I would have had a name for my pain.

ruveyn

I think if I had been born 10 years later, I definitely would've been diagnosed. I was very 'off' as a child. I got diagnosed with depression at the age of 8. AS wasn't widely known in my country at the time, or I would've been diagnosed with that, too.

I'm 'well-adapted' enough as an adult to not need a diagnosis for AS. For the more debilitating comorbids I have, I'm glad I have a diagnosis.

Maybe. I was already labeled as gifted so they might not have wanted to try to double label me. I was bullied a lot though so they might have had the school shrink look at me for that.

I would not have been put into special education classes or mis-diagnosed as having ADHD.

It is difficult to say, in my case.

When I was in elementary school, I saw a therapist and got diagnosed with anxiety. Looking back now, it seems pretty clear to me that all of the anxiety was being caused by some type of PDD, and I think it is possible that if my therapist had really done her research and asked more in-depth questions, etc...she may have realized that there were deeper issues. However, I am not sure. The reason I say this is that my parents were truly clueless. They saw that I had so so many atypical behaviors, sensory issues, nervous tics, and trouble interacting with peers. They constantly told me that I was the "most miserable person" they had ever met. But they both claim that because I was their only child, they didn't really know what children were like and they assumed that other kids were like me. I think this is kind of ridiculous, because they both had multiple siblings growing up, plenty of childhood friends, and, once they were adults, multiple nieces and nephews. But whatever. My point is that my therapist was getting the majority of her information from my parents, because I was so young, and I have a feeling they left out a ton of stuff about me because they simply didn't realize that it was significant. And my parents are just as clueless about ASDs now as they were back then. I do think that teachers and therapists have a greater awareness of the spectrum now, though, so I guess it is possible that even without my parents' input I would have been diagnosed if I was a child today.

I got diagnosed with ADD & depression in '93 (at 12-13 years old) and was prescribed Ritalin and Zoloft. Needless to say, I hated being on those, but during that time I had stopped seeing the therapist who diagnosed me. After 4 years, the husband of my tutor (a doctor himself) re-evaluated me, ruled out the prior diagnosis and got me off those meds.

To answer the question, I really don't know. It's understandable why my first therapist misdiagnosed the ADD and depression, so I hold no ill feelings towards her. Even though AS was formally recognized by the time I was re-evaluated, the main purpose of the evaluation was to get me off the meds, not to determine what I had. Knowing that and taking into account that the doctor was an older man, logic could assume he may still have been on the fence on the subject of AS. But again, I don't hold any ill thoughts against him either.

I would be diagnosed autistic straight away. IQ was around 70 (or much lower if marked on my performance - I barely talked to my own family and said nothing at all to strangers). I didn't have much interest in people or the world around me, just my few interests. And had the usual meltdowns over change.
I didn't have that much knowledge of anything and didn't learn much in a mainstream classroom.

I had attention problems too so I would maybe have got an ADD diagnoses, or even SCT.

I am fairly sure someone at school would have noticed, had I been a child in a later period of time.
I was sent to a child psychologist to have my IQ tested, due to issues at school, and I do wonder if they noticed anything else other than my very high scores.
Sadly, my parents are the sort who would have major issues having a kid with such a diagnosis, and so probably would not have done much about it.

My parents would still be in denial, regardless of how I would've been diagnosed. In fact, recently I learned that my family had been in complete denial as to why I was severely harassed and ostracized by my classmates in Catholic School all these years. They thought I was being discriminated for being non-Catholic. Little did they know that ones of my biggest bullies at one of the schools was a non-Catholic. Religion had nothing to do with my discrimination! It had everything to do with showing the obvious signs of not being a socially and mentally normal teenager. I still cannot understand how people could still be completely oblivious to the fact that I'm autistic even in a world where autism is gaining more awareness. I show the obvious signs everytime I'm out in public and people aren't afraid to point them out to me. The problem is that they can't put two and two together.

It makes me think it wouldn't have made any difference. It took my high school counselor my entire high school experience to come to the conclusion that I maybe autistic. You would think she would've picked up on something when I came crying to her office on my very first day of freshman year (and my very first day in a completely new school district to worsen things) because I was freaking out over not having anyone to sit with at lunch. Instead it took a senior year breakdown of refusing to apply for colleges and pissing off the choir and speech teachers to finally accomplish what should've been done when I was a child. I'm bitter. Yeah, I'm starting to really believe it would not have made a difference considering how slow and oblivious everyone was to realizing that I was different.

Maybe. I certainly did arouse some concerns from teachers when I was a kid, because of some odd behaviors. But of course AS wasn't on the radar back then, and the problems weren't severe enough to ever land me in a doctor's office. I was also pretty good at hiding the strangest of my traits from other people. But at home I was more or less myself.

The problem is that my parents were too crazy to notice this stuff in their kids. They were so wrapped up in their own mental illness that they hadn't the context to realize that my behaviors were abnormal and that my personality was so skewed in its development. My dad was a totally uninvolved and unaware closet-Aspie and my mom really seemed like she suffered from something on the Schizophrenic spectrum of disorders. I grew up thinking that I was perfectly normal, if not admirable in some way.... Then I left home and went out into the world and found out the hard way that this was not the case....

Knowing what I know now helps me to make peace with the past, but I do wonder what my life might have been like if I had been diagnosed back then and received assistance... things like social skills training or strategies for managing sensory issues. These are the things I'm having to do now on my own, many years after the fact. I wonder........

If AS was known (which it was) I would have been diagnosed (which I was) but would it have happened at a sooner age if they knew? Maybe. I was already diagnosed with autism and then it was changed to autistic behavior because I had a history of hearing loss and then it was changed to communication disorder. It was my speech therapist who suspected it when I was in 5th grade and then my shrink when I was 12. I was diagnosed with ADD instead when I was 10 but my mother knew that was not the correct diagnoses because it still didn't explain everything.

I believe I would have been a "ringer". I, too, was dx'd as "gifted" circa 1970, second grade, after having been sent to a shrink at the recommendation of my teacher who thought I was learning disabled. She only had 40 years of experience as a second grade teacher, what did she know? My parents resisted putting me in a gifted program lest that exacerbate my oddities. Thus, I floundered in school, eventually dropping out, getting a G.E.D. and joining the Navy.

That said; I feel if I had been born ten years hence, I likely would have been pronounced ADD, and zombied with ritalin. I never felt that description at all applied to me. It's just what they did in the 80's. Today it would be Aspergers, which I feel fits.

Yet I wonder, how would my life be different had I had that label affixed to me these last forty years? Would my expectations have changed? Would my failures have been expected? Would it have mitigated my perseverance? All in all, rough as it's been, I'm grateful for the ignorance I have been granted, til such time as I was prepared to use the knowledge that replaced it.

Exactly this. I'm pretty sure my grade school counselor expressed her concerns, but my parents ignored her. A child with any sort of disability would have been unacceptable to my father (my mom died when I was in 4th grade).

Still pretty much a kid here, but even back when I was younger my mother could tell I was different. I would have gone to a shrink, only my dad pretty much inhailed all of our money. Now my mom has a good paying job, a husband that cares, and a nice house for her two teenage daughters. (Me, and my 13 year old sister.)