How good was care in the 70's?

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I was diagnosed in the late 60's. My mom stopped cooperating with my treatment not long into it, and I "got better" on my own. Apparently. I learned to walk and talk, anyway. Went to a normal school, on to college, have until very recently been able to support myself. As far as my mom was concerned, I did alright.

Thing is, I've been miserable my whole life. But mom didn't tell me I was autistic until I was 35.

I consider this missed opportunity on a whole host of levels. First, I lost thirty years of trying to improve my situation. Probably the most important thirty years of my life. Secondly, care would probably have been covered by insurance when I was a kid, and my parents instead did nothing.

Did I miss out on anything? Was care in the 70's actually useful?

I would like to have been taught coping skills, and been taught what NT signals mean, rather than taking decades to discover them by myself.

Some argue that you would have given yourself too many excuses and won't have had a chance at a normal life if you were aware of your condition during your young life.

Were you diagnosed with autism in the late 60s?

I was diagnosed in the mid 60s....and with “brain damage” as well. I had no speech until age 5.5.

I went to a special nursery school, then to a special school until 5th grade. It was a school for kids with all sorts of “problems.”

In the 70s, I went to a normal junior high, then a special high school. I received psychotherapy...and that’s it. I got thrown out of many classes in junior high, and some in high school as well. I didn’t receive “autism” treatment because HFA and Asperger’s didn’t exist yet. An “autistic” person was almost always nonverbal and severely dysfunctional in general. Their treatment would have been very different to my treatment.

Diagnosed with autism in 1968. Mom was told I'd spend my life in an institution and would not go to a normal school. Started developing language normally, but regressed and did not learn to speak until I was 4. Did start normal school at 4.

Same thing happened with my mother. She refused to believe them. I wasn’t “sent away.”

Difference with me is that I had never developed speech till age 5.5. It was at a camp where they were researching autism.

Didn’t go to any school till after the summer I started speaking. It was referred to as “brain-injured nursery school,” though it was actually Kindergarten.

You did good—starting “normal school” at 4

I am about a decade younger than both of you but I am guessing things were similar in the 80s too.

DX'd in 1978, my mother was told hand me over to New York State and forget about me. My speech had regressed among other behaviors. She refused and I was offered speech therapy and intense preschool instead. Was able to enter school at 5 in a self-contained LD class setting until 2nd grade. Was put in a regular class in an open school setting in 3rd grade which was horrible. As a result, I was put into self-contained EBD classes where I was given a "slightly more than deminimus" education from repeat of 3rd grade to 6th grade where, as a result of my mother teaching me at home, the system realized that they had lost control of my education and quickly reverted to regular education classes as middle school progressed. For high school, I ended up attending one of the best high school in the USA but did not do well educationally because I received no services.

In fact, the only time I received counseling services, they either used what I said against me or my mother or would tell me that my issues were my fault and that I should change. As a result, I still have a hard time initiating psychological services today.

In fact, I think had my mother followed what the doctors wanted when I was 3, I would be dead by now because of physical issues that I was never warned about as a kid (which caused things to manifest 4 years ago).

Personally, I think the manner of care of persons with autism in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s in the USA was one of either institutionalization, minimal education, or nothing.

I tend to agree with demeus. You are probably better off for learning the coping skills on your own. Your mother has common sense.

On the other hand there were very interesting special education classes at the time. They used techniques that were a little off the wall but were very effective. Too bad these are not practiced today.

Some types of special education curriculum have been around for a long time. Sixty years ago when I was in the third grade the teacher saw a problem with the way I spoke. I thought it was due to my two large buckteeth. But anyways, I was sent to Special Class. Three days a week, special students along with myself were collected from their respective classroom and led to a secret hidden room off of the main school cafeteria. This happened while I was in the 3rd & 4th grade. The hidden room had a beautiful conference room table and very nice soft leather chairs. It was such a nice hidden room that I really didn’t mind being there. Our strange assignment during the hour we were in special class was to recite tongue twisters very fast and yet very distinctly. I thought it was a strange thing to do, but who am I to dispute a teacher. I remember the two types of tongue twisters that we recited. These were:

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
then how many pickled peppers did Peter Piper pick?

Sally sells seashells by the seashore.
The shells Sally sells are surely from the sea.

I remember that it took great concentration to recite tongue twisters accurately. And you really had to work at it in order to say them fast.

I was a very poor reader during elementary and junior high school. But when reading caught my interest, I made up the deficit in around a years time.

This recalls another type of special education that I received. When I was growing up, I never enjoyed reading for reading sake. I only associated reading with schoolwork. The only exception to the rule was comic books. But when I entered high school, the requirement to read efficiently became extremely important. My school must have recognized my limitation and placed me in a strange type of special class during my freshman high school year. The training was a type of reading comprehension training. The closest I could describe this approach was a class in Speed Reading. They would flash a paragraph or two of information for a very brief period of time and then measure my comprehension. They tried to teach me tricks on absorbing written material quickly and effectively.

My ability to learn was hindered by my lack of short-term memory. I would read the first sentence of a paragraph and then I would read the next. But by the time I finished the second sentence I forgot what the first sentence was about; so I would reread it. Then off to the third sentence but part way through that I forgot what the first two sentences were about, so I reread them. So it might take me an hour to read one paragraph - a single paragraph. What speed- reading taught me is to quickly identify one or two key words in a paragraph. This was the essence of the paragraph. Once I found them, they would anchor the entire paragraph around those couple words. So instead of reading linearly, I would read information from the inside out. I learned to comprehend meaning by drilling down from those key words to frame the entire paragraph. So basically I learned to read from the inside out.

I'm surprised they still had the "institutionalize" option in 1978.

You would have thought they would have evolved from that point by then.....

I had special classes around 75-76 in reading/writing.
I doubt it did much good.
I think my dad reading the classics, The last of the Mohicans, The three musketeers, Treasure island etc, as goodnight stories, did more good for me.

/Mats

My parents were of a generation in which many people believed that "ret*ds should be kept out of sight" (their words, not mine), and that having a "ret*d" in the family was a shameful disgrace.

Had I been officially diagnosed with any developmental disorder, it is likely that they would have treated me much worse than they did while not knowing I had an ASD.  At least they fed me, clothed me, sent me to school, and let me try to socialize with people my age.  The alternative is too painful to contemplate.

As it is, I learned how to cope on my own -- which is a good thing.  The bad things are that it took much longer than necessary, and I am now estranged from my relatives.

My mother didn't "send me away"----but she did, basically, leave me to my own devices, and allowed me to make my mistakes and suffer the consequences of these mistakes.

I was sometimes blamed for being bullied; but that was life in those days. I had to make my own way in the world.

Probably depended on the state and region but yeah, they institutions in New York well into the 80s. A CVA lawsuit has been recently filed against New York State by persons who were treated at the WNY Psychiatric Center in West Seneca in the 1980s, which was a live in institution ran by the state.

Yikes. Very near where I was diagnosed in 1968. Had I been "institutionalized", it's almost certain I woulda ended up there.

Since the '70s, "care" has gotten a bit better informed, but I still think you need a large slice of luck to benefit from what you are likely to find. What I learned from my AS mother was to avoid a dangerous misdiagnosis, not to expect help.

↑ "Not to expect help" is right ... sadly.  Even if my own relatives were to come to me asking for help for their ASDs, all I could give them is advice, and not much of that.  There are either no programs available, or programs based on incomplete or inaccurate data, so they would likely not be helped at all.

And most of the "crisis management" programs are ineffective for long-term care, as well.

In the 1970s, they had the IDEA law and the IEP that was put in place around 1973 or either 1975. That gave all kids the chance at getting an education than being rejected from public schools.

I can't imagine how it was for those who had some form of autism but were too mild to be diagnosed so they either had other diagnoses related to it or they didn't get diagnosed at all and they just struggled through school. Or they were homeschooled or went to a small private school like Temple did if their family was wealthy enough.

Back in the 1970s I don't think schools got funds for each student with a disability so they had to use the district money. This caused problems then because that meant the school could just abandon the child and not try and help them because they didn't want to use the funds. So if you had parents that were able to live on one income, they had to fight for you and advocate and know their laws. This was a problem for poor families because the parents would be clueless and not know what to do with the system and advocate for their child. Plus this caused schools to create a system for a child that was not affective or the best for them. This was the case with me in the 1990s. I think it's gotten better for kids in the last 20 years compared to the late 1990s. Also worst case scenario is putting the child into a behavior class or in a self contained class with all the special ed kids, totally segregated from normal kids. No inclusion in the 1970s. This went on until the early 90s from my experience before a new law came out saying kids with a disability had a right to be in mainstream with all the regular kids.