Living life undiagnosed is DANGEROUS

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When I was 18 i was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for assault on a police officer, distribution of drugs, and a few other things.

I never realised something was terribly wrong with me until i was in complete isolation in segregation for days upon days, locked in a cell.

Goodness.

Exactly how does being a drug dealer relate to AS? One would think AS would be counter to that, needing to have street smarts, read fine social cues, etc.

so then i sold and sold and sold and sold repetitivly then BAM rest is history

yeah, and why would isolation be a problem?

LOL

i swear 2 god

ROTFLMAO!! !!

~Kate

It's fine. Relax. I completely agree with your point, especially when dealing with the law.

There may be some truth in this.

I think that I was quite lucky to survive my 20's.
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I would kind of say "Living life without intervention can be dangerous".

I was about 40 years old when AS was recognised in DSM-IV, so I was never going to be diagnosed when I had my most significant emotional and social problems in my teens and early twenties.

But I did get intervention.

I fell in with a rehabilitation group, where I was living with a couple of families that provided structure, emotional support, living skills over a 5 year period. I even underwent a five-month live-in program of structured activities and social and emotional skills with about a dozen other adults. This program wasn't designed specifically for people with AS (which was effectively unknown at the time), but was for anyone who "couldn't get their life together" - drug addicts, people with moderate anxiety or depressive disorders, and so on: lots of structure and regularity. It had physical exercise, healthy eating, work programs, structured social interaction programs, counselling ... and it all helped. Somewhere during that program, I realised that my problems had not got any smaller, but my capabilities had grown enough to manage them. I wasn't being snowed under all the time by life.

And I am still undiagnosed (or self-diagnosed), having never been to a psychologist, psychiatrist or neurologist in my life (because it was much less common back then - I had never heard of anyone I knew going to any of these professionals, and would not have known how to do so myself - or felt up to meeting a total stranger about deeply personal issues).

Intervention, I think, was the important thing for me; but a diagnosis was impossible for much of my life. Not saying that anyone else will have the same experience.

Corp900, I don't see the connection between your subject heading, and your actual post. And it looks like I'm not the only one.

I would say about the same. At about the time when there even *might* have been even the slightest possibility of an eventual diagnosis for me, 1981, I found myself dying of chronic alcoholism and began learning about myself and my relations and interactions with others as part of my permanent recovery from that.

Ha. I don't see how distributing drugs could ever be a typical spectrum trait. It's always puzzled me how drugs can be such a prevalent problem... I mean, how the heck do people know where to acquire them? In what conversations do people say, "Oh hey, this guy sells ________." I can't imagine how this information gets around. I want nothing to do with it, but there are major social issues that my limited world experience just can't understand how or why they exist.

being a drug dealer is not autism related.