Difference between mental retardation and LF autism

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What is the difference between mental retardation and low functioning autism? It seems nowadays people who are mentally ret*d are labeled as having autism? There a possible increase in misdagnosis in autism? What is your opinion on this?

Personally I see autism as having intense interests and being highly skilled in one area. In LF autism I see it as being able to just one good thing while being disabled in other areas of life. Also the whole not liking change thing is more intense.
I've actually met non-autistic MR people and they seem to want more attention than the LF autistics. I have met them too.

Of course there's going to be a million replies criticising functioning labels so my involvement in this thread will become minimal, unless I want a good argument.

I spend most of my time around people with various developmental disabilities (autism, intellectual disability, cerebral palsy, childhood brain injury, etc.), and have been in programs like this for about half my life now. I feel like you'd have to not know many people with varied developmental disabilities to even ask the question. Not that there aren't people where there's a crossover (because intellectual disability is a bit of a trashcan diagnosis for anyone with an IQ and adaptive functioning below a certain level, and the reasons can be many and varied), but usually there's a pretty big difference. I wouldn't even know where to begin describing the difference.

It's not necessarily about social desire, since at just about every so-called "level" of autism there are people who are into socializing and people who aren't (and you can't always tell the difference by looking at whether we approach people or not, as there are people who don't approach people because they can't/don't know how/are afraid to even if they want to, and people who do approach people because they've been taught to even if they don't want to). It's... how to even explain...

Nonautistic people with intellectual disabilities are often very much like any other kind of nonautistic people, they just have certain cognitive impairments that by definition nondisabled people don't have (although just like with autism it's a continuum and the cutoff is a bit arbitrary and has been moved around a good deal over the decades... my most recent IQ is right at one of the old cutoffs for intellectual disability whereas now it's at the cutoff for borderline intellectual functioning). But often I can't tell the difference between a nonautistic person with an intellectual disability and a nonautistic person without one. Because despite difficulties (including social difficulties), there's something very much the same about most people on both sides of that line. (Which is probably why I've met people with moderate intellectual disabilities who can and do pass for nondisabled in most situations. It's not that there aren't differences, but there are huge similarities as well and passing capitalizes on those similarities.)

There are, however, what seems to me a minority of people I've met with intellectual disabilities, who have extremely unusual patterns of cognitive ability. Some have patterns closer to my own than some autistic people have. (Although there are lots of autistic people with patterns close to my own too, it's just that autistic people aren't the only possible people. There's also people with certain kinds of brain damage who resemble me in those ways as well.) Others have patterns that wouldn't be seen as anything close to any autistic people, but are unusual in totally different ways. People with Williams syndrome usually have patterns of abilities that at first seem totally opposite from autism and then if you look closer can greatly resemble autism at the same time, and they nearly always have intellectual disabilities. (For instance, they're very good at being socially glib in a way few autistic people could imitate, but at the same time they can have huge social problems in other areas.) And sometimes these various unusual patterns are associated with specific genetic syndromes and the like, but other times they seem to just sort of happen.

It's really hard to describe because of the huge diversity in both autism and intellectual disability, and the fact that there are specific points of overlap. But most of the time there's a difference, although I couldn't easily tell you what it is. (There's also of course people who have both.)

Also, when you get to the range where communication becomes severely impaired (in the severe/profound zone), all bets are off about the actual cognitive abilities of people who're diagnosed with intellectual disabilities. When someone doesn't have a means of communicating, it seems like most people assume they're not thinking very much either, but that's rarely the case and often people assessed as being in that zone turn out to be quite unimpaired in various areas of cognition after all if some form of communication can be developed. The same problem is found in both autism and cerebral palsy. All three conditions include people assessed as unable to think much if at all, who turn out to be quite a lot better at thinking than previously assessed as. You'd think they'd stop doing it, but they keep on making those assumptions. At a certain level there it also becomes difficult to assess whether a person is autistic or not, because to be diagnosed autistic a person has to have the skills to do certain things. So a lot of people assessed as severely or profoundly intellectually disabled end up only diagnosable as having PDDNOS, because they can't communicate, interact, or do various actions well enough to meet the full autism criteria, and/or because it's impossible to tell whether their inability to do something is due to autism or due to other developmental delays. (And yet if a way to communicate is eventually found... let's just say I've met several people whose IQs jumped up over 100 points in this manner.)

I don't actually think there's a huge bunch of people with intellectual disabilities being suddenly misdiagnosed as autistic, though. The areas where it becomes questionable as I described above, are among the rarest kinds of both autism and the rarest kinds of intellectual disability, so it wouldn't happen often even if it was happening. It's not that there aren't significant commonalities, there's just also pretty significant differences. Then again, for some reason a lot of autistic people on these boards seem to have a stereotype of intellectual disability that boggles me because it's so different from the vast majority of people that exist out there.

Mental retardation, is usually coupled with various disorders that have some outward physical manifestation which frequently confine the sufferers to a wheelchair or present in a similar manner to CP. They may also cause certain facial characteristics or facial expressions. When acquired at birth, it's frequently coupled with CP.

Conversely, many individuals with LFA alone can look completely normal, often with the exception of an odd gate or stimming.

Many people with mental retardation still acknowledge and interact with people and the world around them, and show an interest in it.

People with LFA tend to show limited interest, if any.

With few exceptions, people with mental retardation alone have fairly uniform abilities.

People with LFA may exhibit the scatter that other individuals on the spectrum do, performing average, above average, or at the savant level on some tasks.

People with mental retardation usually have heavy speech deficits if they can speak. While someone with LFA may also have speech deficits if they can speak, it usually sounds differently, and a person with LFA who doesn't actually speak but has echolalia, may be able to repeat back what they hear perfectly as if they were actually fluent speakers. You generally don't see this in those with mental retardation.

When I was about five, we had just moved to a new house and the neighbors had a teenaged son who was mentally ret*d. We had the empty moving truck parked in our driveway with the back open, and he rather happily bounded over, stopped in front of me, grabbed my wrist, said "You come in my office!" and pointed at the truck. He then led me up the ramp into the truck, repeating "You come in my office!" and at the top, he sat down on the edge and happily said "This is my office!"

I have to admit, his knees were all skinned up and I found him somewhat terrifying, as he looked like an adult to me, but I recall my mother standing there saying "He just wants to play honey."

A person with LFA wouldn't do that. They may occasionally lead someone somewhere or engage with someone but not to that degree.



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Actually, most people with intellectual disabilities do not have obvious physical conditions or appearance.

The reason some people think they do, is that when they see people who don't have those things, they don't automatically think the person has an intellectual disability, so they don't count the many (most) such people who don't look any different than usual. They only count the few who have genetic syndromes or additional conditions like CP or blindness or whatever.

Have you ever seen the documentary about Carly Fleishmann? She is low-functioning autistic, and for most of her life, she was presumed to have mental retardation as well. Then she learned to spell, she began to type out her thoughts. Her parents couldn't believe what was actually beneath the surface that she could never let out before. She is a bright girl; you just can't see it at first glance. It is an amazing story. Let me see if I can find it on youtube......................................

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34xoYwLNpvw

Yes, I have seen it before. However, it still did not answer my question.

Actually, mental retardation and autism are often found together. If you're wondering what "the difference" is--well, one's autism and the other is mental retardation; they're different patterns of traits. But if you're looking at the cases labeled "LFA", many of these are cases where a diagnosis of autism and a diagnosis of mental retardation can be made. (Not all, though. It's possible to simply have the right combination of traits that leads a doctor to label you "low-functioning" without any global delay at all. LFA is really not a medical term; it's more a way of saying how you appear to the doctor, and is quite unscientific.)

In mental retardation, you get a general difficulty with learning things and you'll get developmental milestones roughly in the same order as NT kids', only slower. But this isn't universally true, because mental retardation is not just one big thing--it's a catch-all category for anything that can cause slower development and problems with learning. So, just like with autism, people with mental retardation are individuals, and they think very differently from each other.

Autism has a different pattern, a sort of characteristic scatter of skills. With autism, you'll see some areas that are significantly more impaired than most others, unlike the general delay of MR (or in some cases, patterns of scattered skills that are different from the one you see in autism). Among the specific delays in autism are sensory processing, social interaction, language, face-reading, executive functioning, and social reciprocity. Those traits can be rather weakly expressed, such as in the typical case of the Aspie engineer who gets along fine on his own (with extra effort and some social skills lessons). They can also be extremely strong, and lead to a profoundly autistic individual. In those cases, it can be pretty difficult to tell whether the person has autism only or autism+MR, because it's near-impossible to do IQ tests, and even when you can test, they have such limited application that your best bet tends to be simply giving plenty of opportunities to learn and watching to see what the child is attracted to and what he's good at.

It's possible for autism to "cause" mental retardation--that is, cause slower development and difficulties with learning. It's also possible for somebody to have both things as a result of some common cause, like a faulty gene (Rett syndrome, for example; Down syndrome also makes autism more likely). Or you get both from different sources, by sheer chance.

They're two different things, but they are closely related. The important thing, I think, for professionals to remember is that developmental delay in an autistic person will play out differently than developmental delay in a non-autistic person--those two groups are likely to need different kinds of help, because the autistic brain simply learns differently. You can't say, "Oh, he's got MR" and then assume that because you've measured the fellow's IQ at a 50, he'll do just fine in a class designed for non-autistic special needs kids. Autistic people just learn differently, whether or not they've got other stuff in addition to the autism.

No, and I am not about to either. My point was just that low-functioning autism doesn't automatically make someone mental ret*d even if their IQ scores come back as such. A lot of LFA people are smart and just don't know how to show people. If I was more knowledgeable, I'd give a better answer, but I'm not, so I'll just stick with my prior contribution.

Yes. it is true that the IQ tests show this. I wonder though, if proper therapy was given, how many would prove to be as intelligent as Carly is. IQ should be the only measure of intelligence since autistic people often cannot successfully do those quizzes. Because of their limited communication, and their inability to speak, they are often unable to show what is beneath the surface. A lot of other LFA people probably know a lot more than people realize, but are not given the opportunity to shine.

IQ tests were created for NTs and normed on NT populations... and they're assuming that these tests apply to autistics. In many cases, they don't. IQ testing in autistics can be downright meaningless--artificially high, artificially low, or just having a main number that gives absolutely no hint of a wide scatter in the subtests. It makes much more sense to do an evaluation that's focused on pinpointing strengths and weaknesses, because that's what's significant for autistics. We need to stop using IQ as the one number that's supposed to describe your learning ability all by itself. If you're autistic, it likely doesn't work that way.

I used to score low on IQ tests. I have read somewhere that aspie kids tend to score in the above average range or average while autistic ones score low on the test.

Not just autistic kids can score low, I am sure deaf children can score low too or kids who can't read or kids who are just mute. My mom had a student who was illiterate and she knew he was smart and not ret*d as he was labeled as that. Even the parents were convinced he was ret*d so no one bothered to teach him to read. But mom knew that wasn't right so she decided to teach him to read and everyone was surprised when he learned. They thought he was ret*d because he always scored low.