Is it better to have severe or mild aspergers?

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I noticed that a few of the individuals with a more severe form of aspergers didn't really ever seem to have a "need for connection" or a "need for friends", and so they weren't apparently missing anything or had feelings of alienation when they "didn't belong". As you go down the autism spectrum and start to enter "NT" territory, you have some of the same symptoms of aspergers (Such as a monotone voice, emotionally inappropriate facial expressions, a pedantic way of speaking) but you also have a "feeling for the need to belong" and feel alienation when you don't. But, on the other side of the coin, despite increased awareness of their social difficulties, they *might* be "more able" to integrate themselves into society having more experience on average, probably.

So, who has it better? The person with the severe form of aspergers who has no social awareness and feelings of exclusion, or the person with feelings of inexplicable social difficulty and exclusion who is also more "socially capable", albeit, not *that* much better?

I think you're getting your premise wrong, I consider myself severely affected by aspergers, I mean I'm really socially blind, my interests are sometimes beyond intense, they're euphoric, I spend maybe 90% of my time alone and I like that, I don't think I'm high funtioning when I can't leave my house without a major shutdown anymore.

but, regardless of my difficulties, I do feel alienated, although the people closest to me might be surprised by it I would like a friend who understood me, I do have a need for interaction, it's just a very very small need

Or, consider this analogy;
and NT has a big social bucket, they need to do plenty of socialising before it's satisfyingly filled, once it's filled they take time to relax
someone with mild quite high funtioning aspergers has a cup, it gets filled pretty fast and once it starts overflowing they things get very hard for them
people with "severe" aspergers have an even smaller cup, it's easily filled by just one interaction a day, but that doesn't mean someone like me doesn't enjoy that interaction, that one small filling is enjoyable and it's all I need.

You might think that my cup fills so fast that i must not enjoy getting it filled at all, but I like it just at the brim: a rare occurance

I love analogies I used to have a phobia of them.

I think it's a case of "be careful what you wish for." My own AS is fairly mild and I manage reasonably well in my day to day (or I would if it wasn't for my depression, anxiety, and chronic fatigue) and yes I do feel socially isolated and wish I had someone in my life I was close to , like my ex-bf, but I don't wish I had more difficulties! The grass isn't always greener on the other side.

I consider myself to be more mild because I can easily pretend to be an NT, but I have an extremely low need for interaction. I could go several days without being near anyone and not mind at all.

Which is better? I'll put it this way. The more work you put into something, the more you get out of it. I have a milder form of AS, but although I've overcome more in my life at the age of 22 than many people do in a lifetime, that also means that I'm much better off for it. High risk, high reward.

I don't know really where I fall in the aspergers spectrum but since I was diagnosed-I am not going to try to cover myself up and pretend to be normal as much anymore -it is exhausting putting on the act all the time.

I don't think either one is better. It just depends on the individual. There are disadvantages and advantages of all things. From here on I'm using mild and severe the way most people do, doesn't mean agreement with it.

So... just being considered severe autistic/AS doesn't always mean what people think it does. Sometimes a person so categorized really is totally oblivious. Been there, done that.

But often, a person is classified as severe because of, for instance, severe movement and sensory issues, and yet they could have the same desire to socialize as any person classified as mild. For people in that situation if they have social desires and a longing to be normal, paired with knowing they'll never get to that point because they're so far from it, it can be complete agony. Others might not experience that but I can tell you from knowing a lot of people, some do. They look to most people like they're not social and have no social understanding or desires, but that's because they're unable to act out the behaviors that most people use to show their social desires and understanding. They may know those behaviors, may even know them as well as a nonautistic person would, but are unable to actually execute the behavior.

OTOH, people considered mild are often considered just one small step away from normal, even if this isn't true. And with that comes pressure. Pressure to be like everyone else. And to have that goal so seemingly near and yet so far away, that can be awful.

So both sides have their serious disadvantages and it's impossible to say which one's better or worse unless you can somehow get inside people's heads and measure their suffering.

I still spend a lot of time oblivious (it's as if in some ways I can climb out of my "shell" for varying lengths of time but have to go in again eventually... almost like I'm one of those sci-fi aliens who can only survive a little while out of their natural environment and have to go back to it periodically), so I do experience a lack of caring about that, and that's a good thing from my perspective.

But at the same time... I can remember a time when I seemed like I was in psych wards more than I was out of them, and I kept wondering why nobody would interact with me. I had no clue what was going on. Someone finally told me that I looked like I either didn't know or care that other people were there, and therefore nobody approached me. I had had no idea. And it took years before I figured out how I really appear at times to other people, and it totally stunned me. Inside I'm a very different person than my outsides make it seem like at times.

And then there are other times when people expect too much. Where my ability to do one thing means they think I can do something they see as closely related, but that to me is as far apart as if there were a deep chasm between the two abilities. Where they think that my abilities come from one direction and yet they come from another direction they can't even imagine. That pressure is hell to me. Because I try so hard and even my best effort is never enough for them. That bothers me a lot more than general social problems do.

On another thread someone was talking about killing themselves because they had no girlfriend. And I know their pain must be genuine, but I keep thinking how could wanting a girlfriend be on its own such a serious thing to someone that they would kill themselves over it. My older brother is AS and he has much more social desire than me, and he really did drive himself to despair trying to attract women, to the point where he did a lot of things he later regretted. He eventually did figure out how to not do that, but it took him until his thirties.

And from my perspective... I just can't fathom being that desperate for a girlfriend. Having a girlfriend is something I'm of two minds about. It would be nice to have a steady, familiar companion in some ways, even with my lack of an instinctive need for one. A friend of mine who is autistic has a wonderful boyfriend, and they behave like two cats -- they do some things together, some things apart, and no neediness, and that sounds wonderful. But then the social dynamics of sexual relationships can be appallingly confusing. And I'm afraid that there are things I don't know that would really hurt me or the other person without my awareness they even exist. So while it'd be nice to meet the ideal person, I'm not trying to find anyone, and can live just as well without.

And the social things that bother me most aren't as much inability to fit in, as they are the misunderstandings. The misunderstandings hurt the worst. The doing my best to communicate and being told I'm not trying enough. Being told that I must mean something the exact way a particular person has taken it, when I didn't. Being told my motivations and feelings are other than they are. Being trapped between a rock and a hard place by people's assumptions and expectations. That stuff hurts, because I try so hard, I build bridges between myself and the world nearly every day, and for some people nothing I can do would ever be good enough for them. I can take isolation, I can take not fitting in, I can take not having a girlfriend, but the misunderstandings are what kill me inside.

The other thing from my perspective... there are so many parts of autism that are more difficult for me than the social stuff. I don't mean that I'm good at social stuff, not at all, I can be terrible at it. But to me... sensory issues, sensory processing differences that make it hard for me to hold onto the world of language or even the world of idea/concept/meaning, movement problems, near-total inability to care for myself... that stuff hits me much harder than social things. And yet all anyone talks about is how the social stuff makes them feel. While for me... I could be dealing with shutdowns that cut me off from sensation, movement, and concept-based thinking, leaving me only with raw awareness to work with. And then going on the long and painful path back from those shutdowns to what is normal for me, with each step up causing intense "brain pain". (And then braving the same kind of "brain pain" to climb even higher than my normal level, only to be expected to function at that higher level constantly when I can't manage it that long. Right now things hurt so bad I want to scream, but I'm still typing away without any sign to someone who doesn't know me, that something's wrong.)

And so while I know social stuff can be a huge pain in the butt, it's just not even on my priority list. But even with all this, I'd still rather be me than someone else and am quite comfortable with most of my difficulties despite whatever pain they may cause. And the isolation socially doesn't bother me as much as it bothers a lot of people. I don't know if that's because of my level of awareness, or just because of my personality. And I doubt that this goes for everyone with my particular set of difficulties and skills, either, so I don't think that you can really say who has it better or worse except on an individual basis. Someone could have my exact set of skills and be far more miserable than I am. And I definitely think that "They're oblivious and happy" is... an oversimplification at best, because not all labeled severe are oblivious (and not everyone oblivious is always oblivious).

Mild aspies can have no desire for friends and no need for connection. I had no social awareness either as a child and I read in my medical records my social skills were severely poor. But back then I wasn't aware and I did long for friends and connection and hated being rejected and singled out and discriminated, it made me unhappy and depressed. Now today I would say it's mild since I am more aware of social ness and have learned a lot. Reading for one and listening to people than thinking they're wrong and weird. It made my life easier.

I am not very fond of functioning labels because they don't always mean anything. Someone can have mild AS and still struggle in school and face rejections and be singled out and treated different. Someone with mild AS can still have poor social skills. Someone with mild AS can still have very bad sensory issues. Someone with AS can have mild symptoms and have other symptoms that aren't so mild. I had mild to moderate AS according to what I had been told in my teens. It's the anxiety and stress that makes it bad and when I am calm, I don't have it. But I've been told it's mild and I agree there. The symptoms don't really go away. As Attwood says, to get rid of AS, put the aspie in their bedroom by themselves. I think his point was there wouldn't be anything to trigger their symptoms. But they still have it. Just like I still have it.

So hard to say what is better, mild or severe. I wouldn't want more AS because why would I want more struggles and more conflicts and have depression because of society? Do I want to be even more shy because I'd be too afraid of saying the wrong stuff? I already deal with that anyway. But things have gotten better because I am out of school and am not around people much and I don't even try and fit in.

I dont nessarily think that how mild or severe you are on the spectrum correlates to how much social interactions you want. I also notice something within myself. I will set a social goal for myself, I will attain it and I will in the end still want more. Im in the situation where 5yrs ago I had no friends and I worked so hard to push myself out and attain a social life.

One of my biggest social goals for myself was that I wanted a normal social life and now I more of less have 1. I have a decent # of friends, a decent # of acquintances, people I can hangout with when I wanna, people I can do things with where I dont have to despiretly seek people out like I used to at times. But I still want more. I wanna be able to connect to people like NTs are able to, read people better, find friends that I like better, etc.

I think if some1 is severe aspie very socially isolated, they might want 1 or 2 friends and they think thats good enough. While if someone is mild aspie, have friends but they may want friends that get them and accept them so they dont have to mask themselves as NT.

My point is that no matter how much u have (or dont have), you still want more

I wonder if milder cases on average, lead to greater levels of social anxiety?

My social stuff was never really that big a deal to me, except when it is overloading and exhausting.

My sensory issues are a bigger deal and more impairing than social stuff.

Interesting theory! If that's the case then I'd imagine "severe aspergers" would tend to have less social anxiety than the "mild aspergers" case, on average, and then the person whose purely NT would tend to have less social anxiety, on average, since they have less problems "fitting in".

So, with "average social anxiety" on the y-axis and "Aspieness" on the X-axis, it'd be like an upside-down parabola, maybe.

Last edited by swbluto on 21 Apr 2011, 1:04 am, edited 1 time in total.

It seems that AS females tend to have less "social problems" than AS guys, on average, which might be related to a greater ability to read body language and facial expression cues.

I do not consider myself mild and yet I have a desire for friendship.

This is probably iterated.

Did you hear that they didn't want friends from them or did you just assume they did not?

I probably appear to not have an interest in people in day to day things but it is not true. Even if one can not tolerate being around people, doesn't mean the desire for friendship isn't still there. It's just that it gets overrided.

Uhhhh, no, I just assumed that it might have been that way on average because some didn't seem to care that they didn't have friends, and didn't realize that they probably had aspergers until suggested by someone else who had aspergers, so I assumed that represented the average "severe aspergers" case. That assumption could be wrong, though (It seems it might be).

Really?? I guess that differs regionally perhaps. Around here it was nearly impossible to fit into the cliques the girls formed. Boys didn't seem to have as much trouble fitting in with eachother.