Un-categorizing Your Autism

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hi animalcrackers,
am of the belief that clinical depression in us is badly under researched and believe its because its partly because we show our depression in the form of severe challenging behavior; which always routinely gets put down to our autism and intelectual disability and NOT to a comorbid mental illness such as depression.

we are also often thought to be emotionaly empty,and lack the complex thought to know we are suffering-which isnt true, we just dont understand emotions and dont output them correctly but it doesnt mean we dont have emotions nor suffer from depression.
one older lady that used to live with had profound autism and she suffered from severe depression for many years before they finaly got off their arses and got her assessed by the pysch-she was then given SSRIs which improved her quality of life,like self she had severe challenging behavior to and so unsurprisingly thats what her depression was put down to.

yes,we suffer from anxiety to high levels but not social anxiety-we do not have the social awareness nor interaction levels to suffer from social anxiety however its wrong for people to think we dont have anxiety,HFAs will suffer from social anxiety more than us as a result,however reactive depression is something which can happen just as much in LFA as in HFA because we are acutely taken advantage of and abused thanks to our extremely vulnerable nature.

the pyschologist of mine is an awesome pioneering autism & intelectual disability specialist pysch who has worked in the job since at least the seventies,he helped to change the way ID institutions such as the old mary dendy unit ran,and he admits he is on the spectrum himself.
he says autism to any degree is built on anxiety, and we have high arrousal systems as a result.
in terms of LFA we have anxiety on the go all the time;so many of us are on a permenent script of diazepam as a result, to name a few issues that send our arrousal systems over the edge; abusive staff/ones who take advantage of us, routine changes, unpredictibility, sensory issues, struggling to communicate to others and not being listened to as theyre to busy filling it in themselves to hurry it up,not being able to buy something as we commonly do not understand the concept of money and dont know why family or staff are saying we cant have something, being told we cant go out because we have had challenging behavior- we dont understand why we arent being let out as our behavior was sub concious communication to something that we didnt understand or something bad someone else did....

there are so many causes of depression and anxiety in us,this is why am of the belief it is BS that HFAs suffer more from depression and anxiety,and its just further promoting the prehistoric stigma and stereotypes about us.
just to make a point again,am not calling anyone BS as that is being nasty towards others,rather am disagreeing with what was said.

That was a nice message.
Thank you

That was a nice message.
Thank you

Okay, thanks for clarifying that.

Thanks for your response. I also agree it's BS that HFA's suffer from more depression or anxiety because, well....it just never made any sense because IQ doesn't determine what people feel.

Well said.

I get it now.



You're not an idiot for suggesting it -- "moderate functioning" still has the same limitations as "high/low" functioning but it adds more accuracy/specificity than just using high/low so it would be an improvement.



I agree, although I still think that it's not all that useful to grade autistic people's functioning using a one-dimensional scale with only a handful of points on it....it's like using 2 or 3 different shades of green to sort/categorize and understand all aspects of every type of tree in existance (well, maybe not quite as limiting as that but still very limiting).