Hardest hit generation?

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Anyone else feel that aspies in there 20s like myself are one of the hardest hit generations to have autism because of the lack of resources and being made to conform and fit in with society?

Credit where it's due we were helped out a lot as children but when you enter adulthood suppourt stops

Hardest hit to be diagnosed? Possibly. Diagnosis and awareness was lower before, but lack of adult support makes it harder for us to adapt

I am 25... I would say that I have never gotten any support (even though it was incredibly clear from the outset what I had). I have only just recently been officially dx'd with ASD. So I think that if you were lucky enough to be diagnosed as a child, then yes it would have been nice to have those types of supports and whatnots. I would also say that I feel lucky that we aren't just put into mental homes now and forgotten about.

Last edited by nyxjord on 17 Jul 2014, 11:17 am, edited 1 time in total.

Then that would mean anyone older than their 20s as well. Support is non-existent.

Definitely disagree. I'm of your generation (born in 1987, I'm 27 years old now), and I feel as though I was born in a time where there was sufficient support and knowledge on autism. The DSM-IV appeared a little while after my diagnosis.

I personally feel that it was probably most difficult to be autistic, before Kanner and Asperger did their research, period. This extends to people on all levels of severity; 'low-functioning' autistics would be classed as 'insane', 'mute', 'ret*d', and a host of other epithets. HFAs were dependent on the parental support they'd get in their childhood, and if they wouldn't be properly socialized many of them would easily be viewed as 'insane' as well, because of their stims, routines, and tantrums. Only with the proper support and understanding (from parents/caretakers and the like) in their childhood, autistics would end up well in life at all.

Many WP members in their 40s and 50s and beyond have reported that they ran into a lot of misunderstanding on a level that I myself and autistic peers in my direct vicinity have not experienced. This goes for both members who were diagnosed in their younger years, as well as mmbers who were only recently diagnosed in late adulthood.

Looking around me, I would say that the generation of 20-somethings and teenagers and children right now, the ones born after '85 or so, are the most fortunate generation so far, because of the available knowledge and resources.

I agree with CyclopsSummers. I don't like to do the "who has it worse" thing, but I do think that those of my own generation and the ones prior to it and slightly after it -- I was born in 1961 -- had it worst because there was such poor understanding of the autism spectrum, even among qualified professionals, let alone the average teacher or family doctor, that it's likely that millions of those children at that time in the world went undetected and unhelped, being mistreated, told they were crazy or even possessed, told they were just being bad kids, bad seeds, by parents and teachers who, instead of trying to help a child who seemed to have something wrong, simply chalked it up to some kind of chronically bad behavior.

Nobody even knew there was high functioning autism in which the child "seems normal" in many ways, including academically, yet is affected by all the other woes of the spectrum, deeply hampering the child. If there is no understanding by the adults, there is no help for a child.

With my sensory issues and social confusion leading to screaming, tantruming meltdowns in which even I myself could not identify and communicate WHY I was having some kind of crisis, my frustrated parents hit me, pulled me around abusively, shut me in a cupboard, screamed at me in frustration, called me a brat, and even said I was possessed by the devil and was evil, because they didn't know what to do with a child that was having such difficulty with certain situations, clothing, other kids, burnout, etc, that it caused me to break down screaming and crying.

Today and in the last few decades, that same child I was, having those issues, would have had a consultation and probably be found to be having spectrum issues. With everyone going "AHHHHH...now we get it..." I could have been treated better, finally understood, my issues addressed and handled, and I could have been helped toward identifying and managing my issues myself. Instead my whole family hated me and were confused by me, never thinking I might be suffering from the effects of a different neurology.

I myself was deeply unhappy and confused as hell about myself too. I tried to "fix" myself at the age of 11 by seeking out books on psychology and socializing normally because I was so ashamed of my deficits and couldn't understand what I now know to be my stimming and self soothing methods. I have felt confused, ashamed and secretive about my struggle in life because I never knew it had any other cause than just "I'm weird, I'm weak, I'm somehow inwardly feeble and I keep trying to be stronger yet I'm not like other people and can't seem to do what they do in life."

It took me until I was about 46 for me to stumble across information about Asperger's -- and everything fit so precisely that I felt actually traumatized by that discovery. And then anger at why nobody had noticed my whole life, even the people who were supposed to be taking care of and raising me. A family member who was a clinical social worker then said something about being aware of something like this about me but our family was one of "shoving the problem under the rug" instead of openly addressing something.

I honestly don't want to make it a competition of "who had it hardest" but I strongly believe that the generations who went undiagnosed and then faced a lifetime of struggling through life with no clue as to why they have the issues they do -- and being bullied, hated and misunderstood for those issues -- had it pretty hard. Some of us may even have made it through to a somewhat "normal" life, but the price we have paid in stress and confusion and incorrect methods of dealing with our lives has been a high price to pay.

At least those of more recent generations who got identified early in life have been given the information, support and coping strategies to be productive, or at least comfortable and aware of their challenges, without the weird "You're possessed by the devil, that's the only possible reason why you're tearing your new dress off while screaming!" bull s**t.

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Anyone who grew up before aspergers became an established diagnosis, guess approximately anyone born before the 1990's.

I sometimes wonder whether back in the really old days things might have actually been easier, back when everyone was really reserved, jobs were routine and for life, the world is just such a more socially complex place nowadays.

On the mild end anyway, yes, I do think that the current crop of 20-somethings has it worse. Temple Grandin refers to y'all (and possibly my generation too) as a "lost generation." I basically agree.

I am often thankful that I was born in 1978 instead of 1988. As it is, I've been often misunderstood. I'm traumatized and paranoid and I carry scars that I will never be able to get rid of...

...and, though a fair bit of it comes from being judged and bullied, a lot of it also comes from the "knowledge" about Asperger's that started floating around in the late 90s and early 2000s.

As it was, I got beat up a lot, but I was also believed in by some people, and I learned. I grew up somewhat, and I learned, and I tried and failed and tried again, and I lived. Had I been ten years younger, I would have been "accommodated" and pitied and "therapied" into greater superficial conformity...

...and I think I'd be utterly and completely broken. The late 90s and the first decade of the 2000s was hard enough, damaging enough, for me. If I'd been 18 in 2006 instead of 1996-- if I'd been starting my life in the middle of all this s**t instead of trying to correct the wrong things with some knowledge of right things under my belt-- I'd be the walking dead today.

Uhh, yeah, I wanna chime in here. I turned 18 in '05, and I was able to avoid therapy, make use of what accomodations were available to me, lumbered my way through depression, apathy, and self-loathing, and managed to maintain my individuality in the face of superficial conformity. And that was BEFORE the economical crisis. AFTER that, and without the comfort of any higher education, I managed to find work and scratch something of a living for myself. That living is far from perfect, but it's worked out pretty well for me so far. Other autistic age peers I've spoken to face similar or different problems, but it seems we're all muddling through, regardless.

You see, I feel differently even though I have indeed "muddled through." I've lived. But I firmly believe that if I'd had the understanding and support that comes from knowing what precisely was wrong from an early age, I believe that certain very negative experiences I had at the hands of my own family would have gone a different way. I don't think an early diagnosis and "help" would have crippled me into being someone who couldn't live a life the way I have without knowing I shouldn't be able to. I think I could have done the same things I've done anyway, but more, and better, coming from a better understanding of why I am the way I am, instead of being so hard on myself and everyone else being hard on me too. That hasn't helped me to achieve anything even more fabulous, it's just made life feel much more miserable even while I was achieving what I did achieve.

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Haha, when do you think it would have been better to be autistic than right now?

This is just one of those...things were better "back in the day"... And that is almost never accurate if you actually think about it. Things in general have never been better, they are still awful ofc, but do you really think you would have been better off being born with autism in the 1950's or something? Of curse not.

Would also like to point out that not having any support since becoming an adult, that doesn't apply to everyone? I have loads of rights to support, not easy to come by but i have (now).
I go to school where I have special help and my own schedule. I study at a slow pace but I get the same amount of money as students who study full-time, because im on the spectrum.
If I cant get hired anywhere later in life I can get get a job where my employer will only need to pay for something like half of my salary (the other half is from the state) which exists to motivate employers to hire adults with special needs/to get the employer to give the employee extra time and resources to settle in and learn the job. and so on and so on.

Being cut off from any help/support as soon as you become an adult is horrible. I feel bad for you. But it does not mean our generation is less fortunate than any before us... The opposite it much more likely.

That's kind of a hard question actually. Those of us who were born with Apsperger's before you could get a diagnosis had to grow up with no help at all from anyone. And we were treated very badly because of our Autism without ever understanding why we were different. We had to just figure life out for ourselves and hope we survived. I know that I have had regular suicidal thoughts since I was ten years old. At times it was that hard. And sometimes it still is.

Now those or you in your twenties who had help as little kids and throughout your lives and then suddenly stopped getting help, that could be very hard as well. I don't know what is harder, having been helped and supported all your life and then having that stopped, that could be a shocking rude awakening, or never having had any help at all and learning that you can't and shouldn't expect it and just figuring out how to survive on your own. I think I am glad I never had help because if I had grown up being helped I might have had feelings of entitlement and expected help for the rest of my life. I imagine I would not have the strong survival instinct that I have as well. Sometimes that is literally the only thing that keeps me alive or that has saved my life in the past. I am not saying that anyone else feels this but I am thinking I could have. But because I never had help before and since I never expect to be eligible to get itI am really super grateful any time anyone throws me a bone. I don't know which is better or worse. I think they both have pros and cons.

Before the invention of augmentative communication devices, and especially before the advent of the Internet in the 1990's, it was virtually impossible for nonverbal autistic people to communicate to the outside world. It was quite, quite frustrating for them, because they many had the cognitive ability to communicate--yet were prevented from doing so by their autism.

They had ideas, thoughts, feelings, wisdom to convey which was impossible for them to convey because of the lack of AAD's and the Internet. It's quite a labor, really, to constantly write down one's thoughts (if one had the ability to do so).

There are some people on this site who would testify to that most vociferously (in a dramatically direct and forceful way).

Nope. You have it EASY compared to all of us who didn't even know of AS before now. We were either misdiagnosed with a co-morbid and never got the right kind of help, or we were asymptomatic enough to not get a "label" and were told we were "normal" even though we couldn't manage to ever fit in.

There has never been much out there for adults with autism, but KNOWING that you have it is a huge step in being able to learn to live and succeed with it. Not knowing sets you up for failure.

As a child [and most of my adult life] I just thought that I didn't try hard enough, sometimes that I was mentally ret*d but able to fool a few people otherwise. I thought I must be hideously ugly and that being weird somehow made me bad. I was so confused because I was a sweet and well mannered little girl who got the crap beat out of her every day.[ and this was in an area where no one hit girls, unless they were sub-human]

So, today I see so many opportunities on how we can work together and make things a gazillion times better for ourselves and future generations of Autistics.

This younger group of people, 20's and thirties, is the group of people I find the most frustrating [as a whole] because there are so many of opportunities for change and growth, yet so few seem to get involved. And I know it's difficult. But for those of us who have suffered greatly because of our neurological wiring,it makes no sense that now,when the time is ripe for fantastically positive change, so many young Autistics either ignore this opportunity, or mention how impossible it is to herd cats.

This topic seems to come up often here. While I cannot comment generally (which generation is hardest hit), I can provide my personal viewpoint.

If I were born in this generation, I would have likely received my initial diagnosis as early as 8 years old, when my parents first sent me to a Psychologist. It like would have been even earlier, as parents seem more ?trigger happy? these days to get an ?official? explanation for any behavior that deviates from normal (and my parents would have been interested in understanding some of my behaviors both in nursery school and kindergarten).

In any event, if I had been diagnosed that young (I didn?t receive my diagnosis until I was 50), I likely would have avoided certain things and life experiences and become even more insular than I already am. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.