It's very different from person to person, but one thing to be aware of is that adult autistics still have autism symptoms they had as children, but some symptoms, like, say, sensitivity to loud sound and the feel of certain clothing/fabrics/things, can decline (or increase) with age. And they can of course learn social skills slowwwly over time, often on a situation by situation basis.
Which means that autistics can have perfect social skills for certain situations, but be hopelessly lost in a brand new situation that is completely different from any they have experienced.
You can also try asking people directly to learn from them. I'd be happy to dump my life story on you. I'm 35, and I was diagnosed at the age of 3, when I was nonverbal and totally ignored people (my mom told me that, as a baby, I'd push people away, and my parents noted how I'd curl up into the fetal position when I was 2). Nowadays, I talk, hold a job (it pays not that well but acceptable; if not for my health problems I could live alone and slowly accumulate enough money for the occasional vacation), and just today got a lot of praise around the office for totally redoing the office phone list to be much easier to read and more pleasant to look at.
I've heard it said many times that it's best to base characters on people you know, or have met, as that makes it far easier to get inside their head, than if you invent someone totally original. I think that's good advice to take, and many of us would be happy to have you base a character on us, I think. I wouldn't mind. It's better than inventing a character who feels more like a stereotype than a person, which is more likely to occur when you don't have real people to use as a guide.
Remember the kid that wouldn’t sit still, no matter how many times the nuns whacked him? Probably ADHD. How about the weird kid, always off by himself that never talked? Autism spectrum. Or the kid that everyone laughed at when he got up to read, because he mangled all the words? Dyslexia.
These behavioral issues have always existed, but they were never recognized as such. (And in a somewhat frightening turn of events, we may now be recognizing behavioral disorders that aren’t really there.)
From Autism, the epidemic that wasn't
.
Even as recently as the past generation, children born with handicaps were felt to be bearing the punishment for a sin their parents had committed.
We always want a reason, or sometimes even an excuse for why bad things occur. It also does not help that we still don’t fully understand the nature of autism, its true causes and optimal treatments.
Women with autism hide complex struggles behind masks. An article on Spectrum News about how faking normalcy as best as possible leaves its toll on women in particular.
Many participants felt that clinicians brushed off or ignored their concerns. Many professionals held unhelpful — and sometimes unrealistic — assumptions about autism. For example, some reportedly believed that autism hardly ever affects women.
One participant’s special education teacher told her she was “too poor at math” to have autism. Other women believed they were misunderstood because teachers and clinicians didn’t know anything about female-typical features of autism. Most said their lives would have been easier if their autism had been noticed earlier.
The reasons for the abuse varied, but they all appeared to relate to the social difficulties of autism in the context of being female.
For instance, one woman linked an experience of sexual abuse to “not reading people to be able to tell if they’re being creepy.” Another said that her uncertainty about social rules meant that she was not sure whether she could say “no” to an abusive partner’s demands. Others felt that teenage social isolation meant they lacked opportunities to develop their ideas about staying safe through discussions with female friends.
We need to develop a way to measure camouflaging so we can determine whether it is more common in women with autism than in men with the condition — as we suspect it is — and whether it has negative consequences, such as an increased risk of missed diagnosis.
(...)
Our findings raise wider moral questions. Until recently, many gay people felt forced to camouflage their sexuality. Thankfully, although homophobia is still rife, it is much less so than it used to be. We suggest a parallel with the obligation that many women with autism feel to pass as neurotypical.
And not just women, but men, too, even if it's less common.
There are links within the article, too, to other articles.
edited 23rd Sep '16 2:15:44 PM by nervmeister
Honestly, I do wonder how common/rare autistic men who can pass for allistic and mostly "normal" or "the eccentric side of normal" are. There may be more of them than previously suspected.
The focus is on women now because we're becoming more aware of undiagnosed autistic women, and how there are a hell of a lot of them.
I wonder if my grandma is autistic ...
What makes you think that?
I will say, the traits run in families. It's been shown from a small handful of studies and autistics often have non-autistic family members who have mild autism characteristics. For example, my older brother would not be mistaken for autistic by any means, but he did/does have a few autism traits: he was once into trains when he was a kid, he learned how to read at the age of 3 without being taught, and he's sensitive to loud noise (it hurts his ears) in a way that most people aren't. He managed to turn a young interest in pharmacy into a career and is now very well off.
She's always had problems with anxiety, as well as her digestive system. And she covers the entire house with sticky note reminders (don't leave the door open, turn out the lights etc)
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Could be... Or could be CFS with 20+ years of worrying that the brain fog means she's losing her marbles, yet the "dementia" never seems to get bad enough to warrant an MRI ("mild", my arse — all that means is that you're unlikely to get stabbity: chronic anything "mild" for decades is profound).
There's a possible link between the cardio-thoracic-ATP-autoimmune-issue group and autism, but good luck having it researched. After all, "everybody" knows that malingerers like to use fibromyalgia and CFS as cover. <_<
Let her see those: if they chime a bell, she may need to get an investigation done. It may be late in the day, but knowing you're not totally insane beats panicking that you are.
edited 24th Sep '16 12:31:33 PM by Euodiachloris
I wonder how they differentiate between a clouding of the consciousness and ADD.
Three words "hit and miss": there's not enough research into clouding for decent diagnostic criteria. No current tools for metrical analysis can catch something so... shifty, and more needs to be done for any MRI or ECG characteristics to be pinned down.
But, it's not considered a priority. Even though I suspect (strongly suspect) its involvement in a much wider range of conditions than the medical community expects. (I've spotted very fogged/ CFS'd symptoms in people given clean bills due to full remissions after chemo — but, who still trigger my "you need to sit down and not worry about that now" response to seeing signs of what is plain fog in front of my face.)
Unfortunately, all I've got to go on is gut after becoming attuned to spotting the signs in others. -_-
edited 24th Sep '16 9:11:40 PM by Euodiachloris
Hmm. Would that I were still in the research business.
I'd argue that somebody in an autistic-spectrum producing family would even camouflage fog using autism-like coping mechanisms... Because those very cultural tricks the family has could actually help on very foggy days. Good luck spotting the "just in case my short-term fritzes like it often does" post-its for the "I itch if I don't have these here" ones. 
edited 24th Sep '16 3:53:45 PM by Euodiachloris
A procrastination in of itself
Gonna try and chase up the doctor I was referred to come Monday, I had to physically take them the funding approval letter even though they've been sent it twice, and even though I took it to them I've heard nothing.
I swear to god this is like Learning Support all over again, if I'm capable of all the human interaction needed to get the fuckers to do the diagnosis does that mean I'm not autistic? I joked that university learning support was so hard to find and took so much running around that they'd probably say me managing to find them proved I couldn't have ADD, as I mailed my focus long enough to track them down
Still Monday is angry phone call day as I don't have work, hopefully I can get a bloody appointment date finally, it's only been just over a year since I first spoke to my GP.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
Good luck.
@Euo: Well, it could be as simple as asking, in an environment the participant feels safe enough to disclose in. Although ADHD and "fogging" might look similar to an observer, I imagine they must feel differently to actually experience it. I'm ADD myself, and I can attest that it feels the precise opposite of "sleepy". I'm not sure what the overlap with autism might be, they seem pretty dissimilar.
That's the rub: like bipolar, fog comes with an energetic (relatively) as well as a cotton wool phase to the whole thing. As well as the requisite "putting nervous energy points into the Interational Bank of Adrenaline Loan Sharks because desperately trying to catch up on what I didn't manage to do right" side.
So, a section of it actually can feel wired and antsy. Well, depending on which bits of the body-brain relationship are kind of working during this hour-and-twenty-minute snapshot window.
That's what makes it hard to pin down: even describing the subjective experience comes across as "disjointed and contradictory liar who lies (and mangles their vocab)". -_-
When you have the thing, you're never actually free of it. Parts of the fog bank will lift, but others won't... And, where the fog and mist is at any point shifts by the hour. Bad days are "fog everywhere" days. -_- Those are dead easy to spot — they're probably what you were thinking of, rather than the "desperately unravelling with nervous shaking, but can't stop myself because executive function isn't fully functioning, but is writing sarcastic little notes everybody will have to read when it's not floating somewhere very slightly above the right and front of the skull" stage. <_<
edited 26th Sep '16 10:13:54 AM by Euodiachloris
We can distinguish the manic phase of manic dpression by disorganized the thinking becomes as opposed to mere enthusiastic optimism. ADD can have a down time too, but thats due to actual fatigue, and can be cured with a nap. Sometimes two separate conditions present the same symptoms, and the only way to tell the difference is by which treatment is most effective. It doesnt sound as if you can treat a fogging episode with sleep, so there's the difference.
I'm reading a series of in-depth articles about autism that might be interesting.
First up, a review of The Curious Incident of the dog in the Night-Time. It starts off with a warning:
The details are damning:
Christopher thinks everyone is less intelligent than him: He praises his own intelligence on multiple occasions, while describing all the other disabled kids at his school as “stupid” (43) and simultaneously trivializing their disabilities by saying that everyone has difficulty learning some things. Christopher looks down on non-disabled people as well, saying that “most people are almost blind and they don’t see most things and there is lots of spare capacity in their heads and it is filled with things which aren’t connected and are silly.” (144) Haddon may be trying to show the reader that Christopher sees non-autistic people in the same way they often see him in the novel; regardless, the effect is that Christopher looks intolerant and dismissive.
That's just the main character. It goes on to describe other aspects of the book, but since this is a long article, you may want to view it yourself to catch all the details.
Visiting from the Hoag Galaxy
Yeah, I've read that book. The protagonist comes off more like some sort of sociopath than anything. It would be one thing if it was third-person with ambiguous narration, but it's first person and we see his thought processes the whole time. It doesn't help that the book is full of random unpleasant things that don't really make much sense when you think about it. For example, when the protagonist's father divorces his mother, the father convinces the protagonist that his mom died of a disease, complete with taking the kid to a crematorium.
I think what my opinion boils down to is that the book was clearly written by someone who has some but not much contact with autistic people. Or they have a lot of contact with someone who is heavily autistic, but got a very wrong idea of what the thought process is actually like.
EDIT: I looked it up. The author had no personal contact with anyone on the spectrum whatsoever. He'd apparently read a couple articles and not much else.
edited 26th Sep '16 2:05:19 PM by Zendervai
Not Three Laws compliant.
Grr... <3
Yeah, based on that review, there is no way the author knows someone with the condition. Way too many mistakes.
Fortunately, a lot has changed in the popular culture since 2003.
I had to explain to a classroom of students once that the book was not accurate.
How'd you do that? What'd you tell them, and how'd they react?
Some of the comments about that stupid book:
You made excellent points on everything I hated about this book, as well as the larger reasons as to why this one in particular bugs me SO much. And I actually like or love many of the other NT-written books out there with autistic narrators, even though they’ve all got some points I didn’t like all that much, so despite what some have claimed it’s not about that. I felt that, despite their issues in some areas, most of those other books were trying to render portraits of human beings. This one was just… dehumanizing, using Christopher as a prop so the audience could feel inspired whenever it wasn’t painting him as a monster with no feelings. Gross.
And actually, I was also very hurt because is that how people really viewed me…? This is not a book I’d ever recommend.
One big thing that I find common among autistics, and something that I still occasionally struggle with, is that there are a great many things and social norms that seem to come naturally to most people, and yet, we simply don't get them unless you spell them out for us point blank. And even if we know how something works, we still might have our own ways of doing things. If you want something done in the way you want it to be done, you often have to be very specific when giving me instructions. If you want me to wash the car, but don't tell me that you specifically want it washed going [[strike paint the face]] up and down, there's every chance I might do it [[wax on wax off]] side to side instead. So that could be a potential source of conflict right there.
Also, common autistic traits I've noticed over the years are rambling on about a different subject and being unable to tell if the other person doesn't give a crap about what you're talking about, not always making eye contact, [[I Reject Your Reality And Subsitute My Own rejecting the reality of the situation, learning more by physical example than being told how to do something, wanting things done or arranged in a specific way, and just not always being very flexible. I've mostly stopped doing all of these things by now, but I'm not exactly the most common example of autistics these days either.