Reply #209: Did I say developed typically?

[Banazir]

Yes, children can't hide who they are. Does this mean that every time and place in the world has had autism diagnoses for every child who was obviously autistic? No. Does this mean that people who were obviously autistic in childhood can't later learn to hide who they were? No. Does this mean that people diagnosed with autism in childhood always get formal help? No. Does this mean that learning to hide things at some point in life means developing typically or that it means the person wasn't obviously autistic before then? No. Does learning to fake things at some point mean the person won't need help later when that falls apart? No.

I do know several adults who were diagnosed in childhood with Early Infantile Autism, their parents hushed it up because back then it was still considered the fault of parenting, they received no formal support, and no, they did not develop typically (I never said they did), but they later on learned to fake things. Some of them never learned until adulthood that they were diagnosed as autistic when they were children, and others knew as children but their parents kept it quiet outside the home.

All of them but a few burned out somewhere between young adulthood and middle age and needed help, some of them can't get it because their records have been since destroyed (most places don't hang onto medical records that long). I don't know why you "can't buy my assertion" when I know these people personally, have spent time with them, in some cases have even seen copies of their medical records.

I also know people very similar to them (or even more obvious in childhood than they were) who didn't get formally diagnosed. Or got diagnosed with something else: Mental retardation and childhood schizophrenia are pretty popular ones.

Some people did get help, just not formalized help. Some ended up having to go it on their own. It's not as if autistic people are always stuck without learning how to do certain things unless they get some specific form of specialized training. Learning more slowly, or differently, yeah, but after awhile time can even a few things out in terms of appearance. Did they develop typically? Not hardly. Did they manage, by young adulthood, to pass for normal some of the time while in public, at an enormous cost to them? Yes, but they still needed help later after that interval. What's so hard to believe about that?

I'm having trouble figuring out exactly what bias on your part I'm running into. I'm starting to suspect it's several.

I could go on, but since the people I know are people, not medical studies, I doubt you'll listen. But then people are people, not medical studies, whether they're autistic people or not, and the world is not a tidy place where everyone follows some textbook pattern of development, least of all autistic people.