Re:My experience... (Score 1)

While some of what you say is accurate, the age of diagnosis is not necessarily. There are plenty of people who genuinely have Asperger's or autism who went undiagnosed or misdiagnosed in childhood and/or adolescence because of ignorance.

There are also people who would never seek professional diagnosis because, while they have difficulty with a lot of things, they don't see that difficulty. Often people around them are the ones who diagnose them.

As for me, despite a fairly typical "HFA" (not AS, technically, as there were speech and cognitive delays) pattern of functioning, I was not diagnosed until adolescence. As a child, all sorts of things were said about me, but autism was simply not one of them. This is true for a lot of people.

When it comes to anyone with the set of characteristics currently defined as AS, there's no way that if they were born before 1977 or so they would have been diagnosed anywhere before adolescence, because AS wasn't a diagnosis until the late '80s. A lot of people on the autism spectrum who learn to talk are simply seen as problem children, or childhood (or adult) schizophrenics (despite lack of hallucinations or delusions), or hyperactive, or gifted with social adjustment problems, or some other label that doesn't address what's really going on.

There are also many autistic people living healthy lives, although not as many as there should be. Depression and other mental health problems are not consequences of autism, but consequences of the intersection of autism and a pretty harsh world.

The people I have known who are autistic and grew up in loving environments are reasonably well-adjusted, but disabled, just like a paraplegic doesn't have to live an "unhealthy life" just because they can't walk. There are certain things they can't do, but they're reasonably happy and healthy in the right environment. They may talk or not talk, have trouble moving off narrow topics, have trouble with self-care, move in unusual fashions, and have immense trouble either reading or giving out social cues, but none of these things on their own bar someone from health or happiness.

I am not one of these people. I did not have a great environment to grow up in, and I was diagnosed (I'd never heard of autism before) in the teenage severely depressed stage many autistic people go through. But they exist.

It is true that most autistic people do not lead average lives, but there is a difference between average lives and healthy or happy lives. Autistic people leading happy lives are few and far between because of the non-autistic world's hostility to us, but autism in itself does not necessarily cause any more unhappiness than normality does (obviously sensory issues can cause unpleasantness). A lot of happiness depends on temperament and environment as much as anything else, and people who are happy, even if they have trouble functioning and everyone around them thinks they're completely crazy, are less likely to seek professional help. So are people who are oblivious to their own social difficulties.