Published on 12, July, 2020
I think I am on the autism spectrum but I keep hearing/reading that people with autism struggle with understanding nuances in meaning of words or don't understand sarcasm.
As far as I can remember I didn't feel confused with sarcasm and I've learnt the art pretty well that I am known for my caustic humour. I also love poetry and verbal imagery having been an avid reader when I had more time, as a child relied on a very active imagined alternative reality to get through some school situations.
Does that exclude me from being autistic? I'm afraid of going any further if it's all just in my mind.
do this online test
https://psychology-tools.com/test/autism-spectrum-quotient
it will give u an indication how autistic you are
That's interesting Aidie. I have just double-checked my daughter's score on her AQ-10, the test you give the link to above, and she only scored 2. where you need more than a 6 to be considered for assessment but at a thorough clinical assessment she was found to have ASD. The test is a very blunt, unsubtle tool. I thought this at the time but didn't follow up with the assessors.
F
nothing beats the face-to-face assessments by a modern assessor. The Test above was created in 2001 and then they didnt know that female autism has its own traits. I would love a new modern up-to-date test. The AQ-10 only has ten questions so its not very good anyways so thats why I point to the one in the link which has 50 questions.
As I understand it, females have tendencies to be strong at masking and tendencies to focus on working people out/mannerisms etc from a young age. So there's a tendency for them to come across as neurotypical, when in fact their brains are working super-hard to process things and fit in with other kids.
Some guys will experience similar and will, like quite a lot of females do, often get missed out by diagnoses.
One of the first times I really thought "hey, I might actually be autistic too" was from watching a video of girls/women with autism who were talking about themselves and their experiences.
Despite being supposedly male, my entryway to understanding my own (probable/highly likely) autism was through finding a lot of crossover with the female presentation tendencies. [I regard myself as bigender though as that makes my internal life easier for me]
Here are some articles I bookmarked last year as I was discovering/figuring stuff out:
“these results suggest that in adulthood, females show fewer, but perceive more autistic features than males. One possible explanation for this may be that females with ASC are better at masking their autistic features, perhaps because of better self-awareness and self-referential cognitive abilities. Self-referential and social-cognitive traits are related to each other in autism [71], such that increases in one relates to increases in the other.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3113855/
I found articles like this one to be quite useful and eye-opening at the time:https://www.aane.org/self-discovery-one-aspie-woman/
aidie Yes so interesting. I found the AQ10 to be quite unhelpful and the one with more questions a bit more helpful. You're right, a face-to-face consultation would be a lot more helpful because I found it challenging to know what context the questions are referring to. There are so many possible variations.
Like Ethan, I would be really interested to read up more on how autism presents in people who aren't easily diagnosed under the more traditional methods. I've found some podcasts helpful, where people have been chatting about their own experiences, but it's quite hard to find reading material that doesn't just refer to the topic quite vaguely. I get the impression that research into this area is still relatively scarce?
I just had to go-a-googling once I read this exchange and apparently there's some concern in academic circles about the use of the AQ10
https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/popular-autism-screening-tool-is-unreliable-study-suggests/
Its predictive value apparently seems to be pretty useless as it churns out a lot false negatives.
There's a research paper at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4988267/ if anyone is interested in this sort of thing. The section "AQ10 as a predictor of ASD diagnosis" and concluding paragraph before the acknowledgements pretty much summarises the whole report if you don't feel keen on wading through a lot of statistics, analysis and research-speak.
@aidie - have you a link or some info non the unique traits of female autism? Would be really interested to read up on that.