Published on 12, July, 2020
Just curious about people who slipped through the net, so to speak. How did you cope with school? I developed quite good ways of hiding how much i struggled. It helped that i was in most of the bottom sets, as no one really cared back then. I was in the top set for biology, i excelled in that area. Nothing else part from sport. I hated going in every day, i was like a zombie....i literally cant remember my last year in school. Ive blanked it out completely.
I was fine in Junior school but hated secondary school. I had severe asthma when I was young so my autism just got missed. I was intelligent, got put up a year and learned how to unconciously mask I guess. I always struggled with maths and spelling, but I was good enough at the other subjects so that I was very average overall. I went to a very poor council estate school and unless you were a right pain nobody was really interested in you. I too have blotted large parts of that from my memory as I hated it so much.I excelled after leaving school, I always liked grown ups more than kids as there was no bullying, tantrums, spitefulness etc.
I believe that not only should all school teachers have received autism spectrum disorder training, but that there should further be an inclusion in standard high school curriculum of a child development course which in part would also teach students about the often-debilitating condition.
It would explain to students how, among other aspects of the condition, people with ASD (including those with higher functioning autism) are often deemed willfully ‘difficult’ and socially incongruent, when in fact such behavior is really not a choice. And how "camouflaging" (or "masking"?), a term used to describe ASD people pretending to naturally fit in, causes their already high anxiety and depression levels to further increase.
While some other school curriculum is controversial (e.g. SOGI, especially in rural residential settings), it nonetheless got/gets implemented. The same attitude and policy should be applied to teaching high school students about ASD, the developing mind and, especially, how to enable a child’s mind to develop properly.
It seems logical to me that if people have their ASD, ACEs, etcetera, diagnosed when very young, they should be better able to deal with their condition(s) through life. I have a condition I consider to be a perfect storm of 'train wrecks' — with which I greatly struggle(d) while unaware (until I was a half-century old) its component dysfunctions had official titles.
I still cannot afford to have a formal diagnosis made on my condition, due to having to pay for a specialized shrink, in our (Canada's) “universal” health-care system. Within our “universal” health-care system, there are important health treatments that are unaffordable thus universally inaccessible, except for those with generous health-insurance coverage and/or a lot of extra doe.