Published on 12, July, 2020
I was trawling through some data, and I wondered if anyone has any official percentage of HFA (high functioning autistics) over the general population of ASD people. The psychiatrist and the therapist at PsychiatryUK told me that high functioning people (able to work privately and live independently) are a minority, but declined to give me any numbers. We also agreed that the "math genius" archetype of ASD adult is way overrepresented in media, since it is quite rare in real life.
Does anyone have any hard data about that?
As I've said high functioning has never meant function within sociaty, it's function on an IQ test. That said autistic people who scoor well on IQ tests can ussually live independent lives with resonable adjustments.
Yes, but I'm talking about undiagnosed adults, not children.
Yeah, that makes sense. Normie distribution is an almost perfect Gaussian, ASD distribution is not. However, when talking about functionality IQ has a secondary role. I have an ASD colleague that is incredibly intelligent while in a controlled work environment, but is totally helpless outside. The company had to assign a manager just to him, to keep him from 'sperging to the wrong people or scaring off the customers!
you can see tthe figgure here https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/856084/fpsyt-13-856084-HTML/image_m/fpsyt-13-856084-g001.jpg
I think curent numbers are something like 44% of autistic children have averge / abouve average inteligence.
actually if you hunt for it scientists have addressed this question https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.856084
Short answer there are quite a lot of HFA people. Also the IQ curve for autistic people is like a camel hump. With one peak below average and one peak above average. Where as normies only have one hump around normal inteligence.
I worked in schools, and I have noticed that pupils are screened for mental issues. I have seen many ASD children receiving assistance from the SEN people. Back then, when I was a student, there was no screening available. I wonder what I would have become if I had any support.
The shrink told me that it's a functional definition, similar to the three levels of ASD. It's more something like: "are you generally able to do grocery shopping and attend an appointment or a job interview without having a meltdown?"
The issue is that this is quite a loose definition- just because someone cannot stay in one job doesn’t mean that they can’t in another more suitable work environment- it’s not a fixed characteristic- the ability to ‘function’ depends on environment and what else is going on.
And you know this how? Where’s the data to make up that statement?
I think there is more of an awareness of ASD which means that more people are getting diagnosed in childhood, but I’m sure that there is a huge amount of high functioning autistics who still in adulthood have not been diagnosed. Just by going on the stories from the people on here, I don’t remember anyone having made a post saying they were diagnosed in childhood, seems to be all later on in life either early adulthood or even much later on in 50/60/70s.
That would have been true about 20 years ago. Now, a lot of children get diagnosed very early.
I don't have any data about it unfortunately, but I suspect there are a lot more of us out there than people realise. High-masking, low support needs autistic people are much more likely to 'fly under the radar' and not be officially diagnosed. If we WERE all diagnosed, I think we would make up a significant proportion of the autistic community.