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Autism and old people

abloner

I will be 78 in a few days. Nobody knows much about ASD here. There is a great confusion among psychiatrists and psychologists (matter of fact the formers live in a jumble of psycho-schools  and are substantially self taught and the others, are attached to some  “master” who helped them to entering some  area to work or earn their living.

I started talking around  age four. And I lived all my life alone, even when I was in the family. Never married, never had a stable relationship with women or men, though being “straight” and “anatomically” a male. I earned a living with enormous effort. Being the son of an influential man, I found protection of which I was myself unaware. Having discovered at the end of my life this hidden background of a very modest success in economic and professional survival I feel like the husband that discovered after decades of marriage that his wife has always been infidel and that their interaction has been a constant pretence, voluntary by the wife, involuntary and vain by the husband. The past must be all erased, authenticity may be for the epilogue.   

  • “Mild” is here a treacherous word”. Absconded, invisible would be better. To manage an apparently “normal” life might require heroic efforts. People may say, at best, “he/she is a loner, a sad person, unsociable”, without never knowing the minimal crumb of suffering of the ASD, his solitude in his burrow or bubble, where every exchange with the outside world is only labored fake, a performance. The subject himself may not realize until the end of his/her life that he has acted normality all the time and that he/she waits for the end with that handful of ashes which his life has been all the time. He/she may even feel guilty of the constant lying of a life which has been dictated by the unspoken expectations of   “society” and think, like the character of a  famous novel-confession, that  "shame would survive his death".  

  • This reflects the general lack of understanding of abler people who can manage a life, who are therefore deemed to have a "mild" form of ASD. The fact that someone makes an effort to be independent, and manages to lead a productive life, doesn't mean they are not suffering from their ASD difficulties in other less obvious ways. It is frustrating that if you don't present outward severity sufficient to get fuunding or counselling, you don't get any help at all. There just seems to be the assumption that non-emergency autism can be discounted as outside the main concerns of all those clinicians, health workers and scientists. Nobody needs help it seems until they are critically affected.

  • And I am in a vicious circle. If you cannot interact with others you have to legitimate your existential universe all by yourself. And from there it becomes more and more difficult to communicate, so you have to reinforce your walls of loneliness, nor  you can even try to describe to others where you live, how you live, what are your nourishments, your feelings and passions.