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Does late diagnosis lead to trauma?

tintal
over 5 years ago

I think it can, and there are a few articles online that explore how autism relates to trauma and PTSD. Compared to neurotypical people, trauma in autistic people has different causes and plays out in different ways.

Some examples: 

  • Exclusion, exploitation or mistreatment by peers, leading to social phobia and mistrust of others
  • Isolation
  • Forcing oneself to put up with loud noises and bright light
  • Pressure and criticism from parents unaware of child's underlying limitations
  • Not knowing how to manage one's stress
  • Forcefully masking stress-relieving behaviours like stimming 
  • Suicidal thoughts in children, with no ability to rationalise or identify the root of these thoughts

Although there is a little research on the topic, I think it deserves more. I would guess that the above examples are all risk factors for depression, stress, alcoholism, heart disease, and a whole host of other health problems.

Parents
  • over 5 years ago

    I think there's something in this.  It's double-edged.  Yes, you get the 'Eureka!' thing of your life making sense at last.  But I had my diagnosis 3 years ago, at age 56, and it's starting to come back at me now in negative ways.  Feeling like my life has been lost in the 'cloud of unknowing', etc.

    We have much higher levels of sensitivity to trauma than NTs.  For most people, witnessing something horrific or being under deadly threat can be traumatic.  For us, just the way someone behaves towards us can cause huge problems.  Like my own recent issue, with a colleague at work who 'unfriended' me and 'blocked' me on Facebook simply because she disagreed with some of the things I was posting.  She could have just ignored them.   But no.  And her doing that, to someone else, might just result in them thinking 'S*d you, then.  Be like that.'  And let it go over their head.  With me, I was so upset by it that I ended up going sick from work.  I'm revisited time and time again by an incident that happened at school when I was 5.  It really traumatised me at the time, so I'm hyper-sensitive to criticism if it's not done in a civil way.  If someone shouts at me... then I'm in a mess.

    This short article is very good.  I think it sums up very well the points that you are making:

    At The Intersection of Autism and Trauma

Reply
  • over 5 years ago

    I think there's something in this.  It's double-edged.  Yes, you get the 'Eureka!' thing of your life making sense at last.  But I had my diagnosis 3 years ago, at age 56, and it's starting to come back at me now in negative ways.  Feeling like my life has been lost in the 'cloud of unknowing', etc.

    We have much higher levels of sensitivity to trauma than NTs.  For most people, witnessing something horrific or being under deadly threat can be traumatic.  For us, just the way someone behaves towards us can cause huge problems.  Like my own recent issue, with a colleague at work who 'unfriended' me and 'blocked' me on Facebook simply because she disagreed with some of the things I was posting.  She could have just ignored them.   But no.  And her doing that, to someone else, might just result in them thinking 'S*d you, then.  Be like that.'  And let it go over their head.  With me, I was so upset by it that I ended up going sick from work.  I'm revisited time and time again by an incident that happened at school when I was 5.  It really traumatised me at the time, so I'm hyper-sensitive to criticism if it's not done in a civil way.  If someone shouts at me... then I'm in a mess.

    This short article is very good.  I think it sums up very well the points that you are making:

    At The Intersection of Autism and Trauma

Children
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