Why nothing for us!!!!

NAS15840 said:

I don’t accept that they have done a generally poor job of it or treat people as low priority. Apart from the services they provide there is also the need to raise awareness, the NAS do that, not always in the way everyone likes but then you can’t please everyone.

My mother was in the NAS when I was a teenager but eventually she left after realising that it provided very little for high-functioning people like myself and, due to its financial arrangements and its desire to chase public money to spend on care services for people who require them making it more of a quango than a charity, decided that it would be difficult to make the NAS allocate more support and services to people like myself. Instead we decided to use a local AS support group which was much more helpful and accommodating. 

Raising awareness was a high priority issue around 2000ish when there was far less knowledge of ASD but I think it is now subject to the laws of diminishing returns. What is needed now are not large scale mass awareness activities for the 'mainstream' like those from the early 2000s but smaller-scale tightly focused 'infill' awareness for the less clued up corners of society.

They didn’t, the medical community did. For a while now it’s been recognised that Asperger’s was part of the same condition as Autism, it’s a sliding scale with various common traits and different levels of impact in different areas. Medically Asperger’s was rolled up with Autism to create Autism Spectrum Disorders. ASD is medically correct in effect Asperger’s is just higher functioning autism, but the same token Autism could be regarded as lower functioning or high impairment Asperger’s.

You have missed my point. What I want to know is when did the NAS get on the AS bandwagon? If for example a person with (undiagnosed) AS was referred to the NAS in 1990 then would the NAS have identified them as having an ASD in the same way as in 2010 or would they have said that they don't have ASD? If not, then what would have been the earliest year that the NAS would have recognised them as having an ASD? Remember that many people diagnosed or suspected to have AS today who were children in the 1980s and early 1990s had (traditional) autism ruled out by psychologists even if they had a statement of SEN at school.

NAS15840 said:

I don’t accept that they have done a generally poor job of it or treat people as low priority. Apart from the services they provide there is also the need to raise awareness, the NAS do that, not always in the way everyone likes but then you can’t please everyone.

My mother was in the NAS when I was a teenager but eventually she left after realising that it provided very little for high-functioning people like myself and, due to its financial arrangements and its desire to chase public money to spend on care services for people who require them making it more of a quango than a charity, decided that it would be difficult to make the NAS allocate more support and services to people like myself. Instead we decided to use a local AS support group which was much more helpful and accommodating. 

Raising awareness was a high priority issue around 2000ish when there was far less knowledge of ASD but I think it is now subject to the laws of diminishing returns. What is needed now are not large scale mass awareness activities for the 'mainstream' like those from the early 2000s but smaller-scale tightly focused 'infill' awareness for the less clued up corners of society.

They didn’t, the medical community did. For a while now it’s been recognised that Asperger’s was part of the same condition as Autism, it’s a sliding scale with various common traits and different levels of impact in different areas. Medically Asperger’s was rolled up with Autism to create Autism Spectrum Disorders. ASD is medically correct in effect Asperger’s is just higher functioning autism, but the same token Autism could be regarded as lower functioning or high impairment Asperger’s.

You have missed my point. What I want to know is when did the NAS get on the AS bandwagon? If for example a person with (undiagnosed) AS was referred to the NAS in 1990 then would the NAS have identified them as having an ASD in the same way as in 2010 or would they have said that they don't have ASD? If not, then what would have been the earliest year that the NAS would have recognised them as having an ASD? Remember that many people diagnosed or suspected to have AS today who were children in the 1980s and early 1990s had (traditional) autism ruled out by psychologists even if they had a statement of SEN at school.