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16 year old daughter possible late diagnosis - advice/reading?

NAS70631

Hello all & thanks for reading. My daughter 16 is awaiting assessment and I’m looking for any recommendations for reading/advice material or other people’s experiences.

obviously she may not be given a diagnosis when it comes to it but I think it’s still useful to prepare & some of the approaches may help us anyway. It’s been mentioned over the years but I’ve alwsys thought that because she seems to hold onto friends ok that it wasn’t the case. However assessment pushed by Camhs so taking it more as a possibility.

i seem to have mostly found things about younger children (where the strategies don’t apply) or people with more severe sounding ASD. The main problems we’re dealing with are meltdowns, anxiety/wanting to avoid things she doesn’t like, desire to control how things are and a kind of lack of empathy/caring about how others are affected in the family by her/other things. I know that sounds kind of negative/harsh I don’t mean it to be just trying to find better ways to respond. Thank you so much.

  • It will not be easy to find the best material to learn from. One of the best things you can do is watch online videos of autistic people sharing their life experiences and what helped they.

    Concerning meltdowns, those of us on the Autism Spectrum have more consciousness so our brains take in a lot more information. A difference between the autistic mind and neurotypical mind is while a neurotypical brain can filter out unnecessary information immediately, an autistic mind holds both necessary and unnecessary information in because it doesn’t have the filter. With the mind packed with all this information it leads to meltdowns. 

    Concerning anxiety, another neurological difference in an autistic brain is there’s greater variation in the occipital lobes at the back of the brain, PhD. Thomas Armstrong claims the variation makes the autistic mind work in a systematic way. Routines, keeping things the same, always doing things the same way, critical detail and more Autism traits work just like a system. Autistic people I’ve listened to share sticking to a routine makes them feel a lot less anxiety as things are more predictable.

    Concerning desire to control, a psychologist and ASD Specialist called Dr. Whalberg claims this is caused by the environment and overstimulation. Dr. Whalberg says that when some autistic people are overwhelmed by the environment they try to tune it out, they try to manage it opposed to taking it in. He says the more overwhelmed and overstimulated they are the more they try to control, they try to control the environment by keeping it consistent.

    Concerning empathy, no one on the Autism Spectrum lacks empathy, the majority actually have far more intense levels of empathy than neurotypical people. Approximately half of the people on the Autism Spectrum have emotional agnosia. Autistic people get very exhausted by all the masking that they get too tired to care about anything. Another neurological difference in the autistic mind is the variation in the frontal lobes concerning less dopamine than neurotypical people. It’s dopamine that gives people that sense of excitement when they see other people to socialise with, because of the lack of dopamine autistic people don’t feel the need to socialise as much, without that dopamine and all the masking it gets so exhausting. When they engage with what they’re interested in they don’t have to socialise, they’re in control of everything, they don’t have to mask, they’re in a consistent environment preventing anxiety.

    Think to yourself, your daughter is being forced by society to do things that exhaust her (is that caring?), she faces thwarted belonging because of masking which is denial of self-expression that leads to depression (pointing your daughter to depression, is that an empathetic move?).

    Basically, your daughter is being forced to do things she knows are not good for her, if she’s feeling like people don’t care about her will she care about others? Neurotypical people are forcing autistic people to mask, hide traits, hiding needs does not help needs, it’s simply neurotypical people hiding what they fear so they can feel comfortable which is just selfish and not emphatic.

  • Hello, I would recomend Steven Silberman's Neuro Tribes and Send In The Idiots by Kamran Nazeer as well as thinking In Pictures by Dr Temple Grandin. Hope this helps.