To understand that Autism is NOT a mental illness?

[Oxfordblue]

Just that really, someone posted that autism is a mental illness.
I understand autism to be a different way of thinking/perceiving etc. Not an illness that one may or may not recover from

(My daughter is waiting for an assessment for autism & I would hate her to feel that she 'has a mental illness' & actually find that statement so disempowering. The world needs people to think differently, to challenge ideas that maybe set in stone & blur the idea that one size fits all.)

@WonderBoy you actually made me snort out loud!

I think it's best left to actual autistic people to decide whether their autism is a barrier or not, and as someone who struggles to even leave the house, yeah, I think it's a barrier.

This.

Sometimes (as in this week, when my rigidity of thinking has left me in a terrible situation at work and I'm really wondering how I can go on) then yes, it's a barrier.

At other times, when I can discern patterns in numbers that are so beautiful they might as well be rainbow-coloured, then no.

But my barriers are mine and they're up to me, and other NDs, to decide.

Nobody except someone about 2ft tall could fit in our fridge. I think DD would try. She's just announced "it's very hot." No shit, Sherlock.

I have nothing to add to this thread - for me it's been great reading everything that everyone has written - knowing that most has been written by women with autism. I know some might not like me saying "women with autism", but without listing every descriptive I can think of that is what I mean.

It's been brilliant reading your free writing - and something I really noticed on this thread is that most (possibly All) posters kept it civil, left, came beck, others came in and went - but it never turned nasty,

One day, the rest of the world will catch up - the difference is not ours it is yours....

"And I don't understand the mindset of people who say that a diagnosis is a label. To me a diagnosis was the difference between things making sense and not, the difference between blaming everything on myself and realising that some things weren't my fault and couldn't be fixed by simply trying harder. To be blunt about it, it was the difference between hating myself and not."

Thanks for this, someone said I shouldn't label myself & I couldn't say why it irritated me.

As someone else said, it's (ADHD DX) enabled me to find people like me, well, online anyway!

I’m amazed at the scepticism around early deaths and autism

You’ve never had the experience of wandering into a cocktail party and announcing everyone there is going to die young, I take it?

You can’t blame people for wanting the references before they cash in their pensions

It is so f'ing hot, I am sitting in the Smeg, WB with me.

😂

I can see we’re going to have to hush this up 😏

Grinning faces and joking seems a bit inappropriate when talking about early deaths. There's a sense of 'the wrong sort of autistic going on' TBH and it's quite unpleasant.

Lots of preventable autistic deaths in here too:
www.england.nhs.uk/south/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2015/12/mazars-rep.pdf

Or don't intellectually disabled autistic people matter?

You’ve never had the experience of wandering into a cocktail party and announcing everyone there is going to die young, I take it?

Never been to a cocktail party, not sure what this reference means in a thread about autism and mental health.

I was just surprised that given the huge amount of publicity there was surrounding this that there needed to be links to prove it, especially when we’re all on the internet and it’s easy to type “autism early deaths” into google.

As someone who knows all too well about the likelihood of early death, and lives with it daily hanging over the head of our darling WB, I won't be apologising for the humour.

It is never meant to offend anyone, apart from the disablists. If I didn't laugh, I wouldn't be sitting in the fridge, I'd be putting my head in the gas oven. Laughter is a weapon, a defence and a survival mechanism.

No grin.

Has nobody caught the irony in a load of autistic people being told off for being socially inappropriate and misunderstanding social cues?

Because it’s obvious as fuck to me.

It’s called black humour hard.

Sodding 😂

I've just been diagnosed zzzzz. We're still at the "who do you want to disclose to?" stage.

Well I’ve seen 4 separate doctors who diagnosed me and the children and it’s never been mentioned.

Like most things it probably depends on the area you’re in, and the kind of diagnosis you get. It seems that a lot of that information is more relevant to people with an autism and.... diagnosis. (I can't think of a better way to describe it).

Because reading back it seems that the parents of the children with dx of autism and other conditions/needs are getting extremely angry with the people talking about autism because it doesn’t fit their experience.

So it’s ok for zzzzzz to be surprised over and over that we’ve never been told and express it repeatedly, but not for those of us who’ve never been told to express surprise?

I think genuinely the key is what type of diagnosis, because sometimes it’s not at all matching up because it’s something completly different. But it’s still autistic people being lectured at by others because their experiences don’t fit.

When anyone expressed surprise about the other conditions being associated with autism (because we hadn’t been told) it was met with incredulity but we didn’t kick off.

Yet when we express surprise we’re wrong or to be doubted?

I don’t know what the reality is, none of us do. The fact that we’ve all had such vastly differing information proves that it’s not concrete.

But I wonder if the doctors dealing with autism and other needs/conditions (I don’t know the right word) simultaneously speak more about it because that’s their field.

Hence why possibly people who are autistic but don’t have the same additional needs haven’t been told.

Neither is wrong, it’s just differing experiences if that makes sense.

Maybe that’s it. The range of opinions or medical terms seems to be what’s dividing us, and without conclusive studies I don’t see it changing.

It’s all very confusing and overwhelming.

Like the early death stats, that was a shock, but researching online gives many differing studies/opinions which does nothing to either reassure or confirm anything.

Or offer a way to try and combat it.

Wishing all with autism and/or living with autism as a parent/main carer a good morning. We survived the night here. It wasn't an easy one, but we're still here to fight another day. Glad you are too.

I'll bring that up with her when I see her next zzzzz. That won't be until DS2's back at school, he's off with chickenpox.

All I would like to say is that bananas are only acceptable in muffin form. Preferably with choc chip. And you can do GF banana muffins that actually taste good and work with comorbid gut problems... (and also thanks to everyone, this is a Good Thread)