Post

Steve Silberman covered this very well in NeuroTribes. www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/310415...

“Too sensitive.” Bitch, I’m about as sensitive as a cockroach.

Amen. I was sent to "special education" because I was dyslexic. I wasn't diagnosed or taught anything about it until college. All that time, I thought there was something bad about me.

It was literally hell once puberty started. Like many ND Gen Xers in the 1980s, most of us knew we were different, but there wasn't a diagnosis for us. I didn't even know what ADHD was until the 1990s. The only things that saved my life back then were comics, ttRPGs, and the arcade, my fellow nerds

Definitely not a Special Interest, just a Scientist doing Science, mmhm.

My twin sister and I got called "hyperactive" so often we thought it was our name...

Amen, says this school psychologist!

Also, the stigma was somewhat removed by the 1988 movie RainMan. Note the diagnosis curve’s change upward starting about then.

Not to mention those who went to private school, where if they were diagnosed with autism, ADHD, etc. would be disenrolled from the school so admin wouldn’t need to “waste” valuable resources.

I had this kind of conversation with a colleage about my daughter. So I explained him that 50 or 100 years ago, my daughter wouldn't have been autistic, she would just have been stupid.

Neuro-Tribes is a great book on the history of autism. But it’s a tough read for some, as it goes into the history of experimentation on autistic children by the SS between WWI and WWII.

Exactly. "Spaz," "weirdo," etc, have been commonplace insults for many decades.

Hear - hear! My father would have been diagnosed autistic. He was born in 1923, long before vaccines and Tylenol. His best friend had his baseball dreams dashed in junior high due to polio. Hence my parents’ push for childhood vaccinations.

Four years ago for me, at age 48.

The kids that were heavily impacted also didn’t go to school

I was medicated in grade school or "hyperactivity". Ritalin, then. Familiar.

Or, if you were a girl, you were a social butterfly or meant to have babies at 18 and not suited for school. They didn’t expect that much from us anyway.

This thread hit me hard because — it's me.

Or were just weird

I believe almost everyone in my family is somewhere on the spectrum. My mom was possibly ADHD and OCD, dad was autistic, Grandpa was dyslexic, grandma was possibly autistic, and I might be AuDHD.

Yes they are I say this as a female w/ "gifted" dx at age 6 & only 1st-grader in a pull-out NDEA program at my LA Unified school in 1970 who could never quite pull myself together as an adult & found out at 62 that I was autistic the whole fucking time 👋 jackieh2.substack.com/p/happy-new-...

Legends of Changelings left behind in cribs by the Fae after they've abducted the 'original' kid... History is replete with stories of people we'd put all over the spectrum of Autism. It's bad revisionism to claim "Autism didn't exist in the past!" and the motives of the people claiming it are clear

Like the “absent-minded professor” trope: “a talented scholar whose academic brilliance is accompanied by below-par functioning in other areas, leading to forgetfulness and mistakes”, and, “they are considered to be so engrossed in their field of study that they forget their surroundings.”

Not to mention the fact that a lot of kids that were just hard to teach (dyslexic) were put in those same classes. It was tragic.

I have a son on the spectrum (AuDHD), and we had to fight, often too hard, for minor accommodations in school. I think of Jamie all the time, of where he might be, who he might be, and who he might have had the chance to be with a proper diagnosis and support.

My kids didn’t get diagnosed with ADHD and Autism until they were in their late 20s I tried so hard to get help for my youngest in school because she had such difficulty with reading & relied on her auditory memory to compensate but because she was “doing fine” I got no assistance & she struggled

So true. The kids in the special ed class too.

Poor Patrick, my friend's brother. He would have been diagnosed Autistic and gotten better care. He had "the best he could have" but he was isolated in that care.

I've never been diagnosed with anything (although parents and pediatrician discussed it and decided not to pursue and I got "no sugar diet" for a year)... but I will say that one year I was the only kid in the gifted class and a special ed class the same year. Conveniently they were right next door.

We called them “weird” and somewhere around fourth grade they disappeared from school.

Yes. Half wonder if I'd be diagnosed as ADD or ADHD. In the 80s you could be considered slow, inattentive, or quiet. Mental health understanding hopefully improves.

Or they were institutionalized.

Trains...trains...I am convinced there is a set of reasons so many autistics love them and have a special interest in them: 1. All the cars line up in order with an engine at the front 2. They have to travel on a track. No off-roading 3. They have set schedules That's the start of my list.

My uncle is definitely autistic, but if you expand that criteria, boy a whole lot of em…

Or the one guy who brought in a car battery in a backpack and started shocking people. I'd look him up but he had the same name as a character in a very famous blockbuster film and that's the only hits you get when you look him up.

You just need to think about your primary school cohort to know this was not true.

Where I live they used to be called with the local equivalent to the R word. I remember having two of them in my elementary school class. That word some ‘freethinkers’ want to normalise.

Or they know and just want to go back to the days when people who acted differently were treated with ridicule and cruelty

My mom taught 4th grade elementary school for 40 years and frequently saw how meds truly helped her kids. She would follow up on this by saying "better living through chemistry"

Oversensitive is definitely another one that was freely used to label kids who were having frigging meltdowns.

It's not like they want to be verbal all the time.

I have no words. And apparently she doesn't recognize that if anyone has a deficit, she's the one.

She clearly needed retraining.

These "we didn't have x back in the day" are just lamenting that they can't treat x people like shit with no consequences.

Amen

I was one of those kids, right down to being called "hyper" and "spastic". It would have been nice to have understanding adults.

I begged my teachers to allow me to stay in classroom during lunch break so I could read the dictionary. Early 1980s. I remember Autism was still largely thought of as "boys" only at the time.

My paternal uncle finally got a diagnosis in his fifties, and last year Mom told me how her dad never finished school but built a house and wired it for electricity using books from the library. I was like oh so I've got it from both sides, that explains the RAADS score.

Also, back when even the teachers used the "R" & "F" slurs, PTSD was something that only happens to soldiers (who are weak). Couldn't possibly happen to a kid. And if a kid reported anything, the kid was just doing it for the attention and must be ignored. www.ptsduk.org/can-childhoo...

My great grandma had a photo of herself with some neighborhood kids, one of whom was on crutches. Muscular dystrophy? Polio? She didn’t know but remembered him fondly. “He was so smart! It was a shame he was retarded!” Yes, once we just lumped anyone different into one delightful diagnosis.

I had so much joy when I was in Spain and saw all the funny little service units.

My dad added a teaching certificate to his degree in 1966, and started teaching “special education “, as it was called. The number of kids in that system because of lack of understanding on the part of adults was unbelievable. A behavioral difference was a death sentence to a real education.

I was put in a "remedial" class - the teacher would read to herself while the kids amused themselves. I went on to work in IT and retired just before my 58th birthday.

Also ADHD is considered a neurodivergent diagnosis. By today’s standards I am neurodivergent but you would probably not pick up on that even as I was growing up.

Yes. Yes. YES!!!

(The two of them can talk for England, honestly, and no the older one still can’t read)

Truth!

They were just kept home.

Yep. And if you went to Catholic school in the 70s, odds are they are the ones the nuns beat the most.

Agreed. You'd think my neck muscles would be super strong with all the head-shaking I do when I read the news...

And has never heard of Temple Grandin.

Or, as many of my report cards from the 80s say, "lacks participation"

What? You mean the kid who spent 1975 eating his school lunches while staring at an electrical outlet was…AUTISTIC!?!

I was diagnosed #ActuallyAutistic at the age of 65. My childhood would have been a lot less painful & frightening if I’d been diagnosed 60 years earlier. I’m really pleased fewer kids are getting missed today.

Amen. We’re still learning how to meet all kids where they are, and a long way from funding the resources necessary to truly create equitable classrooms. I hope before I retire the pendulum swings back to honoring the power of public education.

The amount of Boomers on the spectrum is no joke.

Reading this thread is therapy.

As a retired teacher of 32 years, I can safely say...AMEN.

Damn, I was one of those weird-ass kids. 70 years ago. Now, my autistic granddaughter gets regular counseling and various kinds of help, and is a lot happier and better adjusted than I was then.

This guy was the department chair, noted for the breadth and depth of his research. But I suspect having to do those tutorials was really tough on him. He was probably more nervous than his students.

It was enough to get a girl! 🤷‍♂️

The 2 schools still exist for that purpose but they closed the residential center. Just because the kids weren’t mainstreamed at the time (the 80’s) didn’t mean they didn’t exist. 2/2

At least 3 of my core 5 friends in high school in the 1970s were (are) on the spectrum. Only one has since been diagnosed.

Or those of us who didn't want to be called spastic who worked so hard to hide our tics and grunts.

this is just anecdotal but I wouldn't be surprised if it's the reason not as many kids do recreational drugs these days

It's early days but it was significantly explanatory, which I found useful, for a number of behaviors I've struggled with forever, and it is altering my weekly therapy into something more directly useful for me.

Had to explain to someone else my age that we had the same kind of kids in class with us as they talk about today. We just called them different, unkind names.

💯. From someone who spent most of her life wondering why things were so hard until she finally got diagnosed at age 52

In thirty years as a software engineer I've never seen HR "micromanage" individual employees (and believe you me we've got lots of people on the spectrum). It is usually the opposite -- they would rather look the other way and avoid paperwork unless you're risking a lawsuit.

So many kids. I knew so many kids who were definitely on the spectrum. There wasn't a plan for how to help them through school at all.

2. This for the record was after a LOT of meetings with school counselors and different psychologist/child shrinks who had a lot of theories but never once mentioned the Spectrum. So mom finally took me to the leading Autism specialist in town who promptly diagnosed me.

Omg!!!!! Several kids in my orbit had "water on the brain" I never knew what the fuck that meant. As a kid, that sounded totally legit, but I did wonder how the "water" got there

I remember a kid in elementary school. He didn’t interact much. In retrospect, I am very sure he would have been diagnosed along the autism scale. Where are you, Lynn?

To you point, there were a lot of things we saw then--cerebal palsy, for example--that we don't see as much now. Or, it's diagnosed differently. I watched a classmate give a presentation recently and concluded that yes, he was smart in HS; but today, he would have carried an ADHD diagnosis.

Yikes…

I remember doing a class presentation about autism in grade eight, back when the diagnosis was just starting to emerge in general discourse, and one of my classmates saying, "You know, that sounds like you actually."

I had a classmate in the 70’s who would ambush you with facts about Teddy Roosevelt if he saw you in the hall.

Agree!!!

Disability activist and autistic superhero Betsy Goodrich, aka Danger Woman, was in my girl scout troop. Before she was introduced into one of the troops I was in with her, the teacher brought us all together and told us all that “Betsy cannot control herself.” The word “autism” never showed up.

It's clear to us that Dad has dyslexia but it wasn't known / diagnosed in the 50's. He was brilliant at math and could build anything from scratch, from a house to a car. He could have been an engineer if he had support for his disability.

There were no peanut or gluten sensitivities either, just kids that were sick all the time

There is no effective treatment for autism. ADHD sure. but medicalizing high functioning autism (weirdness) isn’t accomplishing much.

Girls are/were autistic. But in the 20th century, they were just called "quiet" as they tended to play alone in a corner with dolls or other toys.

100%. I was alive before the movie and I am autistic. Diagnosed in my 40s

We never had an ozone layer either. Or hundreds of other things we had but hadn’t named.

I saw someone saying the concept of changelings was probably born from the changes seen in autistic babies, ok perfectly normal baby and then sudden shift in behavior (or gradual). Instead of blaming vaccines they blamed fairies.

Back then, they wanted to skip lithium and put me straight on Ritalin. Happily, my mother declined. I didn't know what was actually going on with me until my 40's.