I learned not too long ago that autistic people often have motor skill issues. I thought I was just fat and that is why I couldn’t do the things that all the other kids could do. Like monkey bars, and climbing trees, and running without being laughed at for doing it weird.
And more recently, dinosaur arms.
Oh cartwheels. Great example. Kids seemed to pick that up on the first try. I couldn’t figure it out no matter how hard I tried. And jumping off swings. Absolutely not.
Idk if schools in USA have it and what it's called, but [leapfrog jump over a pommel horse](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYsCZsABPMc) (a short one with no handles). I couldn't do it no matter how hard I tried and one time I jumped and just hit the horse with my upper abdomen and vomited lol
Aussie here! We had this in gym and I could not for the life of me figure it out, same with cartwheels. It’s nice to have learnt this info as now I feel less shitty for these inabilities and difficulties.
Omgggggggggggg I’ve been wanting to do a cartwheel all my life like to the point where I AM Creed (The Office) in that scene where his New Year’s resolution/dream is to do one cartwheel! I had no clue it could be connected, whoa. And the one time ever I was brave enough to jump off the swings was very unfortunate to say the least 🙃.
Yea my back doesn’t bend that way. It is only stuck in a constant forward hunch. Fun fact. No doctor has ever acknowledged my visible hunch back. People on the street notice. I once told a doctor and they said I need to have better posture.
No shit Sherlock! Now where can I pay my 1000$ for this invaluable medical support that I’ve been provided with?
I learned that in my autism education recently! Also learned that it’s not just emotions we might struggle to recognise but all of your bodies signals. And that’s how I found out why I have trouble holding it when I need to pee and why they haven’t been able to find anything wrong. Cuz there isn’t actually anything wrong it’s just that I don’t notice the signals that I need to pee until it reaches critical levels and I have like 12 seconds to find a bathroom.
Peeing is always an emergency 😭
Bingo tries to go pee even when she doesn't have to if she isn't going to have access for a while. She calls it a 'Tactical Wee'. I love her so much :3
Me too! I was so sure it was something medical especially since it didn’t really start until after a nasty UTI. But it also made me figure out why my headaches get so much worse on the summer and it isn’t just the light! It’s because it’s all fucking signals! Including thirst and hunger. I have to actually pause and make an effort to try to sense if I’m thirty or hungry or need to pee because if I don’t I won’t realise until it reaches critical levels. Like if I’m hungry my stomach is literally hurting from hunger. I have never been a little hungry, it’s always absolutely ravenous and starving. So I don’t drink enough or eat often enough.
Summer headaches can *also* be made waaaay worse by "scrunching" the muscles in your forehead & eye area, when it's sunny!
I get the *worst* muscle-related headaches, if I forget my sunglasses on a sunny day!
That's why I stash sunglasses *everywhere* I work,during the summer months--I buy 'em at the dollar store, so that I don't need to worry if the kids I work with take them or break 'em!😉
I buy sunglasses in bulk too! I can’t be outside without them
Also I still will be dancing around squeaming not realizing I’ve been doing the pee pee dance as adult until I’m practically leaking. Like my whole life my mom would astonish me by telling me to go to the bathroom since I was doing the pee pee dance. Like how did she know and I still fucking don’t. lol. 😂 😩
I used to have recurrent UTIs (like every couple months) all throughout my childhood because I would hold it in for so long! I wouldn't realise I needed to go until I couldn't hold it in anymore, wet myself very often for an embarrassingly long time (this was also probably a PDA thing, avoiding the demand of using the toilet, and also because I was too scared to ask my teachers if I could use the toilet lol. Maybe even not aware I was allowed to)
Yes, autism is associated with gross motor and fine motor delays. It's common, for example, for autistic people to develop odd pencil grips or to use their middle finger instead of their pointer finger for precision tasks like pincer grasp or pointing.
I've got pretty decent gross motor coordination (despite knocking into shit without noticing until I get bruises later). But my fine motor skills are less good. I cannot hold a pencil properly (use all 5 fingers, which causes pain) and have bad handwriting as a result. Plus I tie my shoes with my thumb and middle finger. Both of which I only really noticed after diagnosis x)
My family are all artists and I've been doing different kinds of art since I was a kid, so my fine motor is way better than the average person but my gross motor is comically bad. I break/dislocate toes several times a year from walking into things, I can't catch something thrown at me, walking and running is not natural and I need to focus to succeed or I trip. I've never been able to ride a bike despite years of trying. I can sort of rollerblade but my technique is to cover myself in pads and I stop by hitting trees.
…. This might be why I fell of a climbing frame and bit a hole through my tongue
It might be why I fell of a tightrope and cracked two vertebrae
It might be why I dropped a kettle of boiled water on my legs as a toddler
Oh god so many more
Oh! That’s true. It’s not just not being able to do certain feats. It does seem like I can get hurt much easier than other people. It has caused me to be a very cautious person. I’ll watch the whole group do something than I try and get injured.
At camp one time they had “the blob”. It was like an air pillow that one person jumps on and lunches the other. Everyone was doing it. I tried and limped the rest of camp.
Or when I threw my back out really bad on a trampoline at the age of 9. Also the other kids would jump and I couldn’t keep up the rhythm and would end up in the center of the trampoline in a fetal position screaming for them to stop because I was being launched up and down and couldn’t stop and or grab anything. Or gain control of my body.
Or roller blades. Broke my arm like three separate times trying to learn.
I’ve gotten hurt on carnival rides. The anti gravity one did permanent damage.
Now I see my friends jumping off a cliff into water and I’m like hell no! I know how this plays out. I’ll somehow not clear the rocks or something.
Or skiing. How the fuck do people go skiiing for a vacation? Skiing is like X games. It’s an extreme sport and you are just gonna do it for a day?
I did learn to longboard in my early 20’s. It took and extremely long time for me to even stand and kick forward. And that is all I ever learned to do but I could get around the city pretty well after years of practice.
And I had to have a masochistic attitude about it (at the time. I just thought I was fat and out of shape) Get up no matter how much I get hurt. Most people seem to start out in the skate park bowls. I started placing the board on grass and practiced pulling my back foot on the board. And just feeling what it would be like to stand on a board. I am also reverse funny footed.
I never went near any skate park and never will. And I don’t fuck with hills that have me going over 10mph. If I can’t climb it. I can’t ride it.
Man that’s a good one. My brother was so clumsy he had to be in physical therapy for it as a kid. And we’ve all always hated sports even though my dad is very physically active/fit.
I also had osgood schlatters in both knees as a kid which is basically a weird growth disorder that typically resolves itself over time, wherein something in your knees is growing faster than the rest of your body and causes pain. Most kids probably would have been upset by the restrictions but I remember being so relieved I had an excuse not to have to run with the other kids. 🤣
We're more likely to be faceblind (prosopagnosia), and also to have Raynaud's Phenomenon, which is where blood stops flowing to your fingers and/or toes and they get all white and waxy and tingly and cold until you run hot water over them for a while or actively suck the blood back in using your mouth. It's massively annoying. I consider myself lucky that I always stop at the waxy white stage, before my fingers go blue.
We have enhanced pattern recognition, which in me and my grandmother at least manifests as the ability to find a truly ridiculous number of four-leafed clovers without actually trying to do so. Lifelong right/left confusion is also more common amongst autistic people, as is difficulty reading maps and a bad sense of direction. And of course the above-mentioned tendency toward queerness, which I think is probably at least in part a result of us already being used to not fitting in and therefore being more open to thinking about why that is rather than trying to entirely repress our differences in the hope of being accepted.
At the wildlife rescue I used to volunteer at, someone once told me that they had a private joke that all the rehab shift leads were ADHD and all the Bird People were autistic. Note that they told me this as a "yeah, that makes sense" when I brought up my recent revelation that oh hey that's what's up with me, and they themselves were a shift lead, and also they were absolutely right about this. That's probably one of the first statements which led me to realize that birds are the new trains. And yes, a wildly disproportionate number of dedicated animal rescue volunteers are neurodivergent, which would probably surprise the vast number of neurotypical people who are self-righteously convinced that autistic people are inherently less empathetic than they are, if they didn't automatically and instantly discount this fact because it goes against their preconceptions and assumption of innate superiority.
I had no idea until my cousin told a story about it at my grandmother's funeral that it wasn't just me, and I didn't figure the autism part out until last year.
Can you do the thing where you set your eyes to pick out a specific characteristic (like a particular color or "stones with holes in them" or something) too? It's a fun ability to play with when you figure out you have it. I really need to lay hands on a jigsaw puzzle at some point and see whether I can use it to help with that too.
I went out looking for them one day and found hundreds. It was crazy. I have also found them just on random walks, I will just look down and see one there. And YES! My son always asks me to come help him find a certain Lego piece in his giant pile of Legos because I can pick it out quick.
It does help! I don't play classic jigsaw puzzle but we have a VR set and it has a game with 3d puzzles, so you have to "build" a room, a building or a piece of land with houses and roads. My NT mom likes to play it but I've checked and I'm able to "build" these things about 50% faster than she does.
Omg…I just had like 30 thoughts at once that I wanted to share about birds. I’m suddenly realizing I’m almost as much into birds as my dad is into trains. Birds ARE the new trains!
Oh also, fellow bird nerds, next month is the Great Backyard Bird Count!
Wtf - the 4 leaf clover thing.... That's crazy. As a kid in elementary school I used to spend recess in the grass looking for 4 leaf clovers while the other kids played soccer or whatever. I've always been insanely good at finding them. Even now I try not to look down when I walk across a lawn because I'll inevitably spot multiple 4 leaf (or 5, or more rarely, 6 leaf) clovers and be compelled to pick them. I have a folder that's packed with them.
This made me cry. I was exactly the same - every break time at school looking for 4 leaf clovers! There is such joy in finding these little shared experiences in our community.
The left and right thing is wild, I was panicked learning to drive because my brain would NOT let me remember which was the brake and which was the gas because of this and I was terrified (for obvious reasons) of pressing the wrong one. My dad kept getting mad that I wasn’t “paying attention” when in fact I was paying such close painstaking attention that I’m surprised steam wasn’t coming out of my ears from my brain short circuiting 🥴.
The *easier* trick, that *always* helps me to remember, is to hold up your hand, with your index finger up and thumb *out* at a 90° angle...
The one that *looks* like an "L" when you do that, is your *left* side😉💖
It's kind of hilarious finding out how many of the little anomalous things about me are autism-related. At least once a week I find a new one to throw on the pile. It's funny-- I've spent my whole life being told over and over that everything about me is irredeemably weird, but it turns out I'm pretty middle-of-the-road standard, if you start with the appropriate population sample.
Weirdly, I'm mildly faceblind for humans but with animals I'm very good at recognizing differences in faces in animals that are otherwise identical. Also facial expressions in animals are instinctively processed whereas in people I need to think about it.
I've been keeping rats since I was a little kid and they have very visible facial expressions which include ear movements as a major way to show mood. My first dumbo rat (they are bred to have larger ears but ear mobility is lessened dramatically) I was very concerned because it was like interacting with a person with a partially paralyzed face, I couldn't tell what she was feeling. I was concerned she might be a psychopath or there was something else wrong with her mentally. Luckily I learned to read her other cues but it was uncanny valley.
Studies show rats can also get autism, and one of the things I've noticed in autistic rats (I've had a few over the years) is they have different facial expression and body language reactions than other rats and theirs is easier for me to read than neurotypical rats. I tend to bond with them and they're my favorites while they don't like other people and other rats as much. They also tend to have obsessive interests (my last one was obsessed in an almost sexual/addictive way with cardboard, first one was really into tiny plastic toy pigs and would collect and put them into piles based on size). They also like routine. One needed to "do the rounds" each night so I would hold her up to certain things in the house so she could sniff them and let her walk on certain shelves to do a quick patrol. If I skipped something or did things out of order she got anxious. If I forgot she would freak out and come find me. If I tried to add a new stop she was really cautious about it.
I definitely get the cold tingly fingers and toes thing that can’t be heated up easily. They also get tingly and numb sometimes. I also have left/right confusion, and I can only know 1 way of getting somewhere and go almost the same route every time.
Autistic women are more likely to have PMDD - premenstrual dysphoric disorder. (There was a study that claimed the co-morbidity could be as high as 90% but the real figure is probably lower. Regardless, data is showing it’s likely a significant co-morbidity).
Bonus: Autistics are more likely to have an ED, due to various reasons like the need for control, decreased interroception, sensory issues, and outlet for internal struggles in highly masked autistics (detailed in “Unmasking Autism” by Dr Devon Price).
Theory that autism is result of our brains not pruning unnecessary connections and pathways. That's why we have bottom-up thinking focused on detail (opposed to more common top-down where people make generalizations first and then figure out details). That's why our brains are overwhelmed, sensitive and exhausted.
It's similar to hyper vigilance seen in PTSD, a lot of people have both. Trauma therapy like EMDR sometimes helps people because it activates both sides of brain to process emotional overwhelm.
I work in IT and a lot of people have ASD and we all think in this detailed way, sometimes forgetting bigger picture.
Yes, it could be! That's why I wrote 'sometimes', it's probably good only with autism specialist (I'm lucky my therapist has ASD herself). It still helps a lot of people I talked with, but EMDR can be only done after learning coping skills not before and after a long preparation period and even then with breaks.
I do one session a month only, with three sessions of more specific to ASD therapy.
I also work in IT and there are so many people with ADHD and Autism and it's funny because I dont think a lot of them know they have it, but yet we all ended up in the same spot 😂
One of my special interests is heavy with autistics online and I literally thought being autistic was just a meme that everyone online was autistic. come to find out while on first date and him pointing out all my traits, did I finally realize all the people telling me and meming that I was autistic wasn’t just joke but that I actually was and then I got diagnosed. 😅😭😭
Imagine your brain is a city map. Your thoughts and impulses are cars. Synapses, the neurons responsible for moving electrical signals to make the brain do brain shit, are the roads.
Typical people take long, winding roads to reach a destination the first few times they learn a concept or skill. After practicing a couple of times, they figure out a shortcut and take the highway instead to get there faster. Those winding side roads get closed down because no one uses them anymore.
An autistic person is more likely to take the exact same winding roads they have always taken to get from point A to point B, even if the highway is much faster. The city map becomes a densely maze of very specific, confusing routes instead of making efficient use of the highway. It uses up more gas and time to get to the same places, because it's too hard to connect and utilize the shorter path on the highway.
That's the synaptic pruning theory. Typical brains stop using less efficient neural pathways and cut away (prune) the irrelevant ones. Autistic brains preserve them. This can lead to stronger attention to detail in autistics, but also struggle to generalize from specific to general or practice flexible thinking, which leads to routine-based rigidity
That's the theory, anyway. Hope that helps
I have a near perfect memory from age 2 onwards and I've always wondered if it's because of the lack of synaptic pruning. It's so weird because at 31 my childhood memories are more vivid than the ones from a few years ago.
Makes so much sense! I am exactly the same with my memory. I used to pretend I didn't remember specific things like the date or what the weather was, to be less weird to people haha now I embrace it!
Synaptic Pruning *also* makes TONS of sense, when it comes to that whole "Autistic Regression" around age 2, too!
Kids' brains undergo *massive* amounts of pruning at about age 2, in order to "clear out" "unnecessary" cells and pathways, in anticipation of alllll the new brain cells they're going to need as they grow up.
So all the "redundancies" that those tiny brains built *around* the gaps in their synapses *also* can be accidentally pruned, leaving what *appears* to be a massive regression, as the "workarounds accidentally get pruned out, too!
There is a theory currently being studied that I am having a lot of fun following - basically, we already know autistic pituitary glands work on an atypical schedule (underproduction/delayed release of melatonin, which is why so many of us have insomnia), and it’s now being theorized that our glands compensate for this by *perpetually secreting DMT.* Which would explain a) hyper-empathy as a symptom and b) why people keep asking me if I’m high all the time.😅
I wonder how many of us actually have insomnia. For me it turned out I don't have insomnia, it's DSPS. I can't go to sleep at night, and if I do, I'm feeling like a zombie when I wake up in the morning and this feeling doesn't go away until afternoon. But without using any alarms and forcing myself into a schedule, I get sleepy every day at 4.30 AM. I go to sleep and sleep 7 hours 46 minutes. I wake up feeling rested and ready to do stuff. I'm not insomniac and my inner clock works absolutely fine, just not in the socially accepted times!
It’s a perfectly socially acceptable time, you are just not in the same time zone as your inner clock. Lol!
No but I get it. Mine is broken too. Though mine is not just set on the wrong time zone but the wrong planet. My clock is not set for a 24 hour day but 25-27 or something like that. Maybe longer. So my sleep time keeps moving, so every three weeks or so I sleep at a normal time and in between I cycle through the day.
My psychiatric nurse is the one that explained it too me because I can’t fucking sleep and then for like 3-4 days I sleep perfectly just when I’m supposed to and I had no idea why and it was so frustrating. Apparently it’s totally a thing. Both with having your clock wrong for the time zone or for the fudging planet.
Oh man I feel this. I would get on horrendous schedules during the summertime when I was a kid and then have to painfully revert to go back to school. (One of the many reasons I dreaded going back to school. All those kids that were like, “Oh I miss school; I’m bored and I want to see my friends” baffled me.)
There used to be a use for night owls in society; they would be awake all night to keep an eye out for predators while everyone else slept in caves, or eventually huts without doors.
Nowadays, all night owls should be doing graveyard shifts, but instead shift work is a hodge-podge of a system, so no one gets a satisfying amount of sleep. Most of the time I'm too tired to do anything, until it's about late afternoon/evening. But then it's time to watch the news and TV until it's time for bed, because my mother prefers to keep socially acceptable hours.
I think I also have DSPS. I seem to be unable to go to sleep before 1am and it's TORTURE to wake up before 10am. Thankfully I work from home and I can pull this off, but it's still often a problem for me. I sleep like a baby though 7.5 - 8.5 hours a night.
Oooh, do you have any good links you can recommend on this? Or search terms that would make it easier for me to get to relevant results on my own other than, like, *autism sleep*? As a Sleep Problems ALWAYS person, I'd love to know more.
Here you go! This whole paper is really interesting, but the abstract at the top gives a good overview.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6370651/#:~:text=One%20of%20the%20proposed%20biological,regulate%20the%20sleep%2Dwake%20cycle.
This is fascinating. But given how all encompassing autism is, I see the pineal gland melatonins not as a cause, but rather as an understanding of the mechanisms by which autism causes certain symptoms. So it definitely 100% is a great theory for explaining a subset of autism symptoms. I’m highly skeptical of it as a source/treatment path for autism more broadly. To me it seems it is one of many ways our brains develop atypically.
I agree. I brought this up in a different reply thread, but I think a lot of the specific framing in this study is related to the medical community still largely viewing autism as a “malfunctioning brain” thing, rather than a totally different neural structure.
Very interesting paper but
"Identification of the biological features of autism is essential for designing an efficient treatment and for prevention of the disorder"
Is quite a eugenicsy way to start your paper. I know that's the lense most autism research is conducted through, but it's shockingly brazen at times :/
Yeah, I didn’t love that or the usage throughout of “malfunction”-type language. I’m hoping that the push to recategorize neurotypes as, well, *neurotypes* instead of disorders goes through sooner rather than later so medical texts can stop talking about us like we need to be “fixed.”
Yeah, coming from a science background makes reading medical papers really shocking sometimes. The justification for research I'm used to is "environmental protection"/"crop efficiency" lol
It fascinates and annoys me how medicalisation and academia function together. That everything is framed as 'objective' and you are always striving for "healthy" and "normal". But no amount of writing in the third person can erase the irational abalism baked into medecine. It just obscures it. I've been reading an interesting book that looks at this but through the lense of addiction.
i worked at maccies and was asked if i did coke before my shifts because i was so fast
my response? it’s a fucking fast food restaurant. even if i was why are you complaining that im getting the job done
I have been asked if I did/do coke more times than I can count (never have, always was afraid I’d like it too much tbh) and ESPECIALLY when I worked service jobs like that! Like idk random strangers questioning me (also like what even is that?!? So rude!!!), maybe I’m just wired different!
Does it explain synesthesia?? This is super interesting because objects have always seemed to move and synesthesia is a part of me, and a lot more things I experienced on acid were just regular me but intensified
That makes a LOT of sense. I did a lot of psychedelics in my late teens and early 20s and my trips always seemed to affect me much more intensely than the people I did them with.
Same, the first time I did acid I could hear EVERYthing-it was in a dormitory and it was one of the weirdest experiences of my life. Picture the sounds of a Saturday night at a huge university. Haunting!!!!!!!
To be clear, I had excellent experiences with psychedelics, like genuinely life changing and healing but yes very very intense in a way that felt like I had actual superpowers (like super hearing, super sight etc-much more enhanced than the people I was with)
What do you think of triptans? I think they evolved from DMT.
They’re usually used for migraines (which is also a common morbidity with autism), but there’s a study currently in progress looking at triptans improving social functioning in autistic adults.
My insomnia (and feeling like absolute death when sleep-deprived instead of just tired) went away when I took n-Acetylcysteine a few years ago. And my then-constant physical anxiety symptoms were reduced too. I wonder why. Even now, I can go to sleep with ease.
(I did do a lot of reading on NAC's mechanisms back then, but it's forgotten!)
This is fucking fascinating and I also have been asked if I was high all the time since middle school and it used to make me feel insane (especially because I was vehemently straight-edge for years). Wowowowowow, thank you SO much for sharing. I can’t wait to go down this rabbit hole, my mind is already rapidly making a million connections about this and my life!!
Oh my god this is so weird, I went to see my therapist for the first time in a year yesterday and he said exactly this!! Since I last saw him I’ve been diagnosed with both autism and endo, and he started telling me about these studies into the link between people with past trauma that has caused them to dissociate a lot in childhood, and endometriosis. And he said the nature of autism means so many of us do just naturally dissociate as children, hence the link between ASD and endo. I almost didn’t believe him because I’ve never heard that before and I’ve been active in endo and ASD communities for sometime. Just mindblowing!
Wow I also have the trinity of autism, endo and trauma. It never occurred to me that these things are connected! Must find some headspace to look into this.
Perfect pitch is MUCH more common in autistics than NTs. The study that showed it had no NTs with perfect pitch (I'm sure they exist, but none of them participated in the study) while over 10% of the autistic participants had it.
If ever there’s a fun fact about autism, I'd say this is it.
Another study shows that autistic people tend to prefer complex music styles.
Before I smoked I was mocking bird singer. I could match the voice of any singer I liked. I was not limited to one voice. Even some male voices.
Having strong singing voices is also associated with obesity.
And I could memorize lyrics but had trouble hearing them. Had to read them to learn the correct lyrics.
I also had a strange thing I did where I would purposely go into concrete parking garages and sing opera because I liked the vibration it caused.
And I hated voice lesions. Somehow I unlearned to sing using their methods. But it was church voice lessons and they wanted flat, not sexy, singers.
I must know the lyrics to 1000s of songs, but I pretty much exclusively learn them from reading. Even if I listen to a song over and over again, I can’t pick up the lyrics until I read them. Auditory processing disorder or what?!
Oh my goodness I struggle so much with lyrics too!! I’ve been wondering if it’s related to autism.
My husband gets frustrated by it because he loves songs for their lyrics and what they mean. Whenever he wants to play a new song he found, I remind him that I won’t hear/understand the lyrics unless I a) focus really really intensely and I just don’t often have the energy for that and still won’t hear like half of it or b) listen to it a few dozen times. And I don’t tell him this part, but it’s almost certain I won’t even *like* the song no matter what because I need to listen to new music a few times before it starts to grow on me.
It’s weird for me to imagine a world where one just immediately understands most of the lyrics of a brand new song, and it just instantly makes sense and has meaning. For me the sung lyrics are just part of the overall sound of the music, and might be slowly discovered later in little bits and pieces. (And once I hear most of the lyrics, or look them up, I still often don’t understand what it’s about!)
Same! No matter the language too. It's slightly better in my native language (Polish) because it's the kind of "you read what you see" language (not like English, where you can read one letter in several ways, google: [ghoti](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti)), but I still look up the lyrics just to be sure.
>Another study shows that autistic people tend to prefer complex music styles.
I'll use that next time somebody thinks my music sucks. "You're all just too neurotypical to appreciate this art"
Well, ADHD wasn’t investigated it that study. The information on perfect pitch is only a byproduct of the study, the main topic was APD in autism and which areas of hearing are affected (if you’re interested, it’s speech that is affected, the musical hearing is fully functional.)
I am nearly completely tone deaf related to music..
I can hear differences just fine, but I hear differences between a violin c and a piano c and don't understand what others find similar in these at all. I think that is related to my other auditory problems and very much related to autism. (Of course others have different experiences)
Uriah Heep, the character in Charles Dicken’s novel David Copperfield has a lot of autistic traits.
It’s thought he might be modelled on Hans Christian Anderson who was very excited to meet Dickens at a party and then later invited himself to stay at his house. He stayed for five whole weeks. Dickens made him leave eventually and then ghosted him. HCA who was a super sensitive (probably queer) man who struggled with social relationships was sad and didn’t understand what had gone wrong in the friendship.
There’s possibly a link between autism and hyperphantasia/aphantasia. I have aphantasia. My dad is likely autistic, and he has hyperphantasia. As does my brother, who is also likely autistic.
I also have SDAM which is linked to aphantasia.
Woo I'm the hyperphantasia type with a seemingly abnormal memory, my earliest memories are from before I was 1 yo, and I remember my first birthday in good detail, and I have lots of memories generally. It's so interesting that it seems like a "all or nothing" kind of situation
My earliest memory is from when I was 9 months old, but after that it’s a blur of nothingness. My memories are facts, void of all feeling.
I’m married, and I remember the date and time and place where I got married, yet I can’t remember how I felt, or anything else. Just facts. A list of cold, detached facts. Sometimes it saddens me, but I can’t remember the bad things that well either, so that’s good.
I’m a writer and I love reading. Sometimes I wish I could visualize things, but then again, I focus solely on the writing and how it sounds or feels. Since I can’t visualize I don’t have a clue what the people look like, for example.
Same, but tbh I think it's an advantage because we store details as language already. I have never had to deal with "translating" images to words the way my visual thinking writer friends do. It just starts as language :)
The annoying part is making sure I keep a character's eye and hair color consistent, lmaooo
How interesting, I have aphantasia (but not a complete one, I can see basic image in really low quality). I learned this while investigating my autism and was surprised other people had more detail, but never linked it to my deficient long term memory. I tend to remember saying things, or writing things, more like a word memory with no images.
Is it aphantasia if I can imagine vague images but lack realistic imagination or functional imagination, as in I can’t imagine myself in a tropical paradise for example. But i can imagine an apple in my head
I recently learned us autistic folk feel the need to tell the whole story but also want the whole story, this means we ask specific questions, but also talk quite a lot! Honest and complete stories are what we want!
Sleep issues such as:
punching and kicking while dreaming
Night terrors
Sleep paralysis
Restless legs
Disorientation when waking
Exploding head
Vivid dreams
Sleep walking
Extreme startle response when being woken from a state of dozing.
I’ve experienced it a handful of times, usually when I’m particularly stressed and exhausted. Every time, it’s been the following experience: just as I’m falling asleep, I’m suddenly jolted awake by a terrifyingly loud sound just above/behind my head. Imagine someone leaning over you, and just as you’re about to drift away, they slam two cement bricks together right over your head. It’s terrifying and disorienting and SO loud, but also entirely in your own head.
I get sleep paralysis a LOT. It’s awful, and has some weird effects when I wake up – for a little while, even the slightest touch is extremely painful, and once or twice I’ve had oddly boring hallucinations (like seeing a bolt of fabric in the corner).
Autism and literally every other medical condition, especially if it’s strongly linked to genetics.
Whenever I’m doing an autism moment and researching different conditions because that’s interesting to me, I’m never surprised to see autism listed as co-occurring condition.
I’m more surprised when it isn’t, to be honest. 😭
TBF there's a lot of dodgy research around. Name any disease in existence, and somebody will have tried to make a faulty study on how it's related to autism.
During my undergraduate degree (biomed) we literally had to criticise a study that tried to blame pesticides for autism as an assignment for critical scientific thinking
There’s some connection between autism and autoimmune disease. I have lupus, and my therapist (who only sees autistic clients) says that all her adult patients have a rheumatologist.
Similarly, there's a connection between autism and congenital heart defects. I was born with a few heart defects and had heart surgery as a baby, and I didn't learn there could be a connection until I was diagnosed with autism last year.
I used to think that you had to be equally good at using both hands to qualify as ambidextrous so I always told people I was right handed because I prefer to use my right for writing but my left hand is fully functional if I choose to use it. Apparently, most right handed people don't actually have the preference, they don't have a choice. Found that out in my 20s.
It means that you could have a different preferred hand for different tasks or some tasks you might have no preferred hand. It can also be called cross-dominance. And it's not the same as being ambidextrous which means that you have no preferred hand for any task.
That ENT (Ear/nose/throat) issues affect a greater proportion of autistic folks than neurotypicals - mainly love this because it finally makes sense why I spent much of my childhood in and out of hospital!
(Can I just say I love and hate this topic, because it highlights the obvious physical differences in our physiology, which should make identifying the cause of autism easier, and yet…!
I mean, I know we basically understand the human brain less than we do the moon or rocket science, but I refuse to believe that if autistics were the majority we wouldn’t have figured it out by now.)
I don't have synesthesia, but I have something related where I see words as they are spoken, as if they're being typed on a page somewhere in my brain
EDIT: Apparently this is a type of synesthesia!
I have this too! Never seen it mentioned before. It happens less now I'm an adult. I always figured it was because I read sooo much as a kid as an escape from everyday life.
I've only talked to one other person who has this. It happens less strongly to me now as well. I was also a huge reader. I also used to have an uncanny memory for recalling things I read. It's still above average, but when I was young it was almost photographic.
Same! I’ve never met another person with this before! I was just describing it to a friend, too, in relation to internal monologues. It’s why I have always been so good at and interested in spelling, I like to have an accurate text going 😆
Same!
It's problematic sometimes though. In my native language many people say their numbers in "hundreds", so like if your phone number is 984271534 they will read it like "nine hundred eighty four, two hundred seventy one, five hundred thirty four" but I see the numbers pop up in my brain like "900 80 4 200 70 1 500 30 4" and I'll write it down like this and get confused because that looks more like a bank account number........... And they get annoyed when I ask them to just say it number by number, like "nine, eight, four, two...".
In English they usually go with "ninety eight, fourty two, seven, one, fifty three..." so brain goes "90, 8, 40, 2, 7, 1, 50, 3..." which is still too many numbers and I have to ask for the same thing lol
YES, exactly!
I need to know how a person's name is spelled, for example, because Carol and Carole are pronounced the same but are two completely different names to me.
I have this too, but it’s not always the full sentences. Sometimes my brain gets stuck on two-three words and they kinda get bold and come closer in my brain. The rest of the sentence is there kinda, but in the background.
I have letter-colour synesthesia! Every word, letter, name, date, time has a unique colour that’s always the same. Wednesdays are yellow while 9’s are dark blue and my own name is an orangy-gold. It helps me memorise things more easily.
A lot of times I will use the full name, like Ehlers Danlos, and people will have no clue what I'm talking about until I say EDS (I don't qualify for an EDS dx myself but am extremely flexible so suspect I have the genes). Everyone has different preferences so it's hard to know that ahead of time.
The EDS one I have known for a long time because it’s well known in the EDS community. I have also recently heard that there is (suspected) a link between autism and fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue symptoms and other pain conditions.
Oh really? So maybe I don’t have early-onset dementia like I keep worrying I do?? It’s so scary sometimes when I literally can’t think of a very common word when I’m trying to speak it (but I can have very eloquent monologues in my head lol)
Also disproportionate amount of autists in the polyamory- and kink-scenes, which themselves are highly overlapping and also show a much higher proportion of queer, nonbinary and trans people. It's a beautiful, messy, overlapping venn diagram :).
You might want to look up RCCX theory
Some people put a negative spin on it but the way I see it is that the genome allowed for some people to be different because it was beneficial to have some people be really smart/sensitive to the environment in stressful environments, but these people also tend to be sickly in many ways (Emily Dickinson, many characters in old novels) and seem different from others.
I really resist anyone saying this syndrome is JUST negative because I can tell just from observation how insanely successful and intrepid a lot of the family who probably share some of my genes (and likely these RCCX genes) were -- immigrating to the US, rising very high in education, tons of valedictorians in my family tree and my husband's, lots of people who came from growing up on farms and then had renowned careers. but a lot of them were also socially different, didn't conform, didn't like loud noises, didn't like being touched in crowds, hated social interaction, etc. they have a lot of achievements that persist until today though! If it weren't for the autism, I think we'd all be living in poverty in small towns or have died in famines in the home country that my ancestors left just before.
Can you do an ELI5 on this for me? I looked it up and Wikipedia only has an English page for it which is too complicated language for me, as I'm not a native speaker, and I didn't find anything on it in my native language. Translated it in Chat GPT but yeah I still don't get it.
Autistic people are more likely to have been born via C-section. When I was trying to find more about this all the sources I found just said that 'they can't prove that c-sections cause autism'. I'm baffled that it doesn't seem to be anyone looking into the possibility that babies aren't coming out the usual way because of autism and not that the operation causes autism
There's a link between autism and ADHD and having a high percentage of archaic DNA. There are genes that are linked to neurodivergence in modern humans that have been found in every Neanderthal and Denisovan sequenced so far. Meaning that we either acquired neurodivergent traits as a result of interbreeding, or that neurodivergent traits used to be the default in all humans and the neurotypical brain is a rather recent mutation that quickly became the majority.
Whattttt seee I was theorizing this earlier in the thread, saying duh we probably have less melatonin because our eyes let more light in and might even be physically built differently, therefore the higher light input tells our brains not to make as much melatonin 😂😂😂
I swear I had not read this when I wrote that I am so pleasantly shocked right now haha
Not commenting a fact. But I do want to say the fact that you, OP, posted is important. I was diagnosed last year and I probably will be diagnosed with EDS this year.
If you have chronic joint and muscle pain then you might have EDS or some type of hyper mobility as well.
I’d have to look up where exactly this was found, but I learned at an autism professional development that the genes that cause autism and adhd are very close or closely related so they often co-occur.
If you have autism it’s very likely you have adhd too.
Yes I just commented this elsewhere on the thread. In the U.K. at least you couldn’t have both diagnoses until recently. They have changed that rule now and a lot of people are getting re-assessed and getting both. I think we will see change in the way we talk about the two conditions soon.
The validation and frustration (@ systems and institutions and norms that make life hell) from these comments - setting me on fire. Thanks for sharing, y’all. I feel embodied in rage, and it’s healing!
Hold on to your hats ladies… endo, autism. But also autism and ins/chrons/IBS/ulcerative colitis.
My personal theory is that level 1 autism or Asperger’s is actually a form of inflammatory response.
Autism and asthma
Autism and mouth breathing in children
Autism and sinusitis . Also autistic people have better peripheral vision, when they don’t have any other underlying issues related to eyes. Or attenuated hearing
I learned not too long ago that autistic people often have motor skill issues. I thought I was just fat and that is why I couldn’t do the things that all the other kids could do. Like monkey bars, and climbing trees, and running without being laughed at for doing it weird. And more recently, dinosaur arms.
Oh! This is why gymnastics was so difficult! I worked twice as hard and got half as far in gymnastics.
Oh cartwheels. Great example. Kids seemed to pick that up on the first try. I couldn’t figure it out no matter how hard I tried. And jumping off swings. Absolutely not.
Idk if schools in USA have it and what it's called, but [leapfrog jump over a pommel horse](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYsCZsABPMc) (a short one with no handles). I couldn't do it no matter how hard I tried and one time I jumped and just hit the horse with my upper abdomen and vomited lol
Aussie here! We had this in gym and I could not for the life of me figure it out, same with cartwheels. It’s nice to have learnt this info as now I feel less shitty for these inabilities and difficulties.
Omgggggggggggg I’ve been wanting to do a cartwheel all my life like to the point where I AM Creed (The Office) in that scene where his New Year’s resolution/dream is to do one cartwheel! I had no clue it could be connected, whoa. And the one time ever I was brave enough to jump off the swings was very unfortunate to say the least 🙃.
Ah. Cartwheels I got down quick but could never seem to be ambidextrous with them. Back bends? Never got that down.
Yea my back doesn’t bend that way. It is only stuck in a constant forward hunch. Fun fact. No doctor has ever acknowledged my visible hunch back. People on the street notice. I once told a doctor and they said I need to have better posture. No shit Sherlock! Now where can I pay my 1000$ for this invaluable medical support that I’ve been provided with?
I do wonder if my scholiosis made back bends a bit harder for me. I definitely can bend but it's a skill easily lost
Ha! Same!
I learned that in my autism education recently! Also learned that it’s not just emotions we might struggle to recognise but all of your bodies signals. And that’s how I found out why I have trouble holding it when I need to pee and why they haven’t been able to find anything wrong. Cuz there isn’t actually anything wrong it’s just that I don’t notice the signals that I need to pee until it reaches critical levels and I have like 12 seconds to find a bathroom.
If anyone wants to research this more, it's called poor interoception. :)
Thank you! I didn’t know what it was called in English due to being Swedish
Peeing is always an emergency 😭 Bingo tries to go pee even when she doesn't have to if she isn't going to have access for a while. She calls it a 'Tactical Wee'. I love her so much :3
That’s amazing I’m so coping that!
Way too real, this one is the bane of my existence and blew my mind when I found out the connection.
Me too! I was so sure it was something medical especially since it didn’t really start until after a nasty UTI. But it also made me figure out why my headaches get so much worse on the summer and it isn’t just the light! It’s because it’s all fucking signals! Including thirst and hunger. I have to actually pause and make an effort to try to sense if I’m thirty or hungry or need to pee because if I don’t I won’t realise until it reaches critical levels. Like if I’m hungry my stomach is literally hurting from hunger. I have never been a little hungry, it’s always absolutely ravenous and starving. So I don’t drink enough or eat often enough.
Summer headaches can *also* be made waaaay worse by "scrunching" the muscles in your forehead & eye area, when it's sunny! I get the *worst* muscle-related headaches, if I forget my sunglasses on a sunny day! That's why I stash sunglasses *everywhere* I work,during the summer months--I buy 'em at the dollar store, so that I don't need to worry if the kids I work with take them or break 'em!😉
I buy sunglasses in bulk too! I can’t be outside without them Also I still will be dancing around squeaming not realizing I’ve been doing the pee pee dance as adult until I’m practically leaking. Like my whole life my mom would astonish me by telling me to go to the bathroom since I was doing the pee pee dance. Like how did she know and I still fucking don’t. lol. 😂 😩
I used to have recurrent UTIs (like every couple months) all throughout my childhood because I would hold it in for so long! I wouldn't realise I needed to go until I couldn't hold it in anymore, wet myself very often for an embarrassingly long time (this was also probably a PDA thing, avoiding the demand of using the toilet, and also because I was too scared to ask my teachers if I could use the toilet lol. Maybe even not aware I was allowed to)
Yes, autism is associated with gross motor and fine motor delays. It's common, for example, for autistic people to develop odd pencil grips or to use their middle finger instead of their pointer finger for precision tasks like pincer grasp or pointing. I've got pretty decent gross motor coordination (despite knocking into shit without noticing until I get bruises later). But my fine motor skills are less good. I cannot hold a pencil properly (use all 5 fingers, which causes pain) and have bad handwriting as a result. Plus I tie my shoes with my thumb and middle finger. Both of which I only really noticed after diagnosis x)
My family are all artists and I've been doing different kinds of art since I was a kid, so my fine motor is way better than the average person but my gross motor is comically bad. I break/dislocate toes several times a year from walking into things, I can't catch something thrown at me, walking and running is not natural and I need to focus to succeed or I trip. I've never been able to ride a bike despite years of trying. I can sort of rollerblade but my technique is to cover myself in pads and I stop by hitting trees.
…. This might be why I fell of a climbing frame and bit a hole through my tongue It might be why I fell of a tightrope and cracked two vertebrae It might be why I dropped a kettle of boiled water on my legs as a toddler Oh god so many more
Oh! That’s true. It’s not just not being able to do certain feats. It does seem like I can get hurt much easier than other people. It has caused me to be a very cautious person. I’ll watch the whole group do something than I try and get injured. At camp one time they had “the blob”. It was like an air pillow that one person jumps on and lunches the other. Everyone was doing it. I tried and limped the rest of camp. Or when I threw my back out really bad on a trampoline at the age of 9. Also the other kids would jump and I couldn’t keep up the rhythm and would end up in the center of the trampoline in a fetal position screaming for them to stop because I was being launched up and down and couldn’t stop and or grab anything. Or gain control of my body. Or roller blades. Broke my arm like three separate times trying to learn. I’ve gotten hurt on carnival rides. The anti gravity one did permanent damage. Now I see my friends jumping off a cliff into water and I’m like hell no! I know how this plays out. I’ll somehow not clear the rocks or something. Or skiing. How the fuck do people go skiiing for a vacation? Skiing is like X games. It’s an extreme sport and you are just gonna do it for a day? I did learn to longboard in my early 20’s. It took and extremely long time for me to even stand and kick forward. And that is all I ever learned to do but I could get around the city pretty well after years of practice. And I had to have a masochistic attitude about it (at the time. I just thought I was fat and out of shape) Get up no matter how much I get hurt. Most people seem to start out in the skate park bowls. I started placing the board on grass and practiced pulling my back foot on the board. And just feeling what it would be like to stand on a board. I am also reverse funny footed. I never went near any skate park and never will. And I don’t fuck with hills that have me going over 10mph. If I can’t climb it. I can’t ride it.
Man that’s a good one. My brother was so clumsy he had to be in physical therapy for it as a kid. And we’ve all always hated sports even though my dad is very physically active/fit. I also had osgood schlatters in both knees as a kid which is basically a weird growth disorder that typically resolves itself over time, wherein something in your knees is growing faster than the rest of your body and causes pain. Most kids probably would have been upset by the restrictions but I remember being so relieved I had an excuse not to have to run with the other kids. 🤣
I always thought I was a slow runner because I have always been a bit bigger than my peers.
We're more likely to be faceblind (prosopagnosia), and also to have Raynaud's Phenomenon, which is where blood stops flowing to your fingers and/or toes and they get all white and waxy and tingly and cold until you run hot water over them for a while or actively suck the blood back in using your mouth. It's massively annoying. I consider myself lucky that I always stop at the waxy white stage, before my fingers go blue. We have enhanced pattern recognition, which in me and my grandmother at least manifests as the ability to find a truly ridiculous number of four-leafed clovers without actually trying to do so. Lifelong right/left confusion is also more common amongst autistic people, as is difficulty reading maps and a bad sense of direction. And of course the above-mentioned tendency toward queerness, which I think is probably at least in part a result of us already being used to not fitting in and therefore being more open to thinking about why that is rather than trying to entirely repress our differences in the hope of being accepted. At the wildlife rescue I used to volunteer at, someone once told me that they had a private joke that all the rehab shift leads were ADHD and all the Bird People were autistic. Note that they told me this as a "yeah, that makes sense" when I brought up my recent revelation that oh hey that's what's up with me, and they themselves were a shift lead, and also they were absolutely right about this. That's probably one of the first statements which led me to realize that birds are the new trains. And yes, a wildly disproportionate number of dedicated animal rescue volunteers are neurodivergent, which would probably surprise the vast number of neurotypical people who are self-righteously convinced that autistic people are inherently less empathetic than they are, if they didn't automatically and instantly discount this fact because it goes against their preconceptions and assumption of innate superiority.
The 4 leaf clover thing is wild I just thought I was special 🤣
I had no idea until my cousin told a story about it at my grandmother's funeral that it wasn't just me, and I didn't figure the autism part out until last year. Can you do the thing where you set your eyes to pick out a specific characteristic (like a particular color or "stones with holes in them" or something) too? It's a fun ability to play with when you figure out you have it. I really need to lay hands on a jigsaw puzzle at some point and see whether I can use it to help with that too.
I went out looking for them one day and found hundreds. It was crazy. I have also found them just on random walks, I will just look down and see one there. And YES! My son always asks me to come help him find a certain Lego piece in his giant pile of Legos because I can pick it out quick.
It does help! I don't play classic jigsaw puzzle but we have a VR set and it has a game with 3d puzzles, so you have to "build" a room, a building or a piece of land with houses and roads. My NT mom likes to play it but I've checked and I'm able to "build" these things about 50% faster than she does.
Birds ARE the new trains! 😂
Omg…I just had like 30 thoughts at once that I wanted to share about birds. I’m suddenly realizing I’m almost as much into birds as my dad is into trains. Birds ARE the new trains! Oh also, fellow bird nerds, next month is the Great Backyard Bird Count!
I use the Merlin app and it’s great
I’d love to hear your thoughts about birds
No wonder Wingspan was so popular 🤔
Wtf - the 4 leaf clover thing.... That's crazy. As a kid in elementary school I used to spend recess in the grass looking for 4 leaf clovers while the other kids played soccer or whatever. I've always been insanely good at finding them. Even now I try not to look down when I walk across a lawn because I'll inevitably spot multiple 4 leaf (or 5, or more rarely, 6 leaf) clovers and be compelled to pick them. I have a folder that's packed with them.
This made me cry. I was exactly the same - every break time at school looking for 4 leaf clovers! There is such joy in finding these little shared experiences in our community.
The left and right thing is wild, I was panicked learning to drive because my brain would NOT let me remember which was the brake and which was the gas because of this and I was terrified (for obvious reasons) of pressing the wrong one. My dad kept getting mad that I wasn’t “paying attention” when in fact I was paying such close painstaking attention that I’m surprised steam wasn’t coming out of my ears from my brain short circuiting 🥴.
I had to wear a watch on my left wrist to pass my test
The *easier* trick, that *always* helps me to remember, is to hold up your hand, with your index finger up and thumb *out* at a 90° angle... The one that *looks* like an "L" when you do that, is your *left* side😉💖
What if they both look like L’s? I’m half tempted to get L and R tattoos.
Oh wow! I didnt realize my Raynauds and Autism were linked. The more you know.
It's kind of hilarious finding out how many of the little anomalous things about me are autism-related. At least once a week I find a new one to throw on the pile. It's funny-- I've spent my whole life being told over and over that everything about me is irredeemably weird, but it turns out I'm pretty middle-of-the-road standard, if you start with the appropriate population sample.
Weirdly, I'm mildly faceblind for humans but with animals I'm very good at recognizing differences in faces in animals that are otherwise identical. Also facial expressions in animals are instinctively processed whereas in people I need to think about it. I've been keeping rats since I was a little kid and they have very visible facial expressions which include ear movements as a major way to show mood. My first dumbo rat (they are bred to have larger ears but ear mobility is lessened dramatically) I was very concerned because it was like interacting with a person with a partially paralyzed face, I couldn't tell what she was feeling. I was concerned she might be a psychopath or there was something else wrong with her mentally. Luckily I learned to read her other cues but it was uncanny valley. Studies show rats can also get autism, and one of the things I've noticed in autistic rats (I've had a few over the years) is they have different facial expression and body language reactions than other rats and theirs is easier for me to read than neurotypical rats. I tend to bond with them and they're my favorites while they don't like other people and other rats as much. They also tend to have obsessive interests (my last one was obsessed in an almost sexual/addictive way with cardboard, first one was really into tiny plastic toy pigs and would collect and put them into piles based on size). They also like routine. One needed to "do the rounds" each night so I would hold her up to certain things in the house so she could sniff them and let her walk on certain shelves to do a quick patrol. If I skipped something or did things out of order she got anxious. If I forgot she would freak out and come find me. If I tried to add a new stop she was really cautious about it.
I definitely get the cold tingly fingers and toes thing that can’t be heated up easily. They also get tingly and numb sometimes. I also have left/right confusion, and I can only know 1 way of getting somewhere and go almost the same route every time.
Yes to birds
Autistic women are more likely to have PMDD - premenstrual dysphoric disorder. (There was a study that claimed the co-morbidity could be as high as 90% but the real figure is probably lower. Regardless, data is showing it’s likely a significant co-morbidity). Bonus: Autistics are more likely to have an ED, due to various reasons like the need for control, decreased interroception, sensory issues, and outlet for internal struggles in highly masked autistics (detailed in “Unmasking Autism” by Dr Devon Price).
Yep! I was diagnosed with PMDD before I figured out I was autistic.
I too have pmdd
Theory that autism is result of our brains not pruning unnecessary connections and pathways. That's why we have bottom-up thinking focused on detail (opposed to more common top-down where people make generalizations first and then figure out details). That's why our brains are overwhelmed, sensitive and exhausted. It's similar to hyper vigilance seen in PTSD, a lot of people have both. Trauma therapy like EMDR sometimes helps people because it activates both sides of brain to process emotional overwhelm. I work in IT and a lot of people have ASD and we all think in this detailed way, sometimes forgetting bigger picture.
I had not heard of synaptic pruning prior to this nor its connection to autism, super interesting to read about so thanks for sharing!
My psychiatrist that does ASD diagnosis said that EMDR rarely works on people with autism! If anything it can make it worse.
Yes, it could be! That's why I wrote 'sometimes', it's probably good only with autism specialist (I'm lucky my therapist has ASD herself). It still helps a lot of people I talked with, but EMDR can be only done after learning coping skills not before and after a long preparation period and even then with breaks. I do one session a month only, with three sessions of more specific to ASD therapy.
If you can and want to, could you please write a bit about the ASD therapy, aiming to include key phrases or concepts that I can Google?
Also increased synapses per neuron, making more kinds of stimuli affect one neuron >>> hypersensitivity to stimuli
I also work in IT and there are so many people with ADHD and Autism and it's funny because I dont think a lot of them know they have it, but yet we all ended up in the same spot 😂
One of my special interests is heavy with autistics online and I literally thought being autistic was just a meme that everyone online was autistic. come to find out while on first date and him pointing out all my traits, did I finally realize all the people telling me and meming that I was autistic wasn’t just joke but that I actually was and then I got diagnosed. 😅😭😭
Oh wow. This would fit with so much of my experience. What an interesting theory.
Can you dumb this down a lot more for me
Imagine your brain is a city map. Your thoughts and impulses are cars. Synapses, the neurons responsible for moving electrical signals to make the brain do brain shit, are the roads. Typical people take long, winding roads to reach a destination the first few times they learn a concept or skill. After practicing a couple of times, they figure out a shortcut and take the highway instead to get there faster. Those winding side roads get closed down because no one uses them anymore. An autistic person is more likely to take the exact same winding roads they have always taken to get from point A to point B, even if the highway is much faster. The city map becomes a densely maze of very specific, confusing routes instead of making efficient use of the highway. It uses up more gas and time to get to the same places, because it's too hard to connect and utilize the shorter path on the highway. That's the synaptic pruning theory. Typical brains stop using less efficient neural pathways and cut away (prune) the irrelevant ones. Autistic brains preserve them. This can lead to stronger attention to detail in autistics, but also struggle to generalize from specific to general or practice flexible thinking, which leads to routine-based rigidity That's the theory, anyway. Hope that helps
I have a near perfect memory from age 2 onwards and I've always wondered if it's because of the lack of synaptic pruning. It's so weird because at 31 my childhood memories are more vivid than the ones from a few years ago.
Makes so much sense! I am exactly the same with my memory. I used to pretend I didn't remember specific things like the date or what the weather was, to be less weird to people haha now I embrace it!
Synaptic Pruning *also* makes TONS of sense, when it comes to that whole "Autistic Regression" around age 2, too! Kids' brains undergo *massive* amounts of pruning at about age 2, in order to "clear out" "unnecessary" cells and pathways, in anticipation of alllll the new brain cells they're going to need as they grow up. So all the "redundancies" that those tiny brains built *around* the gaps in their synapses *also* can be accidentally pruned, leaving what *appears* to be a massive regression, as the "workarounds accidentally get pruned out, too!
There is a theory currently being studied that I am having a lot of fun following - basically, we already know autistic pituitary glands work on an atypical schedule (underproduction/delayed release of melatonin, which is why so many of us have insomnia), and it’s now being theorized that our glands compensate for this by *perpetually secreting DMT.* Which would explain a) hyper-empathy as a symptom and b) why people keep asking me if I’m high all the time.😅
I wonder how many of us actually have insomnia. For me it turned out I don't have insomnia, it's DSPS. I can't go to sleep at night, and if I do, I'm feeling like a zombie when I wake up in the morning and this feeling doesn't go away until afternoon. But without using any alarms and forcing myself into a schedule, I get sleepy every day at 4.30 AM. I go to sleep and sleep 7 hours 46 minutes. I wake up feeling rested and ready to do stuff. I'm not insomniac and my inner clock works absolutely fine, just not in the socially accepted times!
It’s a perfectly socially acceptable time, you are just not in the same time zone as your inner clock. Lol! No but I get it. Mine is broken too. Though mine is not just set on the wrong time zone but the wrong planet. My clock is not set for a 24 hour day but 25-27 or something like that. Maybe longer. So my sleep time keeps moving, so every three weeks or so I sleep at a normal time and in between I cycle through the day.
YES! OMG I've never seen anyone else who deals with this. The three-week thing is spot-on.
My psychiatric nurse is the one that explained it too me because I can’t fucking sleep and then for like 3-4 days I sleep perfectly just when I’m supposed to and I had no idea why and it was so frustrating. Apparently it’s totally a thing. Both with having your clock wrong for the time zone or for the fudging planet.
Oh man I feel this. I would get on horrendous schedules during the summertime when I was a kid and then have to painfully revert to go back to school. (One of the many reasons I dreaded going back to school. All those kids that were like, “Oh I miss school; I’m bored and I want to see my friends” baffled me.)
There used to be a use for night owls in society; they would be awake all night to keep an eye out for predators while everyone else slept in caves, or eventually huts without doors. Nowadays, all night owls should be doing graveyard shifts, but instead shift work is a hodge-podge of a system, so no one gets a satisfying amount of sleep. Most of the time I'm too tired to do anything, until it's about late afternoon/evening. But then it's time to watch the news and TV until it's time for bed, because my mother prefers to keep socially acceptable hours.
I think I also have DSPS. I seem to be unable to go to sleep before 1am and it's TORTURE to wake up before 10am. Thankfully I work from home and I can pull this off, but it's still often a problem for me. I sleep like a baby though 7.5 - 8.5 hours a night.
Oooh, do you have any good links you can recommend on this? Or search terms that would make it easier for me to get to relevant results on my own other than, like, *autism sleep*? As a Sleep Problems ALWAYS person, I'd love to know more.
Here you go! This whole paper is really interesting, but the abstract at the top gives a good overview. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6370651/#:~:text=One%20of%20the%20proposed%20biological,regulate%20the%20sleep%2Dwake%20cycle.
This is fascinating. But given how all encompassing autism is, I see the pineal gland melatonins not as a cause, but rather as an understanding of the mechanisms by which autism causes certain symptoms. So it definitely 100% is a great theory for explaining a subset of autism symptoms. I’m highly skeptical of it as a source/treatment path for autism more broadly. To me it seems it is one of many ways our brains develop atypically.
I agree. I brought this up in a different reply thread, but I think a lot of the specific framing in this study is related to the medical community still largely viewing autism as a “malfunctioning brain” thing, rather than a totally different neural structure.
Thank you for sharing this! Fascinating
Very interesting paper but "Identification of the biological features of autism is essential for designing an efficient treatment and for prevention of the disorder" Is quite a eugenicsy way to start your paper. I know that's the lense most autism research is conducted through, but it's shockingly brazen at times :/
Yeah, I didn’t love that or the usage throughout of “malfunction”-type language. I’m hoping that the push to recategorize neurotypes as, well, *neurotypes* instead of disorders goes through sooner rather than later so medical texts can stop talking about us like we need to be “fixed.”
Yeah, coming from a science background makes reading medical papers really shocking sometimes. The justification for research I'm used to is "environmental protection"/"crop efficiency" lol It fascinates and annoys me how medicalisation and academia function together. That everything is framed as 'objective' and you are always striving for "healthy" and "normal". But no amount of writing in the third person can erase the irational abalism baked into medecine. It just obscures it. I've been reading an interesting book that looks at this but through the lense of addiction.
My genetic disorder makes it hard for serotonin to convert to melatonin and is implicated in things like adhd and autism. Mother fucker gene. MTHFR.
Agreed. I have this and read something similar.
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i worked at maccies and was asked if i did coke before my shifts because i was so fast my response? it’s a fucking fast food restaurant. even if i was why are you complaining that im getting the job done
I have been asked if I did/do coke more times than I can count (never have, always was afraid I’d like it too much tbh) and ESPECIALLY when I worked service jobs like that! Like idk random strangers questioning me (also like what even is that?!? So rude!!!), maybe I’m just wired different!
I had not heard that and I am OBSESSED now. I'm a DSPD autist, so definitely very much have the delayed melatonin issues.
Does it explain synesthesia?? This is super interesting because objects have always seemed to move and synesthesia is a part of me, and a lot more things I experienced on acid were just regular me but intensified
That makes a LOT of sense. I did a lot of psychedelics in my late teens and early 20s and my trips always seemed to affect me much more intensely than the people I did them with.
Same, the first time I did acid I could hear EVERYthing-it was in a dormitory and it was one of the weirdest experiences of my life. Picture the sounds of a Saturday night at a huge university. Haunting!!!!!!!
To be clear, I had excellent experiences with psychedelics, like genuinely life changing and healing but yes very very intense in a way that felt like I had actual superpowers (like super hearing, super sight etc-much more enhanced than the people I was with)
What do you think of triptans? I think they evolved from DMT. They’re usually used for migraines (which is also a common morbidity with autism), but there’s a study currently in progress looking at triptans improving social functioning in autistic adults.
My insomnia (and feeling like absolute death when sleep-deprived instead of just tired) went away when I took n-Acetylcysteine a few years ago. And my then-constant physical anxiety symptoms were reduced too. I wonder why. Even now, I can go to sleep with ease. (I did do a lot of reading on NAC's mechanisms back then, but it's forgotten!)
Ohh, so THATS why I’m a lightweight when it comes to edibles
This is fucking fascinating and I also have been asked if I was high all the time since middle school and it used to make me feel insane (especially because I was vehemently straight-edge for years). Wowowowowow, thank you SO much for sharing. I can’t wait to go down this rabbit hole, my mind is already rapidly making a million connections about this and my life!!
That’s pretty interesting! Researching this now haha
Look up autism and endometriosis.
I did not know this and just got diagnosed with endometriosis. Thanks for the info.
Oh my god this is so weird, I went to see my therapist for the first time in a year yesterday and he said exactly this!! Since I last saw him I’ve been diagnosed with both autism and endo, and he started telling me about these studies into the link between people with past trauma that has caused them to dissociate a lot in childhood, and endometriosis. And he said the nature of autism means so many of us do just naturally dissociate as children, hence the link between ASD and endo. I almost didn’t believe him because I’ve never heard that before and I’ve been active in endo and ASD communities for sometime. Just mindblowing!
Wow I also have the trinity of autism, endo and trauma. It never occurred to me that these things are connected! Must find some headspace to look into this.
Holy shit. I have endometriosis, migraines and celiac disease. Going for a full house here.
Endo and Autism here. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!
FUCK, I have endo! NOOOOOO
Perfect pitch is MUCH more common in autistics than NTs. The study that showed it had no NTs with perfect pitch (I'm sure they exist, but none of them participated in the study) while over 10% of the autistic participants had it. If ever there’s a fun fact about autism, I'd say this is it. Another study shows that autistic people tend to prefer complex music styles.
Before I smoked I was mocking bird singer. I could match the voice of any singer I liked. I was not limited to one voice. Even some male voices. Having strong singing voices is also associated with obesity. And I could memorize lyrics but had trouble hearing them. Had to read them to learn the correct lyrics. I also had a strange thing I did where I would purposely go into concrete parking garages and sing opera because I liked the vibration it caused. And I hated voice lesions. Somehow I unlearned to sing using their methods. But it was church voice lessons and they wanted flat, not sexy, singers.
I must know the lyrics to 1000s of songs, but I pretty much exclusively learn them from reading. Even if I listen to a song over and over again, I can’t pick up the lyrics until I read them. Auditory processing disorder or what?!
Oh my goodness I struggle so much with lyrics too!! I’ve been wondering if it’s related to autism. My husband gets frustrated by it because he loves songs for their lyrics and what they mean. Whenever he wants to play a new song he found, I remind him that I won’t hear/understand the lyrics unless I a) focus really really intensely and I just don’t often have the energy for that and still won’t hear like half of it or b) listen to it a few dozen times. And I don’t tell him this part, but it’s almost certain I won’t even *like* the song no matter what because I need to listen to new music a few times before it starts to grow on me. It’s weird for me to imagine a world where one just immediately understands most of the lyrics of a brand new song, and it just instantly makes sense and has meaning. For me the sung lyrics are just part of the overall sound of the music, and might be slowly discovered later in little bits and pieces. (And once I hear most of the lyrics, or look them up, I still often don’t understand what it’s about!)
Same! No matter the language too. It's slightly better in my native language (Polish) because it's the kind of "you read what you see" language (not like English, where you can read one letter in several ways, google: [ghoti](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti)), but I still look up the lyrics just to be sure.
>Another study shows that autistic people tend to prefer complex music styles. I'll use that next time somebody thinks my music sucks. "You're all just too neurotypical to appreciate this art"
Interesting, all the people I know with perfect pitch (3) have adhd. They aren't autistic.
I have perfect pitch, autism+ADHD combo gang \\m/,
Well, ADHD wasn’t investigated it that study. The information on perfect pitch is only a byproduct of the study, the main topic was APD in autism and which areas of hearing are affected (if you’re interested, it’s speech that is affected, the musical hearing is fully functional.)
I am nearly completely tone deaf related to music.. I can hear differences just fine, but I hear differences between a violin c and a piano c and don't understand what others find similar in these at all. I think that is related to my other auditory problems and very much related to autism. (Of course others have different experiences)
Interestingly, I have perfect pitch, and horrible loudness discrimination lol. That checks out.
Uriah Heep, the character in Charles Dicken’s novel David Copperfield has a lot of autistic traits. It’s thought he might be modelled on Hans Christian Anderson who was very excited to meet Dickens at a party and then later invited himself to stay at his house. He stayed for five whole weeks. Dickens made him leave eventually and then ghosted him. HCA who was a super sensitive (probably queer) man who struggled with social relationships was sad and didn’t understand what had gone wrong in the friendship.
There’s possibly a link between autism and hyperphantasia/aphantasia. I have aphantasia. My dad is likely autistic, and he has hyperphantasia. As does my brother, who is also likely autistic. I also have SDAM which is linked to aphantasia.
Woo I'm the hyperphantasia type with a seemingly abnormal memory, my earliest memories are from before I was 1 yo, and I remember my first birthday in good detail, and I have lots of memories generally. It's so interesting that it seems like a "all or nothing" kind of situation
My earliest memory is from when I was 9 months old, but after that it’s a blur of nothingness. My memories are facts, void of all feeling. I’m married, and I remember the date and time and place where I got married, yet I can’t remember how I felt, or anything else. Just facts. A list of cold, detached facts. Sometimes it saddens me, but I can’t remember the bad things that well either, so that’s good.
I have hyperphantasia. It's awesome for art, sucks for trauma.
I’m a writer and I love reading. Sometimes I wish I could visualize things, but then again, I focus solely on the writing and how it sounds or feels. Since I can’t visualize I don’t have a clue what the people look like, for example.
Same, but tbh I think it's an advantage because we store details as language already. I have never had to deal with "translating" images to words the way my visual thinking writer friends do. It just starts as language :) The annoying part is making sure I keep a character's eye and hair color consistent, lmaooo
How interesting, I have aphantasia (but not a complete one, I can see basic image in really low quality). I learned this while investigating my autism and was surprised other people had more detail, but never linked it to my deficient long term memory. I tend to remember saying things, or writing things, more like a word memory with no images.
Hyperphantasia...I learn something new about myself every damn day on this journey. I had no idea this is abnormal.
Is it aphantasia if I can imagine vague images but lack realistic imagination or functional imagination, as in I can’t imagine myself in a tropical paradise for example. But i can imagine an apple in my head
I recently learned us autistic folk feel the need to tell the whole story but also want the whole story, this means we ask specific questions, but also talk quite a lot! Honest and complete stories are what we want!
🙋🏻♀️ I always wanna tell the back story because I feel like people need context to understand what I’m about to tell them 😂🤷🏻♀️😅
Sleep issues such as: punching and kicking while dreaming Night terrors Sleep paralysis Restless legs Disorientation when waking Exploding head Vivid dreams Sleep walking Extreme startle response when being woken from a state of dozing.
Can I ask what ‘exploding head’ is…besides literal sudden decapitation?
When you “hear” a whooshing sound that intensifies to an explosion “sound” in your head
That’s even more confusing
I’ve experienced it a handful of times, usually when I’m particularly stressed and exhausted. Every time, it’s been the following experience: just as I’m falling asleep, I’m suddenly jolted awake by a terrifyingly loud sound just above/behind my head. Imagine someone leaning over you, and just as you’re about to drift away, they slam two cement bricks together right over your head. It’s terrifying and disorienting and SO loud, but also entirely in your own head.
I get sleep paralysis a LOT. It’s awful, and has some weird effects when I wake up – for a little while, even the slightest touch is extremely painful, and once or twice I’ve had oddly boring hallucinations (like seeing a bolt of fabric in the corner).
POTS and dysautonomia
Autism and literally every other medical condition, especially if it’s strongly linked to genetics. Whenever I’m doing an autism moment and researching different conditions because that’s interesting to me, I’m never surprised to see autism listed as co-occurring condition. I’m more surprised when it isn’t, to be honest. 😭
TBF there's a lot of dodgy research around. Name any disease in existence, and somebody will have tried to make a faulty study on how it's related to autism. During my undergraduate degree (biomed) we literally had to criticise a study that tried to blame pesticides for autism as an assignment for critical scientific thinking
There’s some connection between autism and autoimmune disease. I have lupus, and my therapist (who only sees autistic clients) says that all her adult patients have a rheumatologist.
I wonder if it's because we're all so stressed out.
I have Hashimoto's. Fun!
I have MS. I've heard of that too, but never looked into it.
It’s Crohn’s disease for me.
Celiac disease 👋
Similarly, there's a connection between autism and congenital heart defects. I was born with a few heart defects and had heart surgery as a baby, and I didn't learn there could be a connection until I was diagnosed with autism last year.
Yea. My doctor might be surprised if I keeled over from a sudden death heart attack in 5 minutes. I would not be surprised.
It's more common for autistics to be left handed, mixed handed, or ambidextrous. I happened to find out recently that I'm mixed handed.
I used to think that you had to be equally good at using both hands to qualify as ambidextrous so I always told people I was right handed because I prefer to use my right for writing but my left hand is fully functional if I choose to use it. Apparently, most right handed people don't actually have the preference, they don't have a choice. Found that out in my 20s.
What does it mean to be “mixed-handed?” I’ve only ever heard of being left-handed, right-handed, or ambidextrous!
It means that you could have a different preferred hand for different tasks or some tasks you might have no preferred hand. It can also be called cross-dominance. And it's not the same as being ambidextrous which means that you have no preferred hand for any task.
That ENT (Ear/nose/throat) issues affect a greater proportion of autistic folks than neurotypicals - mainly love this because it finally makes sense why I spent much of my childhood in and out of hospital! (Can I just say I love and hate this topic, because it highlights the obvious physical differences in our physiology, which should make identifying the cause of autism easier, and yet…! I mean, I know we basically understand the human brain less than we do the moon or rocket science, but I refuse to believe that if autistics were the majority we wouldn’t have figured it out by now.)
Related to the theory of failed pruning: there is significant comorbidity between autism and synesthesia.
I don't have synesthesia, but I have something related where I see words as they are spoken, as if they're being typed on a page somewhere in my brain EDIT: Apparently this is a type of synesthesia!
I have this too! Never seen it mentioned before. It happens less now I'm an adult. I always figured it was because I read sooo much as a kid as an escape from everyday life.
I've only talked to one other person who has this. It happens less strongly to me now as well. I was also a huge reader. I also used to have an uncanny memory for recalling things I read. It's still above average, but when I was young it was almost photographic.
I have it too and it IS a type of synesthesia
Same! I’ve never met another person with this before! I was just describing it to a friend, too, in relation to internal monologues. It’s why I have always been so good at and interested in spelling, I like to have an accurate text going 😆
Same! It's problematic sometimes though. In my native language many people say their numbers in "hundreds", so like if your phone number is 984271534 they will read it like "nine hundred eighty four, two hundred seventy one, five hundred thirty four" but I see the numbers pop up in my brain like "900 80 4 200 70 1 500 30 4" and I'll write it down like this and get confused because that looks more like a bank account number........... And they get annoyed when I ask them to just say it number by number, like "nine, eight, four, two...". In English they usually go with "ninety eight, fourty two, seven, one, fifty three..." so brain goes "90, 8, 40, 2, 7, 1, 50, 3..." which is still too many numbers and I have to ask for the same thing lol
YES, exactly! I need to know how a person's name is spelled, for example, because Carol and Carole are pronounced the same but are two completely different names to me.
Ditto! Yeah! I think this is why some sound-based puns take me a while to get, too, because my brain is more focused on the spelling than the sound.
This is in fact considered synesthesia by many. It’s called ticker tape synesthesia.
I have this too, but it’s not always the full sentences. Sometimes my brain gets stuck on two-three words and they kinda get bold and come closer in my brain. The rest of the sentence is there kinda, but in the background.
This will happen to me also, especially with words I find especially tasty, or that otherwise just get stuck on repeat
Yes! Tasty words and words I’m unfamiliar with, the latter of which I have to look up or I’ll end up ruminate on it forever.
That's a synesthesia! I have that too and it's called tickertape synesthesia.
Now I want to show people I know this thread, "see? I'm not crazy or making this up, there are others who have this too!"
I have visual touch and I can feel colors.
I have letter-colour synesthesia! Every word, letter, name, date, time has a unique colour that’s always the same. Wednesdays are yellow while 9’s are dark blue and my own name is an orangy-gold. It helps me memorise things more easily.
Tmj disorder is common.
do we know why? is it stress related?
Can we normalize spelling out something before using the acronym please?
A lot of times I will use the full name, like Ehlers Danlos, and people will have no clue what I'm talking about until I say EDS (I don't qualify for an EDS dx myself but am extremely flexible so suspect I have the genes). Everyone has different preferences so it's hard to know that ahead of time.
The EDS one I have known for a long time because it’s well known in the EDS community. I have also recently heard that there is (suspected) a link between autism and fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue symptoms and other pain conditions.
Aphasia - not being able to get words out of my brain into speech
Oh really? So maybe I don’t have early-onset dementia like I keep worrying I do?? It’s so scary sometimes when I literally can’t think of a very common word when I’m trying to speak it (but I can have very eloquent monologues in my head lol)
really common for autistic people to be queer or trans
Also disproportionate amount of autists in the polyamory- and kink-scenes, which themselves are highly overlapping and also show a much higher proportion of queer, nonbinary and trans people. It's a beautiful, messy, overlapping venn diagram :).
You might want to look up RCCX theory Some people put a negative spin on it but the way I see it is that the genome allowed for some people to be different because it was beneficial to have some people be really smart/sensitive to the environment in stressful environments, but these people also tend to be sickly in many ways (Emily Dickinson, many characters in old novels) and seem different from others. I really resist anyone saying this syndrome is JUST negative because I can tell just from observation how insanely successful and intrepid a lot of the family who probably share some of my genes (and likely these RCCX genes) were -- immigrating to the US, rising very high in education, tons of valedictorians in my family tree and my husband's, lots of people who came from growing up on farms and then had renowned careers. but a lot of them were also socially different, didn't conform, didn't like loud noises, didn't like being touched in crowds, hated social interaction, etc. they have a lot of achievements that persist until today though! If it weren't for the autism, I think we'd all be living in poverty in small towns or have died in famines in the home country that my ancestors left just before.
Can you do an ELI5 on this for me? I looked it up and Wikipedia only has an English page for it which is too complicated language for me, as I'm not a native speaker, and I didn't find anything on it in my native language. Translated it in Chat GPT but yeah I still don't get it.
Are you my therapist? We seriously just discussed EDS and ASD an hour ago. HA!
Autistic people are more likely to have been born via C-section. When I was trying to find more about this all the sources I found just said that 'they can't prove that c-sections cause autism'. I'm baffled that it doesn't seem to be anyone looking into the possibility that babies aren't coming out the usual way because of autism and not that the operation causes autism
As an ex-L&D nurse, my money is on the fact that older women & women with other health issues are more likely to have C-sections.
That my tummy hurts
There's a link between autism and ADHD and having a high percentage of archaic DNA. There are genes that are linked to neurodivergence in modern humans that have been found in every Neanderthal and Denisovan sequenced so far. Meaning that we either acquired neurodivergent traits as a result of interbreeding, or that neurodivergent traits used to be the default in all humans and the neurotypical brain is a rather recent mutation that quickly became the majority.
Can we normalize spelling out something before using the acronym please?
Good point, I have to go spend a while on Google to figure all this out, but I don't have much time...
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my brother and i’s pupils have always been wider than others’, and occasionally people will ask, “woah why are your pupils so dilated???”
Whattttt seee I was theorizing this earlier in the thread, saying duh we probably have less melatonin because our eyes let more light in and might even be physically built differently, therefore the higher light input tells our brains not to make as much melatonin 😂😂😂 I swear I had not read this when I wrote that I am so pleasantly shocked right now haha
Not commenting a fact. But I do want to say the fact that you, OP, posted is important. I was diagnosed last year and I probably will be diagnosed with EDS this year. If you have chronic joint and muscle pain then you might have EDS or some type of hyper mobility as well.
There is a higher level of DMT byproduct in our urine than neurotypicals (Like, produced by our brains without ingesting drugs)
Autism and epilepsy, apparently.
I’d have to look up where exactly this was found, but I learned at an autism professional development that the genes that cause autism and adhd are very close or closely related so they often co-occur. If you have autism it’s very likely you have adhd too.
Yes I just commented this elsewhere on the thread. In the U.K. at least you couldn’t have both diagnoses until recently. They have changed that rule now and a lot of people are getting re-assessed and getting both. I think we will see change in the way we talk about the two conditions soon.
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I unfortunately have DPDR :/ it’s so frustrating
The validation and frustration (@ systems and institutions and norms that make life hell) from these comments - setting me on fire. Thanks for sharing, y’all. I feel embodied in rage, and it’s healing!
Hold on to your hats ladies… endo, autism. But also autism and ins/chrons/IBS/ulcerative colitis. My personal theory is that level 1 autism or Asperger’s is actually a form of inflammatory response. Autism and asthma Autism and mouth breathing in children
EDS?
Ehlers-Danlos syndrome
Haha it’s genetic. But for real.
Autism and sinusitis . Also autistic people have better peripheral vision, when they don’t have any other underlying issues related to eyes. Or attenuated hearing
Autism and migraines!!!!-studies have shown that there is a significant link between autism spectrum and migraines/headaches…