I was looking at the symptoms for autism and I have all of them. I’ve never been diagnosed as autistic.
Stess, anxiety, repetitive behaviors, having a schedule, employment and academic problems seem extremely common. Inflexible schedule seemed the most dire, but we all have routines we struggles to break from or recover when we don’t follow them.
I don’t really understand the psycho/biological differences and would like a layman’s explanation.
- meant to title this “the latter” not “the former”
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Autistic people experience the world in a way that’s often more intense and different from most — their brains are wired to process things like sound, touch, emotions, and social cues in unique ways. A lot of the traits linked to autism, like needing routine, feeling anxious, or struggling socially, are things everyone deals with sometimes. The difference is in how much those things affect daily life — for autistic folks, it’s not just discomfort, it can be overwhelming or even shut them down. So it’s not that the traits are exclusive to autism, it’s that they show up more often, more strongly, and in ways that really shape how someone lives and interacts with the world.
This is an excellent question that we don’t appear to have the answer to.
The defining quality of autistic people is that they share these traits. We don’t have a clear definitive idea of why, current ideas around autism stem from observations of people who relate to these similar symptoms.
Theories currently point to some difference in the brain itself, this is the neurodivergence- a difference in the neurology of those with autism. It’s difficult as while there are any iverlapping symptoms, there are also many differences between autistic people. They might have similarly grouped symptoms, but they can present very differently.
There are a couple of theories that look at how young brains develop. One involved autistic brains not pruning as many neural connections during development. Apparently children’s brains develop by creating lots and lots of neuron connections as they come into the world and start learning many things very rapidly. Then there is a pruning process that removes large parts of these connections that are redundant or otherwise deemed unnecessary by the brain. There’s a theory that autistic brains prune much less. This could explain why autistic brains focus so much on very specific things, their literal neural pathways are more dense and repeated in certain areas. But I don’t believe this has been proven in any way, just an example of how researchers are trying to think about the differences.
Monotropism is a popular theory of mind and mental processing in the autistic community. It outlines the innate difficulty in changing thought processes and the strong desire to focus on a single thing. It was developed by autistic researchers, and many autistic people resonate strongly with it. It might be worth looking up some videos on the topic.
Feel free to explore autistic communities, they tend to be pretty welcoming to exploration and questions. Many autistic people were missed in childhood, autism just wasn’t as well twenty, even ten years ago. There’s lots of people realizing they share a lot of these symptoms in adulthood and are struggling because of it. It’s nice to realize one isn’t alone, there’s lot of people feeling very similar things.
https://www.somersetft.nhs.uk/somerset-autism-spectrum-service/wp-content/uploads/sites/124/2020/02/dsm-5-asd-criteria.pdf
This is the diagnostic criteria in use for the last decade.
If you genuinely think you tick all those boxes, you should probably get assessed.
You’ll not it’s not a list of things people struggle with, it’s a list of deficits. There’s always a point where everyone will struggle to walk, but if that point is at 10 miles or 1 mile tells you a lot about if they have a disability, same idea here.
So. My son has more than a touch of the tis. His obsessions, inability to focus, lack of proper emotional responses, and overall oblivious demeanor to social norms would shock you.
He is a sweet, intelligent, and perfectly ordinary kid in so many ways, but hang out with him for an hour and you’ll know: dude is neurospicy.
The difference is that he has next to no ability to understand and react to social and emotional norms around him. He does not cue into normal expectations, and needs to be told exactly how to react to all social situations.
One thing to remember is that autism is a spectrum and each individual has very different support needs. We also have very different reactions and behaviours from each other.
My biggest problems are sensory issues, object permanence, and executive function issues. When. A neurotypical individual is in a store, their brain filters out unnecessary stimulus from the senses. When I am in a store, my brain doesn’t filter anything out and I am aware of every sound, smell, lights , textures against my skin, the breeze of people passing me, etc. It’s a huge amount of stimulus to process consciously and as a result I get very overwhelmed and have a meltdown. It is basically my brain going into safe mode to protect itself.
Neurotypical people don’t react in this manner. This is just one criteria. There are many more, like emotional awareness, literal thinking, high sense of justice, pattern recognition , interception problems( not recognizing if you’re hungry or not), and many more issues. It’s the persistent nature of these issues that, and other things, lead to a diagnosis.
Most people occasionally will experience similar symptoms but they won’t be persistent and they generally aren’t in combination with many of the other symptoms.
I think you haven’t listed all the symptoms. Difficulty in establishing and maintaining eye contact is a big one. Another big one is having one or a few “special interests” that they really focus on or even obsess over. Those are the sorts of things you don’t usually find among non-autistic people