Can autism get worse the older you get?

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i hope im explaining this right, but i was just wondering if it can get more difficult, at least for some people, the older you get if you don't have help for it?

if you need me to try to explain more what im meaning, please send me a pm

If one doesn't accept or can't cope with being on the Spectrum - then I can see how it may appear to be getting worse. But the solution to that is to accept. Coping depends on those around you and what support systems are available in the community.

The condition itself doesn't get worse - or better for that matter. It's the coping ability that dictates such feelings.

I'd need to know where you live (not exactly of course!) to have an answer for you.

I think in many cases, with age comes more responsibility and being put into situations that can be exhausting, for instance having children or having to work and deal with the complex social environment that comes with work. If you're dealing with that all day, the exhaustion of it can, I'd assume, mean you have less capacity to concentrate on mitigating your autistic traits.
Heck, all I have is a dog, and the extra stress, lack of sleep and decompression time has, IMO, made my autistic tendancies slightly worse (although not by a lot). I'd hate to see how much worse they'd be if my job involved a lot of socialising, or I had a child.

It has certainly got more difficult for me.

As you get older there are greater expectations from you and how to act around other people. I think the most important thing is to accept what you are and find a way round it and/or tackle it without getting you down.

I wrote this long thing for anyone who experiences something like this.

I don't think a person gets more autistic (autism being a set of brain wiring to begin with, not a bunch of outward signs), but I think that a number of factors can influence the appearance of it, sometimes dramatically.

One common thing is a person simply not learning the same skills that non-autistic people do. So while the person is not becoming less capable with age, the gap between who they are and who they are expected to be gets wider and wider.

Also, under stress, an autistic person can (quickly or slowly, and temporarily or permanently) lose certain abilities, especially things that were really hard and barely happening to begin with.

According to people gauging my outside appearance I think I would have started out (at birth) looking somewhat atypical, then looked (somewhere between age 1 and 2) even more atypical, then looked less atypical for awhile, getting less and less atypical-looking with time, then suddenly (around age 11 or 12) looking a lot more atypical, and slowly (and with a lot of lurches in various directions) looking more and more atypical with age. People would've probably called me mid-functioning or low-functioning as a really little kid, mid- to high-functioning as an older kid, they would've and did call me low-functioning (someone officially did, never said the reason, and I could speak at the time) as a teenager, some might've called me mid-functioning as a teenager, and lots of people call me low-functioning as an adult (a few people call me high-functioning or mid-functioning).

But what's important to remember about what I just said is it has to do with how certain parts of me varied from what's considered the norm in a non-autistic person for my age. I do not believe that functioning levels as currently measured are anything but a measure usually made by typical people of deviation from that norm, rather than a measure of ability. And I don't like to use those terms except in conversations like this one.

I think that being dumped into an apartment is often a way that an autistic adult first realizes their level of incompetence in some basic household-type areas. When that happened to me I couldn't (or in some cases could very very rarely) cook, shop, feed myself, use the toilet in the toilet, drink water, etc. Got very thin and very unhealthy, and when the first person with a services agency came into my house she took one look around and told me she wasn't authorized for cleaning this intense and had to schedule a person with more training to come out and clean the more unsanitary areas. I did discover over the years that the more help I have, the more I'm capable of, and I'm lucky to have gotten into the developmental services system pretty easily, so I have eventually (especially after a bunch of living skills training programs failed on me) ended up with services that do exactly that.

I also co-run a mailing list for autistic people dealing with daily living situations from a whole variety of perspectives (mostly adults, some receiving services and some not). If you want I can PM you the web address to subscribe to it.

nothing in life ever stays the same.... my autism has got much much worse over the last year. it hasnt ben helped by having lots of stress i do get help and services but it is not enough to meet my needs, and trying to ask for more help has caused much of this years stress and has just made things worse. the result is now i'm probably going to have to move out of home into some group home or institution or something i'm not looking forward to that!

My autism got worse after I took steroids to treat allergies and again after taking antibiotics. There's a few infections that may cause autism (not proven yet) and steroids suppress the immune system so that would explain it in my case. Antibiotics can make fungal infections (which may contribute to autism but not proven yet) worse. Sugar makes infections worse by suppressing the immune system. PKU is one cause of autism that gets worse if you eat phenylalanine (everyone is now tested for PKU at birth and told to go on a special diet for life to prevent future problems). So yea autism can get worse in some cases.

Stress makes a lot of conditions worse, and I think some of my symptoms, especially sensitivity to noise, get worse with stress.

Try getting away from the stressful situation, so something fun, talk to a helpline, etc.

(I don't have kids either, but my dogs are a great help, as they are happy and non-judgemental)

Good luck