How Would You Define Severe or Mild Aspergers?

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Okay I will take you up on this challenge. Let's say "Affected" for example.

Last week I went into my "Little's" Jr High 2 times and gave about 4 hours of talks to Drs, teachers, administrators and parents. I outlined a revolutionary IEP that challenged everyone in that room to rethink their beliefs and I got them to agree on the conditions of that plan. That plan is working exactly as planned and the district psychologist asked me today to brainstorm how we can spread my ideas to other schools and other venues.

How "Affected" am I?

In order for that meeting to happen, I had to write about 15 emails to the organizer. and other members I needed to have an agenda beforehand or I would freak out so asked for an agenda. I needed to make sure that they had a meeting room that was quiet so that I could focus. I had change the meeting time so that I could enter the school in between the classes so that I could avoid the loud hallways. I had to go back and forth on the agenda several times to clarify things so that I understood and would face no surprises. I had to ask that one person (who I considered "unfriendly) be removed from the invite list because I was unsure how to interact with that person. I had to bring a whiteboard into the room because I cannot talk without pictures. I had to ask the members of the meeting to change their communication style (no context switching, no metaphors, sarcasm) so that they did not lose me. I had to pace the entire time for all meetings in order to not melt/shutdown. I had to ask my kiddo's Mom to watch the body Language of the other members and cue me if I miss something. I rehearsed my presentation over and over again at home and in the car. I had to go to bed early the night before the meetings and was useless the rest of the day because I had to rest/try to relax.

How "Affected" am I?

Last edited by kfisherx on 20 May 2011, 10:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Well, how affected am I if all of that sounds normal?! I'm really glad they accomodated you. I definitely wasn't so lucky in my daughter's IEP's but, then again, they would never have considered allowing me this sort of freedom in the process.

I think I understand your point and I actually agree entirely - on the face of it you got the task done so ipso facto are not very badly AFFECTED - so just what DOES that mean in a "mildy" to "severely" scale? To be honest I don't know... and that's the problem with trying to place complex conditions on a simple scale.

I wasn't claiming that quantifying measures SHOULD be very context based - and wasn't trying to offer any challenge there - in fact I was more mulling over the situation than trying to make a positional statement at all - ie. it seems like the only way anyone can even attempt to quantify AS is to look at it in the various contexts as I described (it's the way I realise I've come to think of my own situation) - which throws up VERY widely ranged results that just don't allow for simply stating where someone is "along the line between mild and severe" - so how SHOULD those results be used?

Does approaching it that way end up really putting the cat amongst the pigeons and shifting people who otherwise considered themselves very severe back much lower in "the range"?? Maybe that whole approach is simply wrong - after all I'm just an aircraft mechanic, not a psychologist and am putting forward something that I feel helps make sense of MY world but it might be complete gibberish in the broader picture?

And of course there is the simple fact that if someone has very short arms but very long legs they could still be quite good at basketball - but reaching the cereal packet in back of the cupboard will still be a royal b***h. I absolutely think having a very high level of intelligence and quick thinking offsets a lot of things that would otherwise be crippling to a person with lesser abilities in those areas (offsets, doesn't cancel).

What happens if a sever aspie female accidently gets pregnate? Myself I would only have children if I could afford them so is that just being logical or me being autistic?

That sounds more like a bit of wishful thinking. Accidental pregnancies happen daily even with all the precautions in place. The only sure way to not get pregnant (or not get someone pregnant) is abstinence. I totally support a persons right to decide their own level of sexuality. Hell, I had a neighbor who got pregnant after a tubal ligation. Life just finds a way - that is its nature.

At first I read your typo as server and thought you were talking about an aspie waitress. Then I realized you meant "severe."


To answer your question, logical.

I am not having anymore kids until I can afford it unless I get too old to have them. Same as until I get a bigger place.

My brother accidentally knocked his girl friend up and now they are expecting. It happened right after I had my baby and I didn't know about it until the end of February. I felt so happy and excited for them and the fact my son will have a cousin his age than a cousin who is eight years older than him. I have two cousins who are two years older than me. But the cousin younger than me is four years younger and the next, six years.

But thanks to that mistake, he is a better person by taking his life more seriously and he is happy about going to be a father. It even made him be assertive than passive so he kicked out his room mates who were trashing the place and he and his girlfriend were getting separated because she was in the process of moving out because she could not take the chaos there and didn't want to live that way. But then the baby brought them back together and now they are putting things back together. He did not want his baby to live in that mess and he didn't want to be having to visit his child so it made him be assertive and do something about his room mates.

Sometimes people do grow up after they have a baby or when they find out they are expecting.

You should write that. There really need to be more parenting books by autistic authors.

What I see on the market now

[Parenting books by non-autistic medical professionals: There are many of these, I have a couple. They have helped but I have long suspected that they are missing the mark in crucial places where the author lacks insider information that autistic adults have.

]Memoirs by family members of autistic people: these have flooded the market and there must be hundreds and it feels like thousands by now. They range from pretty decent, like Best Kind of Different by Schonda Schilling to so horrible I won't read them, but have read a couple terrible pages excerpted in magazines, such as the ones Jenny McCarthy wrote. They can be interesting to an NT parent in a shared experience sort of way, but they rarely contain useful information.

Memoirs by autistic adults: NT parents of autistic kids have read all of these, combing through them searching for clues that would apply to their own kids. It's a needle-in a haystack endeavor since memoirs are so specific to that individual.

Parenting books written by autistic adults I know of two. 2! One is Teaching Life Skills to Kids with Autism and Aspergers by Jennifer Myers. The other is the e-book Congratulations, Your Child Is Strange written by WP's own Tracker and immediately recommended to any parent who sets foot in the parenting forum. That book is fast becoming the parenting bible for any NT parent who comes to WP. But Tracker absolutely won't consider trying to get it formally published since he wants to retain the right to give it away free (a right he would lose if it were formally published, probably). Both of these books are a motherlode of insider knowledge that is missing from parenting books written by NT doctors and therapists.

The market is wide open for another parenting book written by an autistic adult (which would bring the total up to 3, unless some of those therapists and doctors are AS, but I don't think they are). The way your school recommendations are treated as mind-blowing revelations should tip you off that there is a major disconnect between NT parents and their AS kids and that NT medical professionals aren't able to address that disconnect because they share it too. You can. You should,.

Sounds like a reasonable explanation. I guess then I am extreme or severe.

I go to work every day, drive a car and pay my taxes. I am functional.

Yet if I didn't work as hard as I do, I could easily stay in bed all day with depression. I could be unable to get dressed as I need to have the correct socks on before I can put any other clothes on or leave my bedroom. I could sit all day drinking in information on things that interest me. But I don't. I work so hard just to be able to get up and go to work, or go to the shop alone to buy lunch, that I am constantly exhausted. Yet I refuse to give in.

I don't know enough about other people's experiences to generalize what is mild and what is severe, but I feel intuitively that the core of autism is the need to withdraw from the external stimuli of people and the world due to difficulties processing the stimuli. How mentally and physically distressing or exhausting do you find it to spend time both outside your own mind and outside your own place, such as your home or other totally comfortable environment for you? Reading a book at home would be an inside your own mind inside your own place experience, while reading a book at work or school would be an inside your own mind outside your own place experience, and I find the latter far more difficult than the former. My mind just cannot process that much information from the outside world and especially from other people. When I am alone though, I feel great, and my mind works really well.

I am very, very close to making it happen. I just need to get some help from a few NTs for this.

WRT functioning levels, I was again reminded of this one recently. (see full txt /pdf on this page)

ttp://www.socialthinking.com/what-is-so ... on-profile

Severe would mean you can't control it no matter what. Functioning most likely means you can control it, but it is difficult. I am not officially diagnosed, my psychiatrist just mentioned I may have I mild case of AS. So I'm probably don't have as useful an answer.

My AS is definitely not mild... I regularly have problems with things socializing, going out, and dealing with life in general. I'm quite scared of going outside, crowds scare the crap out of me and I'm extremely shy, even around friends and family.

I don't think it's either accurate or fair to consider how someone functions as part of defining mild to severe AS

IMO the obvious and simple answer to the original question is the best one - ie. mild would be someone who doesn't have any manifest serious disfunction and probably won't even recognise they have AS without it being pointed out - to outsiders and indeed even themselves AS traits would very likely be put down to being a bit eccentric / quirky - caused by environmental factors - ie. type of upbringing etc.

Severe would involve clear manifestation of disorder and disfunction - very obvious to casual observers and to the person themselves - ie. there's clearly more at play than how the person was brought up.

I find the whole ASD situation quite confusing and initially at least was interpreting AS as being a HFA disorder that wasn't severe enough to be clearly manifest - to the point of needing examination to clearly identify. What's being called SEVERE AS here I was thinking of as being actually beyond "just" being AS on the spectrum - ie. certainly including all the traits and characterisitcs of AS but being so only as part of a more serious overall condition.

I haven't actually read the papers by Asperger - I guess those make it more clear?

Actually, I think it's the other way around: People with more severe cases are less likely to realize there's something different about them without it being pointed out in some way.

Also, adults tend to grow into being less obvious around people who do not get autism, which also doesn't necessarily reflect severity, and this is not always true.