Example: I hear that I’m ‘High-Functioning’ according to my parents but I’ve been diagnosed as ‘Autistic disorder’ by my doctor and I’ve previously thought that I had ‘Asperger syndrome’ to name a few terms.
Example: I hear that I’m ‘High-Functioning’ according to my parents but I’ve been diagnosed as ‘Autistic disorder’ by my doctor and I’ve previously thought that I had ‘Asperger syndrome’ to name a few terms.
Interesting! I actually did a psychological assessment recently (naively thinking that autism would be included), so I completed the intelligence testing too. I think it was the WAIS2. I didn’t realize it would be included and I was in an extreme state of burnout but I still got a result of “superior” processing speed. It’s one metric that sometimes makes me question whether I could be autistic because so often the narrative is that autistics are slow processors, but your perspective and result indicates that I shouldn’t allow that to cloud my judgment.
The telltale sign of autism is unbalanced growth. A neurotypical child grows at relatively the same rate with regards to their intelligence, their social skills, their hygiene, and everything else. Autistic children will usually show much larger growth in certain areas and weak growth in others. The reason it’s more difficult to diagnose adults is that we’ve had enough time to balance things out by developing coping mechanisms for ourselves.
So while I’ve always been a very fast thinker, it took me muuuuch longer to develop emotional intelligence. Each of us has our own brand of autism, so forget any preconceived ideas about what you think most autistic people have in common. As is often said, if you think you’re probably autistic, then you really are probably autistic.