Why don't old people recognise autism as well as younger people?

[Polly]

I am doing the EPQ and am focusing on Autism in the media. I want to know why old people don't recognise autism as well as younger people. I cant seem to word it though. Basically why old people don't understand autism. Any help is appreciated.

[jackie m]

I am from the older age group and when I was younger Autism was only shown as mainly people who I suppose were shown to go to a special school because they could not do anything for themself but I now know that Autism covers a large spectrum of problems in life and that is only because my grandson has been diagnosed at the higher end of the autistic spectrum because he has been classed as having Aspergers syndrom which is basically only a social problem and probably thousands of us have the same thing and are not classed as autistic. I presume the younger age group expect people who are Autistic as having mental problems and attend a special school?

[David]

Hiya Polly

The autism you are referring to is quite a rare disease in reality. Only about 1 or 2 people in 1000 have it. However, the word autism was first used about schizophrenia, not the pervasive development disorders that it refers to nowadays. When it did begin being used about pervasive development disorders, e.g., as 'childhood autism' by Leo Kanner, in America, in a paper he wrote in 1943; and 'autistic psychopathy' by Hans Asperger, in Austria, in a paper he wrote in 1944. I was born in 1945, but the world had more important things to do with itself at that time than to hold conferences, to decide names of diseases as governments and the news media were rather more interested in inventing names for weapons of war than names for a human disease only 1 or 2 in 1000 people had. My family bloodline had been scientifically bred by the events of the previous 12000 years of agricultural history since homo sapiens had started farming lands for food instead of just roaming them and scavenging anything they could find to scavenge to eat, and believed it had a traceable lineage back AM 5774 years to the Garden of Eden. The most recent linguistic development of our bloodline was in 1066, the year that William the Conqueror landed here from Normandy to take over landed property he believed was rightfully his in European law, from excommunicated Anglo-Saxons who didn't believe that Jesus Christ was of equivalent deistic importance as Yahweh, his father, whom the Holy Roman Catholic Church, of which he was a Knight of Christ, bringing bred property development savants with him to survey, settle, and defend from all other claimants. We were still called savants by the indigenous species of Anglo Saxons bred by the German Anglo-Saxon invaders colonising the previous bloodstock of Britain, which was itself of bastard origin, being a merger of the blood of the Roman Emperor Hadrian Caesar and the previous descendent Britons of Brutus King of Britannia. The most 'autistic' of these savants were called 'idiot savants', which was the term used for them in a scientific paper by John Langdon Down in 1887, in order to distinguish them from members of the human species with the disease known as Down Syndrome. But nevertheless your preoccupation with labelling us and others like us, led to me being diagnosed by the Head Teacher of the first official school that I attended, which was a County Nursery School, as a 'prodigious savant' rather than an 'idiot savant'. I had received four and a half years very comprehensive pre-schooling by my family in real estate acquisition, defence and development before I arrived at County Nursery School so found the curriculum for the indigenous plebians dead boring and therefore began manifesting autistic meltdowns into near coma to visit my dead relatives in heaven for further tutoring in our family speciality, with the consequence of the school adopting the usual (for that time) response of isolating me from the plebs - locked in a windowless storeroom for sensory deprivation without anything stimulating to do, so I continued manifesting near death comas until my family have me a hard-covered copy of The Children's Encyclopaedia by Arthur Mee to entertain myself while in there. My parents had never seen me manifest near death coma, as my mother's maternal grandfather, who had been my guru for the first three and half years, taught it me while they were at work or at evening classes, so we could visit his dead wife in heaven and meet his archetypal 'Mastermind' of secret invisible tutors guides mentors saints and heroes, for conferences about my upbringing in general and my progress through the real estate administration and governance course that he had committed to teaching me before the time came for me start attending state-government provided education facilities.During the summer vacation that formed my graduation from Nursery to County Infants School, I manifested an autistic melt-down into near-death coma in front of my mother, who was a state registered nurse, and she called a doctor to attend me, and between them they concluded that I had 'idiot savantism' like her maternal grandfather, or 'autistic childhood savantism' as Kanner might say. Of course the main problem with using woolly undefined conditions like that is that they remain indefinite conditions until officially defined by a corporate person or body with the lawful authority to define conditions. So, I was called variously 'savant', 'idiot savant', 'autistic savant' , and 'autistic childhood savant' when I graduated to Infants School. That left the matter of what to label me entirely to the whim of the Head Teacher of the state school facility that I was attending at the time such a matter had to be stated. And the Headmaster of the next school I graduated to, a County Junior School, took it into his head to call what I had, "Witchcraft", and reminded the rest of the school in general assembly the Bible says, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live". So the other pupils and teachers sought to do that by attempting to kill me four times every day for the first week of that term, and I tried to kill myself four times on the evening of the fifth day, and I ended up hiding in a 48 hour coma locked in an industrial freezer at 30 degrees below zero. I was therefore withdrawn from the state government provided education system and spent the next four years being educated at home, and the following four in a private education at a Grammar School. That's why old people don't understand autism. When they kids, we were either isolated from the 998-999 plebs per 1000, or killed off, out of sight and out of mind, like in Hans Asperger's Nazi Germany. Its all in my book, if you need to cross-reference it in your EPQ work, "Dafydd Bach: Death of Innocence: The Compendium" by David Adrian Thomas, Esq. (Amazon Prime Kindle Select eBook Store and Free Lending Library). I give all the royalties I receive for my Dafydd Bach books to Autism UK, which is a registered charity for autism spectrum disorders, to help maintain their HelpLine, so I am not spamming you.