How it feels to be diagnosed with autism late in life - The Guardian
I was in my late 30s. I still don't know if the diagnosis helped. Maybe it helps others. More often, it simply frustrates me to be so tense and anxious all the time. I would like the world to be quieter, calmer, more honest, more logical. Is that being "autistic" or simply being an intelligent introvert?
What I want, more than anything else, is a steady and secure job. A career. And it seems that is what the adults in this article also want.
What I want, more than anything else, is a steady and secure job. A career. And it seems that is what the adults in this article also want.
'All my life suddenly made sense': how it feels to be diagnosed with autism late in life | Society | The Guardian: I meet Baron-Cohen in a crowded Starbucks near St Paul’s Cathedral in London, where he wryly comments on the mixture of chatter, clattering cups and muzak – “For a lot of autistic people, this would probably be hell” – and casts his mind back over the 35 years he has been thinking about and researching autism. He started working with six autistic children in a special unit in Barnet, north London, in 1982. Fifteen years later, he set up the Cambridge research centre; two years after that, in 1999, he opened a clinic dedicated to diagnosing autistic adults.
“There was a growing awareness that autism wasn’t just about kids,” he tells me. “I was receiving more and more emails saying, ‘My son’s an adult, but he’s never fitted in. Might he have autism?’ An adult couldn’t go to a child and adolescent clinic, so where were they meant to go? If they went to a learning disability clinic, and they had an IQ above 70, they’d be turned away. So these people were like a lost generation. That was a phrase I used a lot.”
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