Autism Spectrum Symptoms and Overview Information

As you read the word "autism", what comes to your mind about the person's functional abilities? Do you picture Bill Gates, who is widely studied and believed to exhibit a number of traits of 'being on the spectrum'? Do you picture Rainman, someone who cannot live independently but was a 'savant' with certain types of information. Perhaps it a picture of someone who isn't even that capable with interaction.  Recent research is showing there are two different types of autism. One is a brain damage where there is a deficit, the other is where the brain is damaged in a way too, but with an overgrowth syndrome of the nerves -- these are the types you will see mentioned with names like Einstein, Tesla, and Grandin. Sounds like a song doesn't it. Maybe someday there will be one about them. Others have thought there are six types. Suffice it to say it's an emerging area, but I see more about the two types that I'd hang my hat on for now. 

Many more people are 'on the spectrum' than most people imagine. While it is a 'label', which has some downsides to it, it's important to generally know that 'they walk among us' and might even be us, and we don't realize we have symptoms. Why is that important? We might have had social difficulties or other functional difficulties. AND we might have symptoms or be asymptomatic but have health issues 'waiting in the wings' that tend to be more common in people 'on the spectrum'. 

I think of the now-famous Temple Grandin when I hear the word 'autism'. Having an HBO movie made about her life, and it winning at the Academy Awards, with her in the audience applauding, was quite a moment for me to witness. She came and spoke to my occupational therapy class in 1996, just before we graduated. Her office was near the OT building on the campus of Colorado State University.

She told us that she had to take medications to be able to be around the noise of people and civilization, and when she was done my classmates clapped and you could see her reacting and just having to deal with that the bunch of blossoming new medical workers didn't hear what she said about noise and applauded in a small loud classroom situation; I guess my years by then of doing yoga and Namaste had me feeling frustrated that we'd not collectiely been a little more 'with it' about what we'd just heard. And the world spun.

Dr. Grandin went on to become as well known in the movie world as the autism world, and before that she was legendaryin the animal sciences world.  I think she has been the single biggest 'step forward' for those in the US (and beyond) to better understand autism. And what a bar she sets for what can be accomplished. 

Stubbornness is perhaps a symptom of autism spectrum. Repetitive behaviors, or getting 'fixatied' on something. It might come across as a 'hobby'; my father knew in adulthood that he had something 'like autism maybe', and he did get a professional opinion on that and never told us for many years.  So things that we 'joked about' when I was younger might help people see that 'they live among us'.  It's really no more than ongoing problem solving. There's a problem. If I don't give up I will overcome it, I'll just try something different next time. 

-- how he had a lot of pictures of trees and mountains and old mines and gravestones but none of his live family members, for instance. 

-- they can be handsome or beatiful and very 'normal looking'. I had an ex fiance (who didn't get past that stage because I was mid 30s and was not able to revert back to how I'd been as a kid to tolerate this kind of behavior in a primary relationship) who was extremely 'good looking', had good manners, paced himself like a clock drinking one beer an hour on Fridays, as that was what the rules were about being safe to drive (in those days that was the way people thought), he had a large circle of friends from work -- which was in the engineering field. He would talk about things making you feel good inside, like donating money to charity, but it was a different type of connection to that than most people would have. His family disclosed to me when I finally met them that he had sat and rocked as a child, looking at the toys he lined up on the floor. I'd noticed that he was not coordinated at the volleyball lessons he was taking, as there was a team at work he wanted to participate with. This is when I started wondering if autism was different than what we'd been lead to believe (this was in the early to mid 1990s), and if sensory integration like what I was to find out I had problems with, was related but was just 'less'. I knew that in my class in elementary school I wasn't as bad as half the kids, literally, in my class relative to my motor control. My mother got into screening and treating the students who had dysfunction of the sensory integration system. 

-- my father (and my ex beau was too) was very aware of the amount of money that should be in his bank accounts and was very tuned into what the stock market was doing, though he didn't ever change anything in his portfolio much. These were things keeping space in his brain. My ex beau subscribed to three car magazines and studied all the new cars coming out. Even if there was something like a visit from me after weeks of not seeing each other, with my dad, if I arrived during that timeframe on Friday evenings after his habit was to watch that on Friday evenings. I just went and did something else until he was done. When I was a teen 'our thing' on Fridays was he'd bring home the same thing for dinner (as it was girls night out for my mother always). That old tradition was totally forgotten and overwritten by the new, and the priority was not on the person coming to see you -- they could wait, the show couldn't.

-- time is differeng and interesting. My beau's thing was to bring home dinner on Thursday and we'd watch Friends and ER and etc.. He would arrive RIGHT on time, always. My dad was the same way, he never left early, he seemed to like to be in a hurry when he drived. It is thought that makes you more attentive. They get adrenal fatigue from that and liking to skip meals which gives your brain a sign you're at risk for dying and boosts your adrenalin. For family functions my family was always late if it didn't really matter what time we had to be somewhere. Appointments, we were never late. It was called Mountain ___ Family time, as we were from the mountains. 

-- NOTHING was ever forgotten. He could memorize the shopping list and bring home every item, every week, for decades. He would never forget to put the lunch money on the table when we were kids -- always arranged in the exact same way. He was OCD about how you were to do things -- there was only one right way and it was the logical way that his brain saw things. (35 years after the only time I covered for my sibling's bad behavior so they wouldn't get punished, as it was rather an accident what came about from the actions, I forgot that I'd done that and said the truth in the middle of a thought I was sharing with him, and he stopped me instantly and said 'but you told me (otherwise) back then'.  I see a diluted version of that in me: "How can you not remember you need to put fuel in your car but you can remember what I said about something 3 years ago?" I catch people in lies, I find discrepancies in stories or cases, or even in movies and shows -- 'that didn't add up'. Some things we've been told about medical things did NOT add up to me, and I wasn't aware of the system's degradation to where much in science today is lies. So I had to figure THAT all out or else my mind didn't rest. Monkeymind... very much a trait. 

-- he would learn about, say, thyroid disorder and then never do anything about his condition that he spent hours learning AND hours conversing with others about. Over and over. 

-- conversations were not give and take. He was not interested in what others had to say, but about what he had in his mind to tell others.

-- he did not have the normal feelings of parenting and what the child needed. If he wasn't interested in what you were doing with the school activity, he would not attend the event, unless he understood that it was important. Some things he had learned were important, he had a point of reference. He was 'raised right', so he knew how to give a generous gift for various occasions. But he wouldn't know what to buy, he'd rely on others for help.

-- he had 'no fashion sense' for is clothes nor if he bought a car or a chair or anything. It was all about practicality and efficiency.  

-- despite the continuity of the family livingin the same area since before I was born and until I was 50, he never learned who my friends were. I could talk about someone who had been a very good friend and he'd met them and heard of them for years and years and it would not register. Or when I went to a reunion and said that the 'girl' who I'd known since age 4 had taken the phone call when he donated an old vehicle to charity, and wasn't THAT a neat coincidence --- excited to tell him about the reunion the next morning -- his response was 'I remember her dad and brother years ago and we had a real problem playing volleyball.... ' and then he related something he did that was punitive to them in a social setting and the way they reacted and so he quit going to the community volleyball night. And he had no friends, aside from who he made through my mother.

-- another example was when I got my first OT job, I drove to his house to tell him about it and he'd just had new furnaces put in and they were too big. Just after I told him my good news, the furnace kicked on and he pointed at the register blowing near him and went into an elaborate explanation about the BTUs and the size of the fan and how much air it was moving and the problems and solutions that he'd so far researched. I'd taken a friend with me who had never met him before, who thankfully enjoyed 'quirky, unique' people and didn't ditch me because my father was 'a freak'.  

-- he approached the other girl in my class with long blond hair when he came to pick me up after an event one day in junior high, and said 'well, are you ready to go home?' and she had to say 'I'm not your daughter, who are you looking for?'.

-- he was brilliant with many things and then would struggle with others 

-- he was highly regarded at his work and everyone who knew him socially or professionally seemed to sincerely enjoy his outgoingness, his sense of humor and his intellect.

-- he was 'snobbish' about people's education, their intelligence, the music they listened to.

-- he was a hard worker, and he lived by logic and not the heart. And he expected others to measure up. He had done very well in the US military with this personality and skill set.  

-- he did not have the normal sense of 'loyalty' to 'blood', his loyalties were all about what was the most logical. I sensed it, and as a child knew that if I didn't measure up, I was maybe going to be re-homed or something. That's not what would have happened, but that was my feeling as a child. It created in me a high standard and trying to please an impossible to please person took a toll on my stress level, which drained my wellness (think 'adrenal fatigue'). It also was difficult for my mother and other family members who found their own ways, healthy or maladaptive and problematic in some way, to survive. 

-- he had frequent things he'd do or say that would 'backfire' and then when most people might not obsess about a 'faux pas', he would be very hard on himself about it and actually ruminate about it. I'd often hear him talking to himself and going over things that had happened in real life, sometimes long ago, whispering it as he would work in the kitchen making his lunch or packing a sandwich for taking on a hike. 

-- he'd never say something was his fault, or he was sorry. My mother taught me to never expect it from him. She also said to avoid asking him anything at the time of the full moon, the answer would be 'no'. I hope people see that I've shared here in a way that people can see that the system around the person with autism spectrum behaviors is often making things seem less unusual, and so it's possible you have someone like this in your life and you've not reallized it. Perhaps this information will help.  I would imagine that I would narrowly miss a label as an adult and likely would have been found to be autistic as a child based on my home movies and photos showing my eye contact and behavior overall.

-- More about family: As an adult I have sensory integration processing problems that were significant and 'labelable', as well as a give-away in my Myer's-Briggs personality profile -- I'm an INTJ, same as it is believed Tesla and Einstein were. And what would my dad have been? An INTJ. Apple, tree, but a hybrid, thankfully with someone he chose very different than himself to marry and have children with. It is said that today some of the increasing autism rate is that women with the brainy autism stuff can study engineering and the sciences so they meet at work. In the old days they didn't have women like that at work, so they'd meet and marry the secretaries or whatever. My mother was working in a bookstore and he came in to buy a gift to have sent to his girlfriend at his last duty station in the Air Force. He'd risen to being in the atomic program after World War 2. 

-- they can practice and desire to excel at sports and music that takes coordination but they are more technicians, lacking the nuances that make successful musicians. But they attend concerts, they might just be standing off to the side or in the back a bit so nobody bumps them unexpectedly. And they may be wearing something unusual. I've known men with autism who are very upset by the hair on their arms being moved by a shirt sleeve or air moving over them, so they'll wear long sleeves in summer. And they don't form the normal attachments and can break off relationships easiliy, it matters not as much or differently than with a 'normal'. Some day 'normal' will be to have autism, then what will we do with that 'normal' word? 

-- everyone around them is so used to it, they might not identify it for what it 'is'. And because they are so needing of help from those around to 'normalize' things for them, they show codependency behaviors. Since they are 'needy' that can get them labeled, or they do things that can be like 'borderline' behaviors.  Doing homework about the way these terms have come to be created and then used with people, I think it's rally an important thing to study the history and validity of the way mainstream, organized, mental health has come up with things and question their labels and the weight those labels carry.  However, the terms are shortcuts for describing things and researching. So it's a double-edged sword. 

 

Let me find a resource to pull in here to discuss some of the symptoms seen in high functioning adults with autism or autistic-like symptoms. 

Here's a resource I really liked on this subject: eHow. Here's the link: 

www.ehow.com/list_6375462_signs-high-functioning-autism-adults.html [1]

I thought it important to give other examples who are more 'normal looking' that everyone will know of, such as Bill Gates. Many others are thought to be as well, just Google "genius autism".  But here's what Dr Grandin had to say about it in 2001, at a reputable university's website. It's a long article but I believe it is worth the read for anyone who is looking for good articles and information on this subject: 

www.iidc.indiana.edu/index.php [2]

Now that we've 'set the bar' to break the preconceived notions YOUsers reading this at Lumigrate might have, let's look for the more general information about autism. I liked this resource for explaining symptoms of autism spectrum disorder --- Here's the link to AutismSpeaks:

www.autismspeaks.org/what-autism/symptoms [3]

There you will find these four categories with information to elaborate:

• Social Challenges
• Communication Difficulties
• Repetitive Behaviors
• Physical and Medical Issues that May Accompany Autism

I think of it like this:

Most perfect neurological system there could be ........ (everyone in between) ............ most profound symptoms 

(people with Sensory Processing Disorder / Sensory Integration Problems have many overlapping symptoms)

We're each somewhere along this continuum. And the symptoms of wellness/illness are not "fixed", or static, it's dynamic and shifts around. By following functional medicine principles and finding the causes that lead to the disruption and correcting what can be corrected, improvements are seen. Conversely, changes can contribute to more symptoms.  

Along the spectrum is a condition that has been termed Asperger's, and two young men with Asperger's teamed up to create a business about educating people -- since they're "been there".  Here's the link to AutismExperts dot com's main page: www.aspergerexperts.com/ [4]  (NOTE: At the time of my editing this in, September 20, 2014, they have almost 100,000 Liked/followers on Facebook, and their posts and little videos are very popular. The comment thread lets you know how 'right on' their information is. Really a great resource and fabulous to see them succeeded in their enterprise. 

There are other topics at Lumigrate about diet and other treatments to address general wellness and prevention as well as remediation of autism (the topic highlights Marty Ross, MD relative to the diet overview, and it's a great diet for anyone but most specifically those working on symptoms of autism)(and there's much from other researchers looking into Lyme / borrelia which interrelates, as well as Dr Klinghardt, well known for treating chronic illness in adulthood and autism in children (similar causes, similar treatments). Search with the search bar or find the forums that informaton would be found within.

It's rather a 'rabbit hole' of information and NOT as simplistic as how allopathic medicine would look at it -- they've taught us and address it in a very simplistic way, and for generations now, and it's allowed millions upon millions to be infected and not realize it's part of the symptoms they or others have. If you're not into being a 'detective', or you're not viewing your health and wellness as a top priority which warrants TIME and ENERGY (and sometimes money) be put toward learning -- you might end up doing yourself a disservice. This is a good time to remind of Lumigrate's YOU model: 

Same thing with autism; there are surprising numbers of people who have symptoms of autism, and are unaware it's indicative of autism. And one doesn't have to be as extreme as Sheldon the Big Bang Theory, either. The schools can only address so many students' difficuties and so only the more profoundly affected or with the more proactive parents tend to be identified in school. Also, remember  "shades of grey", not just black (no you don't have it) and white (yes you do have it).  

And it's beneficial to figure out because diet and nutrition becomes very important and learning from resources about understanding behavioral differences or difficulties. Mind, body, spirit -- whole / holistic and functional medicine (underlying reasons and treat there treating symptoms only as needed and as naturally as possible typically). One doesn't need a formal diagnosis but it will give you things to search on and inquire about as YOU go forward with learning. 

Here's a link to the topic about Dr Marty Ross (MD) .. Lyme (/ autism) expert in Seattle, Washington (USA) who streamlines the diet and provides a really nice, short, easy to understand video that is set up at there: 

www.lumigrate.com/forum/6-practical-diet-recommendations-marty-ross-md-whether-you-have-bug-borne-disease-or-know-it-o [5]

I HOPE this information helps ~ You will find more about autims and related cofactors, such chronic Lyme, in the forum area on environmental wellness/ environmental illness. (Basically, it is estimated that perhaps 80% of people have the bacteria for Lyme disease in their systems. Not quite that high a percentage is said to be in those with autism symptoms. The Lyme / Borrelia is simply a significant 'load' to the system and so treatments done for the person with autism will not be as effective due to this constant burden. Hence treatment should be done for it.  Using the search bar here in Lumigrate is likely the best way to find additional information, but certainly peruse the environmental illness area. 

Live and Learn. Learn and Live Better! ~~ Mardy