2:53am November 2, 2013

➸ Musings of Ade: Did anyone else...

youneedacat:

clatterbane:

adelene-dawner:

yesthattoo:

madeofpatterns:

…not have a regressive phase until puberty?

I’m not sure if what’s going on right now (I’m a senior in COLLEGE, but this started about a year ago) is a regressive phase or what, but if so, it’s the first. So not until well after puberty, for me.

…you…

Similar here. I am not entirely sure how to sort that out from changes in expectations as you get older and just plain burnout, though. I never got back completely to “me-normal” after a couple of rather spectacular burnout episodes (and a bunch of smaller ones), in my teens and 20s. There was plenty of stuff going on there, but yeah.

It’s extremely frequent. The rate of autistic people who have a “regressive” phase in puberty ranges from around 1/6 to 1/3 (depending, it seems, on whether you count it if they get the skills back afterwards). The rate of people who have a “regressive” phase in infancy is lower than that. So that means there’s a lot of people out there who didn’t “regress” until puberty.

Indeed. Adult burnout and post-puberty regression are basically treated as non-existent but I’ve already encountered a significant number of adult autistics who have gone through one or both, assuming they are separate things.

It’s not much funt o burn out and recover and have to relearn things and being told that what is happening could not have possibly happened.

Yeah I’ve been talking to someone lately who wants to know how often those things happen, and seems surprised (possibly also disbelieving?) that I say they happen so often given that doctors don’t talk about them at all whatsoever except in outcome studies she’s never read and therefore don’t exist to her. I don’t know how to explain to her that doctors know almost nothing at all about autism in adults because that’s not their focus and never has been. That I know tons and tons of people who have lost significant skills, including speech, anywhere from age 13 to age 60. Some of them regain it and some never do and some only partially regain it. This is knowledge we have FROM KNOWING EACH OTHER AND OURSELVES and it should be more important than whether anyone else has decided to ~study~ us for a living.

HOLY SHIT SOMETHING JUST EXPLODED OUTSIDE. I hope it’s fireworks. But I can’t concentrate on this right now and my cat just ran under the bed and I’m not thinking clearly.

Notes: