Hi @jayskette
For many years I have lived with and helped care for a now middle aged adult who has autism. He was diagnosed with autism when he was 5 years old. At that stage he was unable to talk or relate to people. He never attended a normal school, only day centres where people with all sorts of intellectual disabilities were bundled in together without any specialised treatment or services.
Had he received specialised help at that stage, his life outcome could have been substantially improved.
When I first met him he was about 18 years of age. He still had only very rudimentary language skills and no numeracy or literary skills whatsoever. He was totally dependant on others for pretty much everything.
In the ensuing years things have changed for the better due to an incredible amount of hard work on his part and some decent training programs which were often very difficult to access. These programs were inevitably staffed by highly skilled and devoted people who saw their role in helping the intellectually disabled as a calling not just a job.
Today he can travel around by public transport, shop for his own food and cloths, cook a meal and keep his living area clean. It is unlikely that he will ever be able to work. This is not because he is incapable of doing some simple job but because employers are generally too prejudiced to employ someone with this level of disability. Some years back we got involved with a Disability Employment Services provider but after six months of messing around, they gave up on him saying it was impossible.
Like many people living with serious mental illness or intellectual disability he lives in perpetual danger of being rounded up by the police and put into custodial care which is effectively a low security prison. We have been told by both legal and medical experts that once in such a place it can be extremely difficult to get out. This form of detention without trial is supposed to be periodically reviewed. In practice it is just periodically rubber stamped.
We had a harrowing experience of this several years ago when he was arrested and charged with attempting to abduct two young girls by dragging them into his car. The fact that he doesn’t own or drive a car and only travels around by public transport was completely lost on the police. There was also no other credible evidence other than the claims of the two girls. All his legal rights as a person with an intellectual disability were completely violated. We attended many court appearances over a period of nearly twelve months in a desperate attempt to prevent him being “put away”. Eventually all the charges were dropped due to lack of evidence.
Because of his autism he does look and act a little strange but the only abduction that took place was in the minds of the young girls who apparently noticed him at a shopping centre. They alerted their parents who then called the police who apparently embarked on a state wide man hunt complete with an armed dawn raid on our house for someone who the police claimed was a “dangerous sexual predator who needed to be removed from society”. It seems to me that everyone had been watching too many television police dramas.
He now attends a very good day care centre for intellectually disabled people but we have had to jump through hoops to get that funded through NDIS because so many people are now claiming to be on the autism spectrum and try to get funding for all sorts of normal activities.
Autism, like a lot of other mental illness and intellectual disability varies substantially in both nature and intensity. At the top end of this spectrum there appears to be a large number of people with minor communication and relationship difficulties who for whatever reason think it is trendy to have a label of high functioning autism. These people make me quite angry because they consume significant amounts of the very limited resources made available for people with real and genuine needs.
Given the harsh and realistic picture that I have just painted of what it is really like to be autistic, it is difficult to understand why anyone who really understood what autism is about would want to be labelled in this way.
I am not saying that your problems at work are not genuine but as @tyme suggests, the traits that seem to be concerning you are common in varying degrees to all of us. They are part of the normal human condition. Instead of using labels to define and narrow the scope of who we are, it is much more useful in my opinion to try and broaden the scope to take into account our own and other people’s maximum potential.
The work place can be a difficult and sometimes brutal place for anybody. From what you say, it sounds like you have a fairly high level job and the higher up the ladder you climb the more unstable it typically becomes. It is a competitive world and like it or not, your success or otherwise will often depend on your ability to handle difficult and sometimes aggressive people at all levels.
My advice is to forget all about seeking out mental health and disability labels. Instead I would suggest putting your efforts and money into a good vocational psychologist or similar who can help you set the goals that you wish to try and achieve and develop the necessary interpersonal skills that you will need to achieve them.
In my opinion, attempting to go down the intellectual disability path is a losers game.
Regards
Willy
