Can You Tell This Child Is Autistic?

(Yes, i know i said in my last post that i was aiming to write something every day in May, and it's now the 8th and i haven't. My internet went down on Sunday night, and i didn't get it back until yesterday. I've also written a couple of things that weren't public blog posts. Anyway, this is the post that i had *intended* to do on Sunday night, before my mysterious (but luckily easily fixable) cable fault...)

My parents recently gave me a memory card for my digital camera (among other things) for my birthday. On the card were various sets of old photos that my dad had either taken with his camera, or scanned in from old pre-digital photos, one of which was a set of photos of me and my brother as children. I'm absolutely terrible at guessing children's ages, but i would guess that in these photos i look about 10 and my brother about 3, which dates them at round about 1992...

The thing that most strikes me about these photos is that, even if it wasn't me (and i'm not sure if i look at all recognisable as the same person as me now at a long-haired and bearded 27), i would be instantly sure from looking at them that the older boy was autistic. I'm not sure exactly what would bring me to this conclusion, but i think it's some combination of posture, facial expressions, and just possibly an actually physical "look" that i've noticed many (although by no means all) autistic people i've met have (something i'll probably get round to writing about in more detail reasonably soon).



(Yes, this is the sort of sitting position that i felt comfortable in as a kid. I also liked, up until i was at least 13 or so, to sit with my legs crossed in a very stereotypically "feminine" way, right thigh over left thigh or vice versa. I only stopped when i was taught in no uncertain terms at secondary school - when i was just starting to try to have friends and be accepted by other children - that it was unacceptable for a boy to do. It utterly puzzled me though, and still does really, what was/is gendered about that (well, i know physical anatomy, but still, sex != gender)...)



I also think this is a very "autistic" hand position... though i'm not quite sure why...



This was another typical pose for me. Although it was before i started having weird things going on with my joints, i wonder if the positioning of my right foot there does have something to do with my right ankle being one of the joints i get the most weird flexion and "clicking" with now.

(If anyone's wondering where the photos were taken... i think it was most likely Sherwood Forest, hence the Robin Hood caps. However, it also could have been the New Forest in Hampshire, as we stayed at my aunt's house there for a couple of weeks every summer for most of my childhood.)

Here's one of me sitting in a tree:



While i'm not sure there's anything particularly "autistic-looking" about me in that photo, it does show something of the expression i very, very often had (and occasionally still have) in photos, which got/gets misinterpreted as "fear"; in a couple of my school class photographs, i have been told that i stand out immediately from the (identically dressed) group of children because, to NT eyes, i look utterly terrified. For a long time i really hated photos of myself because they seemed to show, blatantly and undeniably, the "wrongness" of my facial expressions, which i was constantly trying to convince myself i was going to "overcome", while of course not really knowing what it consisted of either - it's only in the last few years that i've really got over this and started to find photos of me tolerable to look at.

This one was taken in my back garden at my parents' house, and i think makes me look particularly autistic:



The facial expression, the pose and the very stereotypical "acting out" of an "appropriate" emotion towards a fictional enemy (as i recall, the figure on the chalkboard was a henchman of the Sheriff of Nottingham who we had been practising firing our bows and arrows at - probably a few days after going to Sherwood Forest) - and indeed the fantasy play based on a recently visited location - all strike me as *very* typical of the autistic spectrum.

Also note what i was wearing - as a child, i had major sensory issues with clothing, and only found a very small range of clothes comfortable enough to be tolerable wearing. I don't think i ever stripped myself naked in public (i was too sensitive to cold for that), but i remember ripping my school uniform off as soon as i got through the door, finding it *very* difficult to cope with wearing a tie (something i still think is one of the most utterly pointless things ever invented, and its mandatory presence as "professional wear" in the majority of corporate offices is one of those things that just makes me go "WTF is this world?"). Outside school, the only trousers i would wear were these "tracksuit bottoms" - which were made of a very soft material and had elastic or a drawstring instead of a zip fly, meaning they had to be pulled all the way down to use the toilet (another thing that, therefore, had gendered stigma as well as disability stigma in schoolboy culture). Again, once in secondary school, i tried to wear jeans after finding out that wearing tracksuit trousers was "not normal", but found them horribly uncomfortable (although some of my sensory issues lessened a bit around that age).

(I finally threw away my last pair of jeans a couple of years ago, after realising that i had owned them for about 8 years and hadn't worn them in about 5, after discovering a perfect solution in the form of the "combat" style trousers i now wear pretty much exclusively, which are comfortable, practical (i now couldn't live without the side pockets, giving me 4 pockets per pair of trousers, as opposed to the 2 of most jeans and "formal" trousers) and, as far as i can tell, lacking in particular stigma.)

The stigma attached to those trousers is something i should perhaps explain, as it might be a strictly UK thing, i'm not sure. (It also might have been stronger in the 90s than now, again i'm not sure.) If a child over about 8 was seen wearing those sort of trousers, then they either had "something wrong with them", ie they were "retarded" or "mental" or "not all there", or indeed just "weird", which was a bit of a cover-all, or else their parents were too poor to afford to buy them "proper" trousers, which in the intensely disablist and classist (although not at all aware of either of those terms) world of suburban children in the 80s and 90s (and probably now, although i don't have direct observations) amounted to much the same thing - an acceptable target of taunting and bullying. An adult wearing that sort of thing would definitely be seen as having "something wrong with them", to the extent that they were seen almost as a symbolic uniform of learning disability (with attendant stereotypes about institutional living, incapability of achieving "independence", etc) - someone who wore them either did not choose their own clothes, or was so oblivious to norms of clothing choice that they had to be "not all there".

(There is a whole load of other stuff i could spin off that, about clothing, disability, stigma and more, but i don't have time right now and it probably deserves a post of its own...)

Anyway, i've strayed from my main point. As a child, as far as i know, I did not have any diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder (and i was sent to several different child psychologists, and the subject of a huge amount of (mostly negative) "concern" about me, despite my very high academic achievements, for my complete lack of social integration with other children throughout my primary school years) - yet, looking back, it seems almost impossible that anyone, with even the level of familiarity with autism that most people in the general population now have simply through the mainstream media, could have observed me for more than a couple of minutes without identifying me as autistic. I had practically every stereotypical characteristic of autistic children, including many that tend to be regarded as unfair and erroneous stereotypes (which always makes me feel a bit awkward when they are discussed as such, because i want to say "er, as a child i actually was that") - a total lack of interest in or emotion about other "real" human beings (while having incredibly intense attachments to fictional characters), dozens of sensory intolerances, including refusal to eat the vast majority of foods and finiding nearly all human touch intolerable, meltdowns involving uncontrollable crying and attacking other children, selective mutism, obsessive memorising of facts and figures about narrow topics of interest, hand-flapping (i recall my mother telling me at about 8 "don't do that with your hands, it makes you look like a spastic"), pronoun confusion - you name it, i had it, basically... yet, AFAIK, autism was not even mentioned in reference to me throughout my childhood.

Why this was, i have utterly no idea. I have often wondered how much different my life would be if i had been diagnosed as autistic in childhood - on the one hand, i wouldn't have spent so long living in denial, confusion, self-hatred and paranoia, thinking "what the fuck is wrong with me, and why won't anyone explain to me all these things that everyone else seems to understand perfectly naturally, and yet somehow i don't?", i possibly wouldn't have alienated so many people who i tried and failed to be friends with and ended up offending or turning against me for reasons i couldn't comprehend at all, i probably wouldn't have got sucked into some of the profoundly unpleasant ideologies i spent much of my teenage years in, and things within my family very probably wouldn't have been as fucked up as they were (in ways that were not exactly anyone's fault, although i spent a long time blaming my parents and a longer time blaming myself for much of it) - but then, if i had been diagnosed as a child, would the educational ambitions my parents and teachers had for me have been "downsized"? Would i have ended up in some sort of "special" school instead of the selective-by-educational-ability grammar school i did end up in, and would i have had the ambition to go to university? Would i be a part of intellectual community now? More generally, would i have had the sustaining belief that i could, or at least had the right to, be as independent and achieve as much as any neurotypical person, or would i have "accepted" my inability to know what was best for myself? Would i have been better off with a better knowledge of my own limits, or was my lack of understanding of those limits at certain crucial stages of my life necessary? I strongly suspect, therefore, that while some aspects of my life could well have been much better with an early diagnosis, other aspects of my life could well have been much worse, and, of course, it would be impossible to ever fully know.

So, i'm interested in what other people on the spectrum, or people with friends or family members on the spectrum, think of these photographs - when you look at them, do you instantly see an autistic person? If someone whose child you hadn't met showed you those photos, would you guess that the child was autistic? And, more generally, do you think autistic people can reliably identify other autistic people by looking at them? (As an adult, i have been told both that my "Aspie mannerisms" were obvious before i said anything about my diagnosis, and that me saying i had an AS diagnosis was surprising because it "really wasn't obvious". I actually think i have become somewhat more obvious in the last few years, since discovering autistic community, because many of the semi-conscious ways of repressing my natural mannerisms and imitating neurotypical ways of moving, facial expressions, etc have "worn off".) And did anyone else who was diagnosed as an adult have similar experiences of finding it hard to believe they were never diagnosed as a child, because it was really obvious?

I need to write some stuff about diagnosis and labelling more generally, but i think that's an interesting discussion starting point. (Also, credit is, i think, deserved to AnneC of Existence is Wonderful for partially inspiring this with a post based around photos of and by her at a similar age...)

I won't be posting tomorrow or Saturday because i'm off to London for a conference and a friend's birthday. But i will hopefully have time to post daily-ish for the next week or so from Sunday...