Q&A: Informing an Undiagnosed Adult Friend
Q: Would it be a good idea to inform an adult friend that he most probably has Aspergers/HFA? He is very intelligent, has a well-paid responsible job [that he can do from home totally on his own, usually], has verbal but not behavioural meltdowns; his friendships are odd and shallow and his love-life alternately a mess or non-existent.
A: Short answer? Yes. If it's bad enough for you to worry about it, it's probably a good idea to tell him what you've observed. The worst that happens is he gets offended and you apologize; at best, you might have given him a clue that'll help him change his life for the better.
Long answer: The profile for adult autism is pretty complicated. When someone's slipped under the radar for half a lifetime, they often develop coping skills, hide autistic traits, and generally cobble together a way to cope. What they end up with is something that seems vaguely autistic to someone in the know, but could be any number of other things too.
The traits you mentioned aren't really core features of autism. Shallow friendships, stormy love life, verbal meltdowns, intelligence... they're rather vague traits. Shallow friendships aren't actually associated with autism at all, because we tend to be introverts, which means we tend to have a very small number of very close friends, if we have any at all. But there are extroverted autistics, about a quarter of us, and depending on the person, extroversion plus autism can equal someone who thinks of everyone they meet as a "friend", when actually they don't know all those people very well.
But if you do suspect ASD in someone you know, and you can see them suffering from not having any help for those traits, yeah, you owe it to them to tell them, "Hey, maybe there's a name for this." You're probably not a psychologist (and if you were you wouldn't really be well-placed to evaluate someone who's also an everyday friend), so you can't stick a label on it with any kind of accuracy. It's really the childhood history that would tell a professional what your friend's brain is like, because if they're autistic, their childhood is a time before they developed all those ways of coping, and before they developed ways to pretend to be NT. Autism is usually more obvious in kids, so when an adult gets diagnosed it is always very useful to know what they were like as a child.
But if you see that they have cognitive problems that are creating daily hassles for them, as a friend, you can explain your suspicions to them--that you see that they have some traits that look a little like autism; that you've read there are a lot of people who weren't diagnosed as kids because their autism was very mild; that you're telling them this because it might be useful for them to help them understand themselves, and perhaps seek a professional evaluation if their problems are bad enough for them to need outside help.
Even if it doesn't turn out to be autism after all, at the very least you will have pointed out to them that you can see that they are having trouble, that you care, and that you want them to get whatever treatment that they may need in order to manage those problems. What your friend does with the information is up to them; after all, they are an adult, it's their life and their decision to make. Just remember that whether they get a diagnosis or not, whether it's autism or not, they are still the same person they have always been.
A: Short answer? Yes. If it's bad enough for you to worry about it, it's probably a good idea to tell him what you've observed. The worst that happens is he gets offended and you apologize; at best, you might have given him a clue that'll help him change his life for the better.
Long answer: The profile for adult autism is pretty complicated. When someone's slipped under the radar for half a lifetime, they often develop coping skills, hide autistic traits, and generally cobble together a way to cope. What they end up with is something that seems vaguely autistic to someone in the know, but could be any number of other things too.
The traits you mentioned aren't really core features of autism. Shallow friendships, stormy love life, verbal meltdowns, intelligence... they're rather vague traits. Shallow friendships aren't actually associated with autism at all, because we tend to be introverts, which means we tend to have a very small number of very close friends, if we have any at all. But there are extroverted autistics, about a quarter of us, and depending on the person, extroversion plus autism can equal someone who thinks of everyone they meet as a "friend", when actually they don't know all those people very well.
But if you do suspect ASD in someone you know, and you can see them suffering from not having any help for those traits, yeah, you owe it to them to tell them, "Hey, maybe there's a name for this." You're probably not a psychologist (and if you were you wouldn't really be well-placed to evaluate someone who's also an everyday friend), so you can't stick a label on it with any kind of accuracy. It's really the childhood history that would tell a professional what your friend's brain is like, because if they're autistic, their childhood is a time before they developed all those ways of coping, and before they developed ways to pretend to be NT. Autism is usually more obvious in kids, so when an adult gets diagnosed it is always very useful to know what they were like as a child.
But if you see that they have cognitive problems that are creating daily hassles for them, as a friend, you can explain your suspicions to them--that you see that they have some traits that look a little like autism; that you've read there are a lot of people who weren't diagnosed as kids because their autism was very mild; that you're telling them this because it might be useful for them to help them understand themselves, and perhaps seek a professional evaluation if their problems are bad enough for them to need outside help.
Even if it doesn't turn out to be autism after all, at the very least you will have pointed out to them that you can see that they are having trouble, that you care, and that you want them to get whatever treatment that they may need in order to manage those problems. What your friend does with the information is up to them; after all, they are an adult, it's their life and their decision to make. Just remember that whether they get a diagnosis or not, whether it's autism or not, they are still the same person they have always been.