Are people with autism able to tell when another person has autism?
Written on 23rd Feb 2015 by Alex Lowery
As you may know, I have autism and am a professional Public Speaker on the subject of autism. As a Public Speaker, I have been asked many questions. Some people have asked me if I am able to tell when someone else has autism. Someone with autism recently commented on one of my videos saying that people with autism are able to tell when someone else has autism, and this comment got me thinking more about this concept. As usual I am going to be talking from my own personal experiences as well as what others have said, and it is not to be taken as fact. Everyone with autism is different. This is just what I have gathered to often be the case over the years.
Photo from the Youth Council of autistic people with Ambitious about autism
The truth is that more often than not, I am able to tell when someone has autism. Some people with autism are more obviously autistic than others though. There are some who I can tell from the very first second they walk into a room and there are others who have autism that is much harder to detect. There are some cases where I am not able to recognize a person’s autism, but the majority of people on the spectrum are quite clear to me, even when they’re not to other people. Even if I hadn’t guessed they were autistic, most of the time I can see it once it’s pointed out to me. As in, everything clicks once I find out. This at least is the case when it comes to males with autism. Females are often harder to detect.
How am I able to tell? Well, I don’t actually know. It’s just something about them, but there often are clues. If a person doesn’t give eye contact, or seems a bit awkward socially, or seems to talk a lot about one thing, or makes a few Stereo-typical movements, or just a person’s behavior can give it away to me. This might sound strange, but some people with autism even have a voice which sounds autistic. It may be a voice that you don’t normally find with non-autistic people. It could be rather slow, really fast, too loud or too quiet. My voice isn’t exceptionally unique. However, I am told that I sometimes talk in an inappropriate volume. It may be too loud or too quiet. I often sound like I’m giving a speech when I talk whether I am giving a speech or not. Anyway, some people with autism do sound different. There have actually been videos that I’ve watched on YouTube, and I’ve guessed their autistic without knowing, and I’ve even looked autism up on their Channel and it turns out that I’m right.
When I come to think about it, I even had this instinct as a child. I was even able to do it before I even knew I had autism. You’re probably thinking that’s impossible, but in manner of speaking it’s true. At this point, I didn’t know what autism was, so I wasn’t able to think ‘they’re autistic’. However, some of the children I knew that had autism, I was able to sense something similar in the traits of some of these individuals. I’m mainly talking about the young children my therapists used to work with who were mostly non-verbal, which you might think would explain it. But one day as a child, I en-counted a boy with Asperger Syndrome, and even though he could talk, I knew he shared some similarities to the non-verbal boys I knew. I cant explain it, but something about him was clear to me that he had similar traits to these other boys. When I found out I had autism, I even put some of these pieces together, and asked my mum if these children had the same condition as me. Maybe right from the beginning, I subconsciously recognized traits of myself in these kids.
I also know of many other people with autism who say similar things. They say they can detect even a hint of autism in somebody even when it’s mild.
So as for the answer to the question in the title, as usual there is no set answer as to weather people with autism can detect autism in others or not. However, in many cases, I’d say that they can.
Thank you for reading.
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I don’t know whether they can tell but my observations are that my son seems to feel far more comfortable around people who are more similar to him. He tends to drift towards those who are more socially awkward and I think this is because there is less demand to be sociable with these friend’s.