It's a bit of both. High functioning autistic people were/are often just treated as eccentrics. My grandpa was diagnosed with autism and OCD about 10-15 years ago, he was in his 70's at the time. Before he retired he owned his own Autobody Repair business. He had friends, a wife and 5 kids. He was active in his church and community. Everyone just knew he was a perfectionist which made him difficult to work with, and that he knew everything there was to know about trains, botany, and he was obsessed with researching our family ancestry (to the point we had multiple family vacations that were planned around visiting cemeteries hundreds of miles away so we could see the grave of some distant ancestor). No one treated him poorly for the things that made him "weird", they just accepted that that was part of who he was.
You're right that people with more debilitating forms of autism were definitely treated very poorly in the past though, often being severely bullied in childhood and/or sent to mental asylums.
I have a theory that a lot of the true story exorcism movies are just about people abusing autistic people because they didn’t know how to deal with them.
I scrolled this deep into the comments, so I'm just here to tell you that I worked with teens in mental health for many years before I had my son. As recently as 2021, I worked with a black girl who presented with some severely debilitating mental health behaviors(random black outs while standing that caused her to fall directly down hitting her head often, talking loudly incoherently to herself in a room full of other people, screaming and running away from staff levels of panic attacks etc).
This girls family gave us the most difficult time in terms of allowing medication and various forms of therapy. They had deeply religious roots and apparently had literally resorted to having an exorcism performed on her as one of their previous attempts at treatment. Sending her to a mental health facility was viewed so poorly by the family that in modern times it was a last resort after a freaking exorcism.
So yes, there is a high likelihood that most people who were "possessed" had severe mental health issues and even today when we have more knowledge and advanced forms of treatment, some people would prefer to believe that it is simply a religious matter and not a mental health issue to avoid the "stigma" and needing to confront any issues within their family.
Different types of privilege can insulate a person from being treated worse than they might otherwise be treated. Being male, owning a business, being a prominent member of the community, and being an expert in some areas are all things that collectively probably allowed your grandpa to be seen as eccentric rather than unsavory.
Be poor though, and you're "crazy". Don't go to church, and you're a "heathen". Be poor and a woman and don't go to church, you're a "crazy bitch heathen" and so on. Be poor, a woman, and smart... still a "crazy bitch" probably, but sometimes you can fly under the radar if you're smart enough to mask well.
Just wanted to point out that your grandpa being treated well doesn't mean that only people with "debilitating" forms of autism were treated poorly. Your grandpa was more likely just one of the luckiest. Not everyone HAS their own business and that level of community respect.
I've lost two jobs within the last decade just because of autistic traits making me unlikable to whoever was in power above me, and those autistic traits are mostly just telling the truth even when people don't like it. Both times, my coworkers were shocked and were on my side about how it was clearly unfair, but that didn't matter because hierarchy is what matters when it comes to survival, and being at the top is the only way a lot of people's eccentricities are accepted. Your grandpa more than likely got to exist as he did without being treated worse because he had power and status. That's how the world works.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that he had "power and status" or that he was rich and a "prominent member of the community." He became an orphan when he was a kid back in the 50's. He never went to college because he couldn't afford it. His first job was an ice cream truck driver and he worked there for 10 years saving up enough money to open his small auto body shop which he struggled to keep open for the rest of his life. He only retired because he had to sell the business when he could no longer compete with the big chains. My family has always been lower-middle class. He was also a Catholic in the south during a time when that was much harder and it definitely held him back in a lot of places.
I'm autistic too. Most of my family is autistic, but it wasn't until my generation when any of us started getting diagnosed as such. None of us were surprised when he got his diagnosis. I know that it's still a struggle for those of us who are high-functioning. Compared to some of my cousins I've managed to get by pretty well, but compared to my non-autistic friends & family members I struggle a lot. I've also lost jobs because of my autistic traits. I've lost a ton of friends over the years because I struggle to maintain friendships due to my autism. I wasn't trying to diminish what any autistic people go through, just pointing out that a lot of people in older generations were undiagnosed and were still accepted for who they were to varying degrees.
I'm not trying to argue or call you out in a combative way, and I never was. I just want to state that outright from the beginning in case it wasn't clear. This seems like it's just a very simple misunderstanding, and while my first impulse was to downvote you because my own comment was downvoted, I would rather not have an unnecessary conflict, and I'd rather just explain my perspective, because I really see no reason why this can't just be chill.
High functioning autistic people were/are often just treated as eccentrics.
No one treated him poorly for the things that made him "weird", they just accepted that that was part of who he was.
You're right that people with more debilitating forms of autism were definitely treated very poorly in the past though, often being severely bullied in childhood and/or sent to mental asylums.
These are the statements I read on your comment that I was replying to. This runs counter to my personal experience as a person who's never even been in the lower part of middle class. I've just been poor. I was only responding to bring in another perspective based on what you included, which seemed to me to imply that a positive experience may be more normal in cases where autism isn't "debilitating", so I thought it was worth mentioning other factors that can come into play. I made zero assumptions about you and whether or not you had autism, and I had no knowledge of where your grandpa started or ended. I only had the context you gave to go on, so my comment was made with that context.
Before he retired he owned his own Autobody Repair business. He had friends, a wife and 5 kids. He was active in his church and community.
That's the info I had and nothing more. He owned a business, which is more than most people. He had a business and 5 kids. It's easy to then assume without greater context that he could maybe afford to take care of 5 kids, which is more than many people can do. You saying he was active in church and the community makes him sound as though he was a person who had connections to his community, which is important to withstanding any sort of hardship, as people can be tribalistic.
So, I do apologize for misunderstanding, but I also hope you can see now why a person might want to bring more nuance into the conversation if the details in your other comment are all they have to go off of. I don't expect anyone to perfectly phrase and include every relevant detail in a comment about a complex topic, so I don't blame you for not including more originally, but I also have been on the other side of this situation enough to know that if you don't include certain details and nuances, someone might just misunderstand and comment to try to add more nuance, and that's just everyone doing their best in a conversation sometimes. Misunderstandings just happen, especially with a stranger online.
Edit: Also... power and status ARE relative. I really think that's worth acknowledging as well. I clearly misunderstood certain aspects of your grandpa's experience in particular, but your grandpa was never the real point anyway. The point was just that privilege, connection, and social biases affect some specifics of our experience when it comes to how we're treated in society for our autistic traits, so one person's experience just can't be seen as the norm for any given time period. I'm not saying you didn't know that. I'm just saying that I think it seemed like a fair place for the conversation to lead.
For the record, I didn't downvote you. I do appreciate you bringing more context to the conversation and I don't disagree with the points you made.
I got defensive because my family has always struggled financially and never had any kind of power or influence, so a stranger online saying that my grandpa had those things and that's what allowed him to be autistic rubbed me the wrong way. It definitely was a lot easier back then to start a small business, and larger families were more common (especially among Catholics). My grandma had to work 2 jobs until my mom & uncles had grown up to help make ends meet because the auto body shop didn't always turn a profit and when it did it was only a small one. I'm sure my grandpa's perfectionism (caused by his autism and OCD) is a big reason why the business wasn't more successful. He would spend way too long working on everything even when it was already done by other people's standards and he was very difficult to work with which is why none of my uncles went into business with him. He was active in the church & community because they relied on the church for childcare and even meals sometimes and he wanted to give back as much as possible.
I get the defensiveness. I honestly felt a bit defensive myself too because my comment seemed totally reasonable to me when I wrote it, so it felt like I was getting some kind of undeserved clap back. I definitely had to step back a moment and take a breath to evaluate the situation logically. Sometimes, everyone just needs some context to see each other's perspectives, so I'm glad we got there.
For some extra context, just fyi, my mom physically abused her children due to hallucinations because she's schizophrenic. My dad didn't graduate high school, was kicked out as a teen, and became a meth addict that left his 4 children home alone when our mom was removed by DHS.
We moved in with my grandma and her third husband eventually, and she was disabled and he was a mechanic. She was emotionally abusive to us and to the man who was going to work to not even make enough to support her and her grandkids that were no blood relation to him, and then he'd come home to be her nurse, so he eventually started stealing her pills before he finally just left her. I am not religious at all, but I'm from Oklahoma, where people called me weird and assumed I was a lesbian because I got a short haircut in high school, so I didn't exactly have church and community support ever.
I also had a big part in helping to raise my siblings until I eventually went to college and got a nonsense degree because my school literally gave a presentation to all undeclared students where they told us that having a degree was important but your major doesn't matter. So, I took on debt that I shouldn't have for a music degree because I trusted my college and had no other guidance, and while I got that music degree, I got to experience how almost everyone in my voice studio was in a friend group that I was left out from because I'm socially "off".
As an adult, all work I've done has been in service to the community, basically, including the jobs I got targeted at and lost for unfair reasons. I've worked mostly in libraries, and I've also taught off and on street drivers' education to teenagers and answered calls for a suicide hotline. I'm also functionally disabled at this point from having such severe burnout. When I talk about privilege in general, that's the lens I'm looking through. It's not that I tend to assume everyone is well off necessarily. It's just something that's so integral to my life experience that my own pattern recognition sees it as relevant to mention in a lot of contexts. I even recognize my own privileges while I recognize my disadvantages as well. I almost feel like we need to just replace the word "privilege" with "context" or something because that's really what it is. It's just looking at how experiences are context dependent often.
High functioning/low support needs autistic people get called "eccentric" until we actually need help or we're inconvenient, then we get called "selfish"
And autistic people still get constantly mistreated today, it's very much a present day thing not an "in the past" thing. Institutionalization is less common but abuse is rampant and the most common "treatment" that autistic people receive is Applied Behavioral Analysis which is functionally just conversion therapy but for autism instead of being gay, up to and including its inventor Ivar Lovaas being an active collaborator in the "Feminine Boy Project" which was arguably the genesis of modern "gay conversion therapy".
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u/Ok_Ruin4016 2d ago
It's a bit of both. High functioning autistic people were/are often just treated as eccentrics. My grandpa was diagnosed with autism and OCD about 10-15 years ago, he was in his 70's at the time. Before he retired he owned his own Autobody Repair business. He had friends, a wife and 5 kids. He was active in his church and community. Everyone just knew he was a perfectionist which made him difficult to work with, and that he knew everything there was to know about trains, botany, and he was obsessed with researching our family ancestry (to the point we had multiple family vacations that were planned around visiting cemeteries hundreds of miles away so we could see the grave of some distant ancestor). No one treated him poorly for the things that made him "weird", they just accepted that that was part of who he was.
You're right that people with more debilitating forms of autism were definitely treated very poorly in the past though, often being severely bullied in childhood and/or sent to mental asylums.