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Is The Recognized Perception Of Autism? How Does It Affect Your Life? Essay

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What happens when you spend the majority of your life living with a misdiagnosed disease? How does it affect your life? Do you become depressed? What happens when you are treated for something that isn’t affecting you? Could that make you worse? For many women, this life and these questions are a very harmful reality. Recently, there has been a surge of late-diagnoses for women on the high functioning end of the autism spectrum. These women had previously been diagnosed with everything from depression and anxiety to multiple personality disorder and had spent years wondering why no treatments seemed to work for them. Why does this happen? Recent strides in autism research has enabled doctors to pinpoint autism as early as infancy in some cases, so why are these women not being diagnosed until much later in life?
To understand this, we must first understand what the recognized perception of autism is. For most of the public and many within the research community, autism is seen as a very masculine disease. Not only do males make up most of the population diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, but autism is also seen as an exaggeration of the stereotypical male brain. As a matter of fact, Simon Baron-Cohen, the scientist who discovered the “extreme male brain” (EMB) theory of autism, found that females on the autism spectrum displayed more masculinized personality traits. Baron-Cohen acknowledged that there was a slight difference in the severity of

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