Taking the Scenic Route

There is an interesting discussion going on at one of the parenting boards I frequent, and one of the arguments for it being against genetics and for environmental insults was that Amish don’t have Autism. 

I tend to disagree with this.  I would think it is more to do with it being underdiagnosed because of their lifestyle choices, especially since Amish kids don’t tend to go to mainstream schools and have that avenue of intervention the way most kids in the US do.  I also think, in general, older-style communities are, in some ways, more tolerant of people being ‘different’.  Not in every way, obviously, but I think there is a better acceptance of quirks because there are fewer people and more of a need to learn to live with other people because you don’t have as many options of just finding somebody else who fits your idea of “ok”.  I experienced this just because I went to a small school.  In a larger school, I would have had a lot of cliques to chose from to find the one that fit me the best, but in a small school, you just are much more up close and personal with people who are different than you.

Here is a portion of my post that talks about some of my observances of why Amish might not be as diagnosed:

I also think that the Amish lifestyle is going to mask a lot of the typical problems that autistic people face. For one thing, the life is very structured and very defined roles. There is LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of “heavy work” and other things that help with proprioceptive and other sensory issues. There isn’t a lot of variation in textures/smells/sounds/lights that would cause them to be as overwhelmed. They wear the same clothes/kind of clothes all the time, they don’t have lots of loud unexpected noises, they don’t tend to sit around and chat the way a lot of the rest of us do because there is too much to do. If a person doesn’t really speak, that might be one of the only things that would be noticed as dramatically different because so many of the sensory issues and difficulty with transitions is eliminated because of the way they live.

Plus, things like plowing, planting, milking, ect, are not social things. Anybody that has ever spent an entire day going back and forth in a field almost NEEDS to have some autistic traits to handle it…you spend the whole day watching where one row is so that you can line the plow up to make the next set of rows. It is really hard to do unless you have excellent spatial skills, which is something many autistics excel at.

I know when ds started OT, my first thought on almost everything he did is that it was a sanitized version of things we did on the farm all the time. I have to wonder if our move to a more sendentary lifestyle has as much to do with the rise in diagnosis as anything simply because there are a lot of people out there that aren’t getting the sensory input they would have if they worked all the time as kids used to do.

I noticed that most of what I mentioned had to do with boys who would grow up Amish, but I think a lot of women’s tasks are also very much “heavy work”.  You are likely to run into more problems with some of the social things, simply because the nature of women’s work often had groups of women working together, where men tend to work more isolated, but it is still filled with things that are pretty predictable. 

This isn’t a well thought out extensive argument, just some observations.  However, I find it really hard to believe that Amish don’t have Autistic members.  It really seems unlikely to me.  I think it might not be seen as a disability the way it is in more mainstream culture though.