Autism in later life.

The late diagnosis cohort is moving into its fifties, sixties, seventies, and the public conversation about autism has not caught up.

The assumption that autism is a childhood condition has left a generation of older Autistic adults without the frame that would have explained their lives. Many received other diagnoses along the way. Anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, personality disorders, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, treatment resistant versions of all of these. Some of those were real. Many were the closest approximation the clinician had without the autism frame.