Until I was a half-century old, I didn't know about my own crippling ASD condition. It's still an unofficial [self-]diagnosis due to the large fee charged within our [Canada’s] supposedly universal health-care system; for, within it are important health services/treatments that are universally inaccessible, except for the high-incomed to access in for-profit clinics.

While low-functioning autism seems to be more recognized and treated, higher-functioning ASD cases are typically left to fend for themselves, except for parents who can finance usually expensive specialized help. … But a physically and mentally sound future should be EVERY child’s fundamental right, especially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter.

I'm sometimes told, “But you're so smart!” To this I immediately agitatedly reply: "But for every 'gift' I have, there are a corresponding three or four deficits." It's crippling, and on multiple levels!

As a boy with an undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder [not to mention high sensitivity and resultant also-high ACE score], my primary-school teacher was the first and most formidably abusive authority figure with whom I was terrifyingly trapped.

I cannot recall her abuse in its entirety, but I’ll nevertheless always remember how she had the immoral audacity — and especially the unethical confidence in avoiding any professional repercussions — to blatantly readily aim and fire her knee towards my groin, as I was backed up against the school hall wall.

Luckily, she missed her mark, instead hitting the top of my left leg. Though there were other terrible teachers, for me she was uniquely traumatizing, especially when she wore her dark sunglasses when dealing with me. Thus, a school environment can become the autistic child's traumatizer; the trusted educator, the abuser.

But rather than tell anyone about my ordeal with her and consciously feel victimized, I instead felt some misplaced shame: I was a ‘difficult’ boy, therefore she likely perceived me as somehow ‘deserving it’.

Perhaps not surprising, I feel that our educators could/should receive mandatory training on children with ASD, especially as the rate of diagnoses greatly increases. There could also be an inclusion in standard high school curriculum of child-development science that would also teach students about the often-debilitating condition (without being overly complicated).

If nothing else, the curriculum would offer students an idea/clue as to whether they themselves are emotionally/mentally compatible with the immense responsibility and strains of regular, non-ASD-child parenthood.

From my observations, while low-functioning autism is relatively readily recognized and treated, higher-functioning ASD cases are basically left to fend for themselves [except for parents who can finance usually expensive specialized help].

It would explain to students how, among other aspects of the condition, people with ASD (including those with higher functioning autism) are often deemed willfully ‘difficult’ and socially incongruent, when in fact such behavior is really not a choice. And how “camouflaging” or “masking,” terms used to describe ASD people pretending to naturally fit into a socially ‘normal’ environment, causes their already high anxiety and depression levels to further increase.

Of course that exacerbation is reflected in the disproportionately high rate of suicide among ASD people.