When I was growing up in the UK in the 60s, there seemed a very clear notion of what was and wasn't good mental health, and if you were capable of speech, of writing, could go to school and do your homework, you were not mentally ill, however awkward, difficult, moody, prone to tantrums and inexplicable you were and your behaviours might have been.
Nobody asked what might be wrong with you, because they just gave you their simplistic labels, like 'troublemaker' or 'loner'. There was no attempt to understand you, since there was nothing for anyone to understand.
At the low functioning end of the spectrum, children were pitied and often incarcerated in institutions they may never have had the opportunity to leave.
Aspergerger's Syndrome was unknown because - as has already been posted - Hans Asperger himself had written up his case histories and notes in German, and they had not been translated or widely circulated, so while autism research was under way, it was biased almost entirely to understanding the low functioning end of the spectrum. Indeed, the fact that autism might be a spectrum at all was not commonly believed.
Whole generations of Aspies were ignored and forced into compliance with societal expectations of 'normality' when most of us were clearly not 'normal' at all, yet that pressure to comply really did nothing more than cause most of us to mask, to some degree or another, and force us to try and be what we really were not.
It's hardly surprising that many feel considerable resentment, looking back, and looking outward.
I dealt with it by isolating myself as much as I could, to avoid dealing with the bullying and name calling, and the otherwise constant undermining of self. I talked as little as possible, and read every book I could find. Books fascinated me in ways the people around me didn't. I dismantled everything I could find to discover how it worked, and sometimes even managed to reassemble things afterwards, though not always. And I listened to the radio (we had no TV), to programmes about architecture, law, physics, astronomy and the universe, and would march off to the local library to research the things I'd heard about.
That's how I survived childhood, and pretty much also how my daughter subsequently did too, because she is also on the spectrum, and we simply had no way to know until much later.
If it had not been for what I understand to have been the deliberate suppression of Asperger's studies for the professional aggrandizement of Kanner and others who came after him, perhaps medical science would have understood us rather better, as it is just beginning to now. But I'd bet that even then, society would have found it far easier to attach their simplistic labels than to understand the complexity of an autism spectrum that the vast major of them have no personal knowledge of.
