[GenevaRene]

In the past few days, it's been suggested by a few highly-trusted people that my son may be autistic. From what I've read online, I'm inclined to think there could be something to this. I'm not sure what I should do with such information. The first obvious issue is that my entire experience with autism is, my mother and I saw Rainman when I was a kid, and in the past week several people have said to me, "You know, I wonder if J is maybe borderline autistic." So, please excuse me if I muck up the terminology or ask questions that have already been answered, or whatever. This is all new to me, and I'm having an extremely hard time making sense of the information available online, and correlating it to our situation.

What I've figured out so far is, J has all the symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome as listed by WebMD, and he also has a few of the symptoms of autism, again listed by WebMD. But, I'm not sure how much of an authority that website really is, and I'm afraid to trust it because it describes him so well, and all of the symptoms seem to refer to young children. We're not talking about a young child here. We met J at 13, and he's 18 now. I can ask his birthfamily about early childhood symptoms, but frankly I'd like to be more confident of this before I go scaring anybody else with it. I suspect they noticed the symptoms, as they did seek some treatment for several of them, but that's as far as it ever went. Can anyone point me to some resources that talk about symptoms in teens or adults? Does anyone have experience with a child diagnosed as a teenager? I'm especially seeking free resources, because we had to replace our car unexpectedly last week, and while all interesting books will be eagerly thrown on my Amazon wishlist, they will stay there for a while before I can acquire them.

Also, it seems our doctor will want to know a lot about early childhood. Is there any list of questions online somewhere that I can expect him to ask, that I could get the birthfamily to answer ahead of time? Should I even contact our doctor, or some kind of specialist? What am I supposed to do with this concern, anyway? How long should I expect it to take, to get from suspicion to diagnosis, or to where we rule it out?

And... if that wasn't enough questions, I had a long talk with J's best friend tonight, and the friend told me that he's afraid of my son being diagnosed with such a thing, because he has a problem with viewing autistic people as intelligent, valuable human beings. Now, he asked for help in getting past that prejudice, and I have a lot of respect for him for having the nerve to be honest and ask for help. I have a bit of an urge to be disgusted with him for saying it, yeah, but mostly respect, and a desire to help him grow past that. Does anyone know of any resources I can pass on to him that will help him understand, in plain English, what autism and asperger's are, and what they are not?

Thanks for any help anyone can provide.