work. school. family life as we know it. yes, everywhere. yes, idid. with alienation, isolation, even bullying and harassment. lars, what s the biggest challenge that you find in the workplace? oh, that s an easy answer. social aspects. i like to consider myself actually quite social, but i don t understand social interaction and i send conflicting signals to the people around me. so it is a kind of a mutual misunderstanding. and also ijust have extreme difficulties with office politics. i m just curious, what is it that you excel at? problem solving. there are a couple of things. i mean, there are some stereotypes
lars backstrom, a real pleasure having you on the show. and lars, let me start with this, because you weren t diagnosed until you were something like 51 years old. how did you come to realise that you are autistic? i had always felt. alienated. i had always wondered why things, especially social things, they were easy for other people, but appeared so difficult for me. but i never really suspected it. and also i had been receiving counselling for most of my adult life and neither of my counsellors even suspected it. partly because that adult autism was not the thing. but even so, it was actually my wife. one day she was web surfing
lars was placed in hisjob through a company called auti con. it s an international information technology firm that exclusively employs autistic adults as it consultants. they have more than 400 autistic employees. in fact, it is the largest neurodiverse majority company in the world.
when you know the cause, then you can start thinking, what can we do about this? now i had something to work on, so i started studying and researching about autism. lars, did you have problems at work before your diagnosis? work. school. family life as we know it. yes, everywhere. yes, idid. with alienation, isolation, even bullying and harassment. lars, what s the biggest challenge that you find in the workplace? oh, that s an easy answer. social aspects. i like to consider myself actually quite social, but i don t understand social interaction and i send conflicting signals to the people around me. so it is a kind of a mutual misunderstanding. and also ijust have extreme difficulties with office politics. i m just curious, what is
it s not an indication that you have autism, but it s an indication that you might have and you might want to talk to your gp about it for a referral. and then i called lars and i did the test on him and it showed that he might be on the autistic spectrum and that s when we started the process rolling. isabel, i m going to ask you to put lars back in front of the camera. a real pleasure. thank you for your time. thank you very much. thank you. there you go. welcome back, lars. so, lars, once you got the diagnosis, i want to ask you, how did you feel when you realised it? it was a bit of a mixed feeling. i mean, first of all, and the biggest of all was that i was relieved because now i had answers to my feelings of alienation and why so much had gone wrong in my life despite my utmost effort.