The major thing that allowed me to function more or less 'normally' was a regimen of vitamins and supplements, designed to rebalance my copper/zinc ratio, as well as several protein imbalances, which, according to the clinic I went to, was typically found in other individuals with autism.
I can't really comment on the clinic you went to specifically, but your post hit a number of red flags.
First, there is no such thing as a dietary or medical intervention for autism which passes even the most basic forms of scientific scrutiny. It's not like medical intervention can't be important for helping autistic people function, but any medical intervention marketed as being
for autism is questionable at best.
Beyond that, "rebalancing minerals" (e.g. copper and zinc) is fairly typical quack (or "biomed") rhetoric in the field. It's true that there's some publications making noise in that general direction (e.g.
this), but it's generally highly preliminary work based on questionable premises published in low-impact publications (which is, for the record, a fully accurate summary of the paper I linked as an example).
As if that wasn't enough, there isn't a "protein imbalance" of any sort typically found in autistic people, and the term itself is fairly characteristic of medical bullshit (and yes, "bullshit"
is the technical term): the closest thing there is in real medicine is a protein
deficiency, or alternately a deficiency in one of the essential amino acids. Legitimate medical clinics would diagnose these in terms of a deficiency of the amino acid in question (e.g. "cysteine deficiency"), and will usually go quite a bit further by diagnosing it on the basis of the specific cause of that deficiency (e.g. "
homocystinuria").
Of course, none of this means that the clinic in question necessarily did anything wrong: your "take-home" points are not necessarily what they told you, or even what they directly thought. I'd need a whole lot more information before directly commenting on what they did (or didn't do).
Given that whatever they recommended seems to have worked to an extent, there are three... no, four possibilities.
The first of these is simply a placebo effect, although the term's somewhat more expansive than it sounds. Social and psychological difficulties are infamously vulnerable to effects from both direct and indirect psychological trickery. In fact, most of the effect of antidepressant medications is from the direct sort... but even
beyond that...
Let me pull out an example I'm personally familiar with. About seven or eight years ago, I was asked to tour a hyperbaric oxygen facility that was "treating autism" on the basis of the facially absurd idea that autism was caused by
oxidative stress and that putting kids in pressurized canisters of pure oxygen would help
lower said stress. The parents were reporting that the kids were coming out of the tubes happier and more relaxed, showing marked improvements in their academic performance, and generally functioning better, among other things. One parent cited that her preschool kid -- who was hardly physically demonstrative -- was eager to visit and would come out of the pressurized tube cheerful and smiling, and even hugged her, smiling, after his first session.
When I looked in on the place, I found that they had a pretty interesting setup -- the tubes were transparent, and in easy viewing distance of TVs. When the kids came in, they'd put them in the tubes, play their favorite shows, and pump the audio into their oxygen chambers for the half-hour or hour of their "therapy".
Many of the kids there were being subjected to constant "therapies" of a variety of sorts, often for 40+ hours per week even beyond the time-demands of school, and had very little time to rest, relax, and generally be children. They were then taken there for a "medical" intervention which, despite being utter bullshit, gave them a chance to relax and unwind for an hour. Tne parents then found the kids happier, more able to function, and showing affection and gratitude for the break.
How
utterly amazing. </sarcasm>
The second possibility is that the suppliments and/or minerals are treating -- whether deliberately or otherwise -- some sort of underlying medical condition. I mentioned homocystinuria earlier; if you (coincidentally) have it, there's a good chance that a B6 suppliment would help considerably in a variety of ways (the same could be said for a low-sulfur diet, a low-protein diet, a folic acid suppliment, a high-cysteine diet, or even eating a lot of sugar beets). Of course, homocystinuria is really,
really unlikely to be a medical complication in your case for a large variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it's usually fatal if undetected and left untreated. A ketogenic diet is more likely to be helpful through sheer coincidence, as there are several forms of epilepsy which may be missed in routine screening. Similarly, a low-fat diet can (coincidentally) eliminate migraine triggers... etc., etc., etc.
The third is that the act of taking medical interventions can influence the behavior of the people
around you in a variety of ways... thus leading you to stumble on supports that you may not have even known that you needed. Similarly, the act of taking the interventions can cause people to take things seriously when they wouldn't have otherwise, or simply alter their patterns of behavior in a variety of ways. A parent blaming your problems on a medical condition (whether or not the condition is utter bullshit) may not be blaming
you, for instance, and may (correctly) mentally move their
locus of control for your disabilities away from you as a result. The (sudden or otherwise) disappearance of the resulting stress can often help people function better... even if the "treatment" itself isn't doing a damned thing.
Similarly, the entire process of getting you help may satisfy their mental need to
do something about your problems. If the magic pills they give you keep them from taking their frustrations out on you, the pills themselves don't really need to do a damned thing to help you function.
The fourth is much simpler, and has to do with something that we refer to as "
maturation" in experimental methodology.
Correlation does not imply causation, and life is a constant barrage of changes of a variety of sorts.
People are easily fooled by coincidences, and
bogus therapies often seem to work simply due to how we decide what "works" and what doesn't. If you learned some important skill, or changed something in your life, or simply grew up in a way that helped you function around the same time you started on a bullshit pill regimen (and again, I can't say that your pill regimen actually
is bullshit based on what you've said), you could think that the pill regimen helped you instead of whatever actually did.
I saw that
all the fucking time during my time working at a preschool for autistic children, by the way. It got
incredibly fucking blatant... and I continue to see it in my advocacy work and daily life. Also, the coincidences I'm talking about
can be incredibly striking, even over time. It's
a large part of why medical treatments need the thorough and rigorous testing that they do.
