![[dr. bob]](/dr-bob-sm.gif)
Dr. Bob is Robert Hsiung, MD,
bob@dr-bob.orgShown: posts 1 to 25 of 74. This is the beginning of the thread.
Posted by dj on June 18, 2000, at 11:06:29
I'm curious about the link between the following and depression...
The Little Professor Syndrome
They talk like adults and often have sky-high I.Q.'s, but their social skills are nonexistent. Can kids with Asperger's syndrome, a recently diagnosed form of autism, harvest their strange talents in adulthood?
By LAWRENCE OSBORNE
NY TimesAround a circular classroom table, five 6-year-old boys are drawing pictures of blue whales with crayons. Mozart's "Requiem" pipes away on a nearby cassette player; by the window, a group of sunlit bean-bag chairs looks inviting. One of the children, Asa, is turning out a waxy masterpiece with the meticulous care of a jeweler. The fins and tail of Asa's whale, who is jumping out of the water, have been drawn with striking precision; a dialogue bubble percolates from its mouth. "Wow!" the whale is shouting.
"Look at him -- he's psyched," the bespectacled Asa says in a curiously expressionless voice. "He's so happy to be out of the water and turning double somersaults that he can't stop talking."
The teacher, Lauren Cacciabaudo, asks each boy how he has managed his day.
"How was your sitting, Henry?" she says to one boy.
"Three," little Henry says, giving himself a grade from 1 to 3.
"Nice sitting, Henry! How about focusing, Jean Paul?"
"Three."
"Nice focusing, Jean Paul. What about looking in the eye, Asa?"
"Three."
"Nice eye contact, Asa!"
Glued onto the surface of the classroom table are pairs of cut-out handprints. Frequently, Cacciabaudo asks the boys to put their hands on these prints and keep them still. For there is a flitting energy of restless birds about these boys, even though not one of them looks up to inspect the stranger sitting in their midst. Instead, they fixate on a colorful pencil I have just bought at the Guggenheim gift shop. Bright green, it sports an elephant's head with felt ears on a mountable spring. The boys are mesmerized.
"Where did you get that?"
"How old is that elephant?"
They bounce the elephant's head back and forth, sticking their fingers into its grasping mouth.
"It's prehensile!" Asa coos.
At first glance, this brightly decorated room is no different from that of any other elementary school. Shelves are filled with storybooks; on the chalkboard, a vertical line of words reads "prudence," "pretzel," "prairie," "purple." But the nervous agitation of the boys' hands, punctuated by occasional odd flapping gestures, betrays the fact that something is off kilter. There is also a curious poster on one of the walls with a circle of human faces annotated with words like "sad," "proud" and "lonely." When I ask Cacciabaudo about it, she explains that her students do not know how to read the basic expressions of the human face. Instead, they must learn them by rote.
The boys in this Manhattan classroom, part of a special education school run in association with the New York League for Early Learning, all have a mysterious condition known as Asperger's syndrome -- a neurological disorder that disproportionately affects males and is often connected to a striking precosity with language.
The Learning Disabilities Association of America defines Asperger's syndrome as "a severe developmental disorder characterized by major difficulties in social interaction and restricted and unusual patterns of interest and behavior." Although sufferers display behaviors associated with autism -- monotonic speech, social isolation, a paucity of empathy -- they are not mute or incapacitated.
Indeed, the outsize vocabularies of children with Asperger's often make them seem less disabled than gifted. In the United States, the syndrome was only made official among psychologists by entry into the D.S.M.-IV, or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, in 1994.
The precise relationship between Asperger's and autism remains to be untangled. Dr. Richard Perry, a child psychiatrist at N.Y.U. Medical Center, argues that Asperger's syndrome shares a basic triad of dysfunctions with autism: problems with social interaction, with communication and with play.
Both types of children, he says, have perplexing difficulties in "reading" human social signals like facial expressions and dealing with the nuanced to-and-fro of ordinary conversations. "For some reason we don't yet fully understand," he explains, "Asperger's kids cannot decipher basic visual social signals. This leads people to see them as emotionally disturbed."
Or brilliant. For the flip side of this somber picture is a recognition that Asperger's sufferers may also have extraordinary gifts. Consider Glenn Gould. The eccentric Canadian pianist, who died in 1982 and who retired from the concert circuit at age 31, was notorious for his bizarre behavior: he had a phobia about shaking hands, ate nothing but scrambled eggs and arrowroot biscuits and rocked incessantly at the keyboard. At the same time, Gould's obsessive focus and prodigious memory helped give his legendary renderings of Bach their burning intensity. Might Gould have been an Asperger's sufferer?
Timothy Maloney, a musicologist who manages the Gould archives, suggested precisely that at a recent academic conference.
Others scholars have retroactively applied the Asperger's label to oddball intellectuals ranging from Vladimir Nabokov to Béla Bartok to Ludwig Wittgenstein. Nabokov's hypertrophied vocabulary and obsession with butterflies, some say, may qualify him for the disorder (though an equally focused obsession with nymphs seems somewhat less incriminating). Such claims may be dubious, and probably infuriating to lepidopterists, but the argument is seductive to many: could the very qualities that make Asperger's people so strange lie at the root of their peculiar talents?
This sense of potential explains why kids with Asperger's are being grouped together in special-ed classrooms. "If you look at these children, you can see at once that they don't have classical autism," says Jeanne Angus, director of the New York League school, who stops by Cacciabaudo's class for a visit. "They're normal in so many ways. They're often very sweet. And they're often amazingly precocious, with sky-high I.Q.'s. But look closer and you'll see cracks. Many of them have had appalling difficulties in the regular school system."
Scholars have retroactively applied the Asperger's label to oddball intellectuals ranging from Glenn Gould to Vladimir Nabokov.
Those difficulties include temper tantrums and erratic behavior that can unnerve the most strong-willed teacher. Angus nods toward Asa. "When he first came here, he would roll around the floor all the time, just to get a feel for its texture." The boy had no idea that this was inappropriate. "The thing is," she goes on, "everything has to be taught to them -- everything. When you ask them at first, 'How do you do?' they will say something like, 'Why do you want to know?' They simply don't understand social games."
It is an impression of anarchic solitude that is often reinforced by the tendency of Asperger's children to have obsessional interests. Angus tells me that Michael, one of the boys in the class, had a fixation with tornados when he first arrived at the school. "He knew everything about them. The statistics, the G forces, the wind velocities. He was like a videocassette about tornados, which he could rewind and play over and over. He was using technical terms I've never even heard of. And he was 5!" Michael also behaved like a tornado, whirling round the room and tearing everything up.
Other children have sometimes bizarre fixations. They will memorize entire TV shows and recite them over and over (an ability known as perseverative scripting). Other times, they specialize in memorizing everything there is to know about the oddest things: deep-fat fryers, telephone cable insulating companies, the passengers on the Titanic, exotic species of cicadas, the provincial capitals of Brazil. In one documented case, a child memorized the birthdays of every member of Congress.
Needless to say, these obsessions are deeply unsettling to parents. "Just imagine," says Fred Volkmar, a child psychiatrist at the Yale Child Study Center, which is conducting the nation's largest research project on Asperger's syndrome. "You walk into a hamburger joint and your 5-year-old suddenly points at the fryer machine and cries, 'That's a Sigma Model 3000!' What do you say?" It is a confusion that is compounded by the linguistic precosity of Asperger's children. "Up to the age of 3," Richard Perry says, "Asperger's syndrome and autism are very similar. But then the former begin to talk. And how!"
Unlike the linguistically impaired autistics of the type depicted in the movie "Rain Man," Asperger's children talk like little professors. "They seem brilliant because they have this language," Volkmar says. "But in reality, it's fact-obsessed, fact-oriented. It's rigid and insular. It's not a social brilliance. Usually, their social interactions are a disaster."
And according to Perry, this has been precisely the predicament of Asperger's children in the past. "Frequently," he says, "they have been misdiagnosed because they're almost normal. They almost blend in, but not quite. That's their tragedy."
"They are," says one parent at the Manhattan school, "perfect counterfeit bills."
This baffling syndrome was originally diagnosed a half-century ago by the Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger. In 1944, Asperger published his postgraduate thesis, "Autistic Psychopathy' in Childhood," which described many of the symptoms of the syndrome and ascribed a genetic basis for them. But Asperger refused to label children with a heavy psychiatric hand. Autism, he argued, was not a straightforward fate; the condition could be ameliorated through "pedagogical methods."
Working in Nazi Vienna, Asperger was surely aware of the prospect of many autistic children being sent to concentration camps after being labeled mentally retarded. Thus, he ended up creating a more optimistic picture of the disorder than the vision of crippling disability that the psychiatrist Leo Kanner had described in his groundbreaking analyses of classical autism, first published in 1943. Asperger and Kanner mapped out two different ends in the spectrum of autism: the Asperger end was distinctly sunnier, with the possibility that such "high end" autistic children could thrive and even be gifted in their way.
After World War II, Asperger's subtle contributions were temporarily lost as the center of gravity in child psychology moved from the German-speaking to the English-speaking world. Only in the 1970's was Asperger's research revived by a British researcher named Lorna Wing at the Medical Research Council in London. Along with her collaborator, Judith Gould, Wing set out to study autistic children in the London borough of Camberwell.
After a few months, Gould and Wing began to realize that the social problems of autism could be manifested in highly divergent ways. "For example," Wing says, "instead of being socially aloof and indifferent, the classic autistic picture, some children made active social approaches to others, but in a nave, hopelessly inappropriate way." Instead of having no language or stunted language development, some children had perfect grammar and a huge vocabulary. "Even so," she continues, "they used this to talk on and on in a monotonous way about pet subjects."
Wing began to see a link between the children she was studying and the symptoms described by Asperger back in 1944. But unlike Asperger, who had believed in a clean distinction between autism and "his" syndrome, Wing saw the two as shading into each other. "We developed the idea of a very wide spectrum of autistic disorders, of which Asperger's was only a part." Wing published her findings in 1981 in the journal Psychological Medicine. At last, Asperger's syndrome, the hyperverbal realm of autistic experience, had entered the realm of official psychiatry. "I felt," Wing recalls, "like Pandora opening the box."
Currently, the Yale Child Study Center is working with 900 families nationwide to produce the first empirical diagnostic for Asperger's syndrome. One of its directors, Ami Klin, says that it was only seven years ago that Yale researchers began tracking socially isolated children who did not fit the profile for classic autism. "Cognitively, they were quite good," he says. "But socially, they were disabled. They fell between the cracks."
Asperger's children, Klin feels, are unique. "Classic autistic people," he says, "are bad at language, good at images; with Asperger's people, it's exactly the opposite." Yet efforts to produce a cast-iron definition of Asperger's has been difficult.
Scientists involved in the Yale study are mapping out chemical reactions in the brain as it tries to decode faces and exploring abnormalities in "eye tracking" -- the reaction of the human eye to social signals. This research may provide a way of pinpointing Asperger's suffers. "But it will take time," Klim cautions.
This diagnostic uncertainty makes it extremely hard to know exactly how many people suffer from Asperger's. A 1993 study reported a prevalence of 36 per 10,000 children, while a 1999 paper reported a rate between 2 and 5 per 10,000. (The male to female ratio is at least 5 to 1.) Since Asperger's entered the D.S.M., the number of students in U.S. elementary schools found to have some form of autism has soared by 154 percent to around 35,000, an increase attributable in part to Asperger's awareness. Indeed, Asperger's advocates tout figures as high as 1 per 250 of the general population, though this is most likely an exaggeration. Yet because Asperger's sufferers usually manage to get by in the world, it is indeed possible that someone we know -- someone previously dismissed as a bookish outcast -- might suffer from it.
Lightly built, with closely cropped black hair, glasses and a jittery manner, Philip Snyder is a 36-year-old aspiring actor who grew up in Berkeley, Calif. Only recently told by doctors that he suffers from Asperger's, Snyder has spent his entire life in a state of bemused noncommunication with the rest of the world.
"I studied acting at Harvard," he says resignedly, "but they threw me out because I was so rude to the other students. Of course, I had no idea that I was being rude. I thought I was actually being nice. But that's the story of my life: one long non sequitur."
Phil is the father of Asa, the boy who admired my elephant pencil. We are sitting in Starbucks on East 87th Street with Asa and Phil's wife, Lise, from whom he is separated. Asa and Phil are telling each other about their nightmares.
"I saw my room collapsing," Phil says.
"That's cool," says Asa. "Were you scared?"
"Very."
"Do you have a lot of nightmares?" I ask Asa.
"I can't sleep much," he replies. "My mind doesn't stop."
Phil met Lise while they were both waiting on tables at the Vienna Cafe in Los Angeles. "I always knew he was a little odd," Lise laughs. "But I was drawn to that very quality." Their relationship soon grew troubled, however, and she left him while pregnant with Asa. "Phil and Asa," she adds affectionately, "are very similar. They can tell you how to get to the moon, but not to their own rooms. I think Phil would agree with that."
"Oh, yes," Phil sighs. "It's pretty bad."
With his round-frame glasses and high voice, Asa is adorable enough to draw attention from doting granny-types around us. "I like Mary Poppins and Roger Rabbit!" he cries to one of our neighbors. "I'm going to be a director and a dentist."
"And what do you like about Mary Poppins?" she says.
"Supercalifragelisticexpialidocious," comes the reply.
"Ah."
Asa was always verbally adroit, his parents recall; he spoke his first words at 7 months. At the same time, however, potty training and learning to get dressed were arduous chores. Asa also suffered from a common Asperger's affliction known as auditory hyperactivity, meaning an inability to tolerate noise; he used to sit through entire movies with his hands over his ears. Asa also suffered from irrational fears, scared even by the popping of soap bubbles.
"Almost from the beginning," Lise admits, "I knew that Asa was different. My conversations with him aren't like normal adult-child ones. Instead, Asa fires off research questions. He never goes in for small talk of any kind. There's no reciprocity or bantering trivia. He's too focused. With him, talking is not really a conversation."
Asa was always rather philosophical, too, Phil adds. "During his second birthday party, he came up to me and said, 'I'll never be 2 again.' It reminded me so much of myself. Sometimes he would say simply, 'I feel so alone."'
Tellingly, Phil identifies closely with Glenn Gould. He listens to his recordings constantly. I wonder, indeed, if Gould has not become something of a hero among Asperger's sufferers, proof that the diagnosis is a blessing as much as a burden. Phil sees much of Gould in Asa, as well. Asa has also taken a shine to Gould and his music, although he oddly insists on referring to the pianist as "Mr. Ratburn" (a cartoon character on one of Asa's favorite TV shows).
Asa also has an imaginary friend called Ehe, who is a brilliant inventor. Ehe, in short, shares Asa's consuming interest in all things scientific. Ehe "shows" Asa how to draw diagrams of atoms so precise that they include neutron clusters and orbiting electrons. Asa's own insights are sometimes worthy of Ehe: the previous night, says Phil, his son calmly informed him that written numbers were fast, whereas spoken ones were slow. Asa is similarly fascinated with black holes and likes to say that a human entering one would be "stretched like spaghetti."
Inspired by the example of Gould, Phil clearly regards Asa as having his own Asperger's intellectual vector, one that should be respected. "If you ride a wild elephant," he is fond of saying, "you go where the wild elephant goes." Indeed, he feels that the ability of an Asperger's person to synthesize information in novel ways will eventually work to Asa's advantage. "Society," he says hyperbolically, "will actually become more and more dependent on people with Asperger's to usher it through the difficulties ahead."
Nevertheless, Asa has had his share of problems in the regular school system. He started out at P.S. 198 on the Upper East Side, until those problems became too much. "At first," Lise confesses, "I didn't want to admit to myself that he might be ill." One telltale difficulty was Asa's refusal to do the school fire drill. "He simply couldn't grasp the concept behind it, that you had to pretend there was a fire when there wasn't one. He'd say, 'Is there a fire or isn't there?"' Asa's stubborn refusal to follow the imaginary logic of fire drills earned him time out. "It was a blow he never got over," Lise says.
Perplexed, school officials suggested that he needed therapy. But what kind? Since Asa had not received a diagnosis of any official disorder and because he was not obviously abnormal, the school simply allocated him a posse of specialists: a communication therapist, a socialization therapist, a physical therapist and a speech coach. The quartet followed Asa around during his school day. "Needless to say," Phil says, "they made him feel 10 times more abnormal than he had before." Asa himself called them "the shadows."
Eventually, Phil and Lise rebelled; they argued that Asa was gifted, a special case rather than a problem child. The school disagreed. "We were told," Lise says, "that he couldn't get into the program for gifted children because he was 'quiet.' Quiet? Since when is a kid singled out for being introspective?"
Only at the private New York League school, Lise adds, has Asa really flourished. The school's STAR program (Social-Emotional Training and Academic Readiness) aims not to drum every Asperger's characteristic out of the children's heads but simply to help them control the more outwardly disadvantageous ones, enabling them to survive in the social jungle.
Jeanne Angus explains that in the regular school system the emphasis is on "inclusion" -- that is, lumping Asperger's children with everyone else and hoping for the best. "It doesn't work," she says. "We feel that we need to get to the Asperger's children as early as possible in order to get through to them." They are, she goes on, usually unhappy and isolated in normal school, whereas in the tiny classes provided by a specialty school like hers, they are among peers who share their problems.
"When we teach them the facial expression charts here, they are all learning the same thing," she says. "When we make them focus and maintain eye contact, they all have to do it. It doesn't make them feel abnormal." The school recognizes that, with patience, Asperger's children can at least learn to imitate social behavior that other kids learn intuitively. "We take it slowly, rather than forcing them to conform to what neurotypical children can do," Angus says.
The school day is broken down into small periods in which socializing is strongly emphasized; even lunch breaks have structured conversations. Angus has seen Asa's progress firsthand. "When he first came to this school," she remembers, "he would clasp his hands together and jump up and down all the time. It's typical self-stimulation that we see in a lot of Asperger's boys. But he's calmed down a lot."
Asa's experience is one that most Asperger's parents can easily sympathize with. Echo Fling, the president of the Asperger's Syndrome Coalition of the United States, is also the mother of an Asperger's child. Her new book, "Eating an Artichoke," chronicles the struggles of getting her son Jim's ailment correctly diagnosed and then him eased onto the right pedagogic path.
"Because it wasn't on the books until 1994, even getting diagnosed was a nightmare," she says. "And Jim always seemed very precocious. But then he'd use memorized dialogue from movies to converse with people, and if you didn't know the movie, you'd find it awfully strange! And he was so stoic, so seemingly emotionless. Give him an umbrella and a cigar, and he'd be a perfect mini-Winston Churchill. He had to be taught what a smile means."
Recalls Phil: "I was always the cleverest kid in English, but I practically flunked college. I was always inventing personae for myself. One month I'd be Groucho Marx; then I'd be Sherlock Holmes. I was trying to find a character who people would like, but it never worked. Eventually they called me Mr. Peabody, that pedantic little talking dog!"
"What about Mr. Ratburn?" Asa pipes up, eyes twinkling behind his rather professorial wire frames.
"Yes, he's a great character, isn't he?"
"Personally, I'd rather be Roger Rabbit," Asa says matter-of-factly. "Roger Rabbit can dance."
urious about the kind of adults that Asperger's children eventually become, I decide one night to drop in on the monthly Asperger's parents' meeting held in a social-services center on West 65th Street. Although most of the people here are frustrated parents of children who cannot find affordable targeted schooling, there is also a smattering of Asperger's adults who show up to offer solidarity or to meet one another. I am not sure, however, quite what to expect.
I recall a haunting passage I have read recently in the American Journal of Psychiatry in which a 11-year-old Asperger's boy tries to describe himself. He writes: "I am an intelligent, unsociable but adaptable person. I would like to dispel any untrue rumors about me. I am not edible. I cannot fly. I cannot use telekinesis. My brain is not large enough to destroy the entire world when unfolded. I did not teach my long-haired guinea pig Chronos to eat everything in sight (that is the nature of the long-haired guinea pig)."
Asperger's kids often memorize everything there is to know about the oddest things: deep-fat fryers, telephone cable insulating companies, exotic species of cicadas.
With this unnerving prospect in mind, I fall in with the Asperger's adult group, which is sitting somewhat to one side by itself. One of them is Mark Romoser, a Yale graduate in his mid-30's. Unlike Phil, Mark has a more pronounced aversion to eye contact and seems to observe any interlocutor slightly sideways. Now a research assistant at Columbia University, he once hoped to enter graduate school in psychology but "had trouble obtaining recommendations from professors."
Mark is dry and droll, with a seductive, slightly effeminate drawl; after telling me that many Asperger's people are huge Monty Python fans because it conforms to their actual rather absurd experience of the world, he asks me point-blank if I find him normal.
"Perfectly," I say.
"Mahalo nui loa," he fires back.
"Excuse me?"
He leans forward and says quietly: "Hawaiian. I must tell you, I hate living on the mainland."
The "mainland," for Mark, seems to be the realm of a suspect normality filled with what Asperger's people often call "typicals" -- those who are neurotypical or, to use the outlawed word, normal. Instead, he calls himself an "ex-pat waiting to happen" who has made Hawaii the object of his impassioned interest. Indeed, the full-time Manhattan resident now writes a regular column for an online magazine called enewshawaii.com.
But why, I ask, Hawaii?
"My mother thought it would be a good idea for me to swim with dolphins. So I found a woman in west Oahu who takes autistic people out for swims. She calls us 'unique beings.' That was that. I was hooked. After all, we're supposed to be gripped by obsessions, aren't we?"
He winks. I ask him about romantic relationships, and he shakes his head. He hasn't had a girlfriend in years.
"That's a tough one. I'd say the only place I could be considered popular on the mainland was college. But girlfriends. . . ." He shrugs. "You know, I was a big Deadhead at college. But I must have been the only one ever to leave a Dead concert completely alone."
This inability to form close sexual bonds is widespread (though, as Phil shows, it is by no means universal). Fred Volkmar, the Yale professor, shared with me the example of one 18-year-old Asperger's patient who simply stared at girls in his college cafeteria. When the unlucky object of this attention came up to him and asked him what he wanted, he would simply blurt out the carnal truth. Needless to say, the police were called on several occasions.
"When I was at school," Mark says, "I was doing too well to be called mentally retarded. So they called me 'emotionally disturbed' instead. That was the trendy label at the time. I've often wondered if it was accurate. I wouldn't say disturbed, though. Dislocated more like." Then he adds, "Except when I'm in Hawaii, of course."
Says Judy Rivkin, the executive vice president of the Asperger's Syndrome Coalition: "People forget that autistic and Asperger's children grow up. They don't just vanish into thin air. But we have to remember that you can often get by masking a disability, passing for something that you're not. Many Asperger's people seem gifted and normal, and maybe they are in some regards. But that doesn't mean that they don't have to face profound problems."
In the end, perhaps Asperger's sufferers perpetually swing between brilliance and isolation, between originality and awkwardness. Lise, for her part, recognizes that Asa alternates between wildly differing psychological states. "When I walk him from home to school," she says, "I see him stepping from one state into the other. He puts on his 'school face' and goes from being lively and relaxed to being locked into a kind of monotone. It's a startling transformation. But then, that's the Asperger's world in a nutshell."
June 18, 2000
Posted by dj on June 18, 2000, at 11:22:41
In reply to Little Professor Syndrome - Asperger's - long..., posted by dj on June 18, 2000, at 11:06:29
When I read the following article back in April I was quite taken by it, and even forwarded it to some friends and family noting that it described the type of brain I have and it does, to some degree.
However though we all have similarities my brain and personality is unique, as am I and each and every one of us ("milage varies", right Bob ; ) so it is difficult to fit into a 'syndrome' or a one size fits all box. Unfortunatly that is what the bureaucratic mindset attempts to do and that, I believe, is one reason we have a rising level of depression, anxiety and other dis-eases...in the societal model which the technocratic mindset and North American societies embrace.
Neil Postman writes brilliantly about this mindset in his books "Technopoly", "Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century", "The Dissapearance of Childhood", "Amusing Ourselves to Death", etc. where he critiques our societal embrace of the deeply shallow and points out some of the consequences..., though he does not make the link Prof. Homer-Dixon does in his article "The Razor's Edge" which I copied above...
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Einstein said mystery is fundamental,
but many fear the mystery of autism
ICEL JANE DOBELLThursday, April 6, 2000
Globe and MailAn Ottawa musicologist has suggested that Glenn Gould may have suffered from Asperger's syndrome, a mild form of autism. A psychiatrist who is writing a biography of Mr. Gould disagreed.
Two years ago, my 10-year-old, David, was diagnosed with mild autism. You would assume such a severe disorder would be obvious long before the age of 8, but autism is one of our great mysteries, difficult to diagnose, steeped in controversy, prejudice and myth.
When David and I read the musicologist's descriptions of Mr. Gould, it was obvious to us that he was high functioning autistic (HFA). Conversely, we were alarmed by the psychiatrist's description of mild autistics as "robots," incapable of eye contact, unlike Mr. Gould, who was "a delightful, very advanced child."
David reread the article several times, then -- contrary to the psychiatrist's description of HFA -- looked at me with his intense blue eyes and, exhibiting emotional pain absent in robots, asked whether we could write the psychiatrist to explain the truth about HFA.
For 50 years, autism has been under attack. We know now that autism ranges from high to low functioning individuals -- each as unique and typically human as any person. One school principal says David is as wise as an old philosopher. Other descriptions run from "sensitive, compassionate and amazing" to "dreamy and obsessive."
David is obsessed, like Mr. Gould, with one interest; in his case, it is marine biology. When discussing the sea, his focus is unshakable. His cheeks flush with passion and his eyes become impenetrable. He paces back and forth pontificating, then suddenly stops to stare into the heavens for further enlightenment, oblivious to his audience. Like an absent-minded inventor, scientist or artist -- areas of human expression where HFA is typically found -- he often retreats into his imagination.
Mr. Gould's refuge was the piano. David's sanctuary is the Marine Ecology Station on Vancouver Island. This ark, filled with all manner of ocean life, was created by a visionary marine biologist, Bill Austin. Here, David is permitted every summer to play the role of junior marine biologist, conducting unofficial side tours of Bill's magical wonderland, complete with row after row of microscopes poised over tanks rich with specimens.
Like the Pied Piper, David marches around the station with children in tow, a group enchanted by his anecdotes and details inherently interesting to the young: the grasping mating ritual of crabs, the excretion of fluids by the bulbous sea cucumber, the affectionate and endearing habits of the octopus.
Dr. Austin works to keep it accurate.
When David conducts his tours, he becomes heightened and somehow separate -- but he is no robot. True, when discussing biology or in the face of subjects that do not capture his interest, he withdraws into his own world, but he is also capable of being present, sensitive and intuitive. Though he regularly misses social cues, he can also be acutely perceptive.
This often occurs while we watch films such as Jane Eyre or Howard's End.In Emma, when the heroine must apologize to Miss Bates for an unkind remark, David yells with his own embarrassment and races upstairs to hide under the pillows. One of his favourite characters is Darcy in Pride and Prejudice; he is incapable of social games, and we are convinced he is HFA.
David's capacity to integrate any situation is influenced by his extreme sensitivity to sensory stimulation -- like Mr. Gould -- as well as his internal process, thoughts and emotions. While watching films, with minimal extraneous stimulus, his attention is riveted and he is given to deep analysis of human motives. Add other conversations, music, smells, lights and myriad distractions that might occur in any moment, and David becomes distant.
His greatest challenge is understanding social conventions. His ability and contrary inability to comprehend the emotions and expectations of others leads to misunderstandings. But he is far from insensitive to these situations. For hours after each crisis, he must go over the details to process his own experience and to understand the experience of others. He is like a scientist of human behaviour, or an alien challenged by the enigma and complexity of human inconsistencies and hypocrisies.
David is shockingly honest and direct -- the source of much of his troubles, as it was Mr. Gould's. David cannot pretend to comply with expectations he feels are unreasonable. If he is not engaged in a conversation, he cannot feign interest. His eyes cloud over and no amount of bribery or threats can induce him to focus.
David, like Mr. Gould, has his share of eccentricities. Mr. Gould predominantly ate scrambled eggs and Arrowroot biscuits. David has a passion for butter. But it cannot be melted and it cannot be spread underneath the jam; it must be placed in little chunks spread out visibly on top. Or it can be on the side of the plate, but only if the plate is cold so the butter does not become too soft. At times, I feel I am living with Sally from the film When Harry Met Sally.
To adequately explain HFA would require volumes. The problem is not so much describing the behaviours as much as it is refuting all the loaded assumptions. These assumptions are steeped in judgments that reflect the values of society. Autism is threatening to society. As we fear the unknown, it is not surprising that so many are repulsed by autism and view it as a disease. But Glenn Gould was a genius and autism was part of his genius. Albert Einstein, Vladimir Nabokov, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Béla Bartok: Are all mentioned as examples of those who might have been autistic. If any of these men were anything like David, it was not necessarily the challenges of their condition that were the source of their "suffering" so much as the judgment and expectations of others.
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious," Einstein said. "It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and science." For those who know HFA intimately, there is a magical unknowable quality to these people who break down our preconceived assumptions and offer new perspectives -- often through art and science. For those who are able to embrace the challenge, autism is a window into the mystery.
Icel Jane Dobell lives in Vancouver.
Posted by Sara T on June 18, 2000, at 17:25:38
In reply to Little Professor Syndrome - Asperger's - long..., posted by dj on June 18, 2000, at 11:06:29
> I'm curious about the link between the following and depression...
>
> The Little Professor Syndrome
>
dj -
My son, age 8, going into 3rd grade, is one of those little prfessors. He has Asperger's Syndrome, ADHD, and LD. He is very bright with a high IQ, but his social skills are abismal most of the time.AS (short for Asperger's Syndrome), like all of the Autistic Spectrum disorders fall under the category of Pervasive Developmental Disorders in the DSM IV, and it is a neurological disorder. It is pervasive because it affects so many different spheres of their functioning.
Some of the things they didn't touch on much in the NYTimes article but learning disabilities such as dysgraphia (handwriting problems), and the inability to decode incoming language (people speak too fast and the listener can't process what they say) and executive function capabilities being impaired are a few.
Sensory hypersensitivy is common, as well as large and fine motor coordination problems. My son cannot stay in his regular ed classroom because the noise really gets to him. And the lunchroom, there's a minefield. Clothing textures bother him, heat and cold, and he only likes about two foods other than sweets.
Due to their obsessive way of thinking, transitions of going from one activity to another are hard and often provoke tantrums than can go on for hours and become violent at times. Their level of tolerance for frustration is very,very low.
You wondered about the link between depression and AS. It is common in this population especially as they become adolescents. The pressures of socialization become intense for them and they often cannot handle it. Suicide is a concern. My son was evaluated at age 6 because of depression, he wanted to burn himself up, go somewhere dark and bury himself. He couldn't take school. He couldn't handle the noise, the sitting, he couldn't focus on the work due to attentional problems. And demands were being placed on him that hit all his areas of weakness.My son's story is a common one for many parents. It is hard to get a diagnosis and harder to get proper educational supports. The school cited in the Times article is a very unusual place and not many of those exist. I have heard many horror stories of kids that have had to be hospitalized for depression because schools would not recognize that they needed help. I am fighting for my own son's future with that too.
But to put it in perspective, I think that there simply aren't places in our society for those who function on the margin, or are a bit strange. ADDer's have the same problem, read Thom Hartman's HUNTERS IN A FARMERS WORLD. There may have been in the past actually more ways for those people to be absorbed into society. In Uta Frith's book, THE ENIGMA OF AUTISM, she has a chapter on the history of autism and cites characters in literature back to the middle ages whose behavior was very bizarre and autistic-like.
I do think, however, it isn't as simple as saying, well, these people are just different. There are serious impairments to their functioning and because of that they are more suseptible to comorbid mental illnesses. They are also more suseptible to Tourette's Syndrome, and Seizure disorders because of the neurological damage.
If you are interested in knowing anymore about Asperger's or Autism, there are many sources. One of the best I recommend is OASIS, which is at the following URL;
http://www.udel.edu/bkirby/asperger/
Sorry for the long ramble, it's just that for me its not so much a philosophical question as it is a very concrete issue in my life.
Thanks for bringing it up though, dj.
Sara T.
Posted by Janice on June 18, 2000, at 17:59:58
In reply to More on Little Professor Syndrome ..., posted by dj on June 18, 2000, at 11:22:41
dj,
great articles (I also enjoyed your depression one above)! I was just telling Sara above that one of my uncle's has Asperger's Syndrome. And you're right, all disorders/syndrones melt into one another.
If you haven't all ready seen 32 short films about Glenn Gould, rent it. It is really brillant…and yes he was wonderfully quirky. If I remember correctly, he had only one close friend - a cousin. Or this is how it seemed in the film.
I digress, but one of the writers of this film (Don McKellar), went to create a series with CBC called Twitch City. Basically it was about the life of an agoraphobic, eccentric young man who wouldn't leave his house. To give you an idea of how quirky it was, one show's plot went like this: After the 2 roommates fight about getting catfood for the fat cat, 1 roommate leaves to go to the corner store. He gets in a fight with a bag man, accidently kills him and ends up in jail. An always whacky and pleasantly surprising, if you're interested? It may have finished in March.
You must feel a bit relieved to have a better idea of yourself dj,
Peace, love and all that good stuff,
Janice
Posted by CarolAnn on June 18, 2000, at 19:09:05
In reply to More on Little Professor Syndrome ..., posted by dj on June 18, 2000, at 11:22:41
Oprah did a show on ADD/ADHD and the doctors said that these disorders may be mild forms of autism. CarolAnn
Posted by dj on June 18, 2000, at 21:07:46
In reply to Re: More on Little Professor Syndrome ..., posted by Janice on June 18, 2000, at 17:59:58
>
> You must feel a bit relieved to have a better >idea of yourself dj,
>
Janice,I wouldn't go so far to say I have Asperger's Syndrome,particularly after reading the NY Times article and Sara's very eloquent, insightful and informative discussion of it and her son's condition. However, I do recognize in myself some of the sensitivities that both outline, just to a much lesser degree.
I tend toward introversion but I can be very extrovered (XNTX according to Myers-Briggs) in some situations - political campaigns which I've worked on, for instance. However in crowded situations (parties for intance) I do often am anxious if I am not in a defined role, if I am just being and if I allow myself to get tense I can obsess. I've long been conscious of this. The work I did at the Haven helped me be more accepting of it, though I still go there at times.
However if I am in a role (host for instance, which is rare but which I enoy, usually...) I can excel, if I am comfortable, which is the key for me - being comfortable in whatever situation I'm in as my perfectionistic tendencies push me to perform it well. If I feel comfortable then I perform well in most situations I am in, if not and I'm obsessing that's when I'm not good at reading social cues. So perhaps when I tense up excessively I go into a mode like a low level Aspergers where I don't read social signs so well, though it's a result of me being stuck in my own angst.
Best to all!
dj
Posted by dj on June 18, 2000, at 21:38:07
In reply to Re: Little Professor Syndrome - Asperger's - long... » dj, posted by Sara T on June 18, 2000, at 17:25:38
> But to put it in perspective, I think that there simply aren't places in our society for those who function on the margin, or are a bit strange. ADDer's have the same problem, read Thom Hartman's HUNTERS IN A FARMERS WORLD. There may have been in the past actually more ways for those people to be absorbed into society. In Uta Frith's book, THE ENIGMA OF AUTISM, she has a chapter on the history of autism and cites characters in literature back to the middle ages whose behavior was very bizarre and autistic-like.
>
> I do think, however, it isn't as simple as saying, well, these people are just different. There are serious impairments to their functioning and because of that they are more suseptible to comorbid mental illnesses. They are also more suseptible to Tourette's Syndrome, and Seizure disorders because of the neurological damage.
>
Sara,Thanks for your very thougtful, insightful and informative comments on your son's condition, aspergers and autism. It helped me get a better
sense of what it is about.A very erudite writer who has helped appreciate the gift in some of the very different and unique human conditions and their consequences is
Dr. Oliver Sacks who wrote "An Anthropologist on Mars : Seven Paradoxical Tales" about: "...autistic Temple Grandin, whose own book "Thinking in Pictures" gives her version of how she feels--as unlike other humans as a cow or a Martian. The other minds Sacks describes are equally remarkable: a surgeon with Tourette's syndrome, a painter who loses color vision, a blind man given the ambiguous gift of sight, artists with memories that overwhelm "real life," the autistic artist Stephen Wiltshire, and a man with memory damage for whom it is always 1968." - courtesy of Amazon.comThough I haven't read this book I've read "The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat" from which I learned a lot about Tourette's Syndrome which like him I am more aware of when I see someone with it 'acting out' their verbal tics. I have read excerpts from the above including the tale of the sugeonn with Tourette's who lives in a small town here in British Columbia and flys a small plane, which like surgery is pretty amazing if you know anything about the syndrome.
The key point Sacks makes very eloquently in his books and interviews I've read is that we all have our unique challenges and our unique gifts and finding the balance is the key. For some of this, this is more of a challenge than others and perhaps there is more of a gift there as well...in the long run. We all have to figure that out for ourselves in our own unique ways with whatever help we can garner.
Whether our society is becoming more supportive or less for individual idiosyncrocies is something for the historians to grapple with... I believe there are signs that some segments of our society are becoming more tolerant of a broader range of differences, though there are a vocal lot who resist their more compassionate selves.
I believe that it is an important and integral role to help foster those compassionate tendencies in our society, by speaking out and making sure that the voices of those who aren't easily heard above the din, are noted and their needs looked after...Marianne Williamson writes quite movingly about this in her book: "Healing the Soul of America" and it is the core principal behind all religions. We are indeed, our brothers' and sisters' keepers and it is only by truly helping others that we help ourselves, I believe, while making sure that our own needs are looked after. Otherwise we abuse aka sin against our own individual and societal core beings.
Sante!
dj
Posted by Sara T on June 18, 2000, at 23:02:26
In reply to Re: More on Little Professor Syndrome ..., posted by dj on June 18, 2000, at 21:07:46
> >
> > You must feel a bit relieved to have a better >idea of yourself dj,
> >
> Janice,
>
> I wouldn't go so far to say I have Asperger's Syndrome,particularly after reading the NY Times article and Sara's very eloquent, insightful and informative discussion of it and her son's condition. However, I do recognize in myself some of the sensitivities that both outline, just to a much lesser degree.
>
dj -
Did you think you might be AS? Actually I was surprised to see a post about that article.Have you ever read a book called SHADOW SYNDROMES? Their is a great discussion in that book in a chapter called "Shy Gorillas" which talks about people who don't have the full blown syndrome of autism or AS, but who would be considered eccentric. They are the people on the edges, but also often quite productive and creative.
Given the chance to hold forth on his interests, my son can be quite social actually. Other kids seems to like him and they come to him because of his extraordinary store of knowledge. Outside of that though, he doesn't seem to care much about whether or not he's with people. Proximity to others actually makes him rather irritable and overloaded and he starts to "stim". That is to spin, or flap, or make some other repetitive movements. I've heard adult AS persons say they still do that, although many have learned to control it.
Sara T.
Posted by dj on June 19, 2000, at 2:28:12
In reply to Re: More on Little Professor Syndrome ... » dj, posted by Sara T on June 18, 2000, at 23:02:26
>
> dj -
> Did you think you might be AS?
>
> Proximity to others actually makes him rather irritable and overloaded and he starts to "stim". That is to spin, or flap, or make some other repetitive movements. I've heard adult AS persons say they still do that, although many have learned to control it.
>
> Sara T.Sara,
Thanks again for some more thoughtful comments. Though I don't think I have AS, certainly not in a full blown way, I certainly could have the Shadow Syndrome (do u know who the author of that book is?, sounds interesting...), particularly when feeling stressed, which is when I (and we according to research I've read on social styles) often fall back to our most basic and not always best habits and instincts.
Many would and doubtless do consider me eccentric, as I am certainly not conventional. Whichever way the crowd is going is likely to be the opposite of my destination, in most cases. I certainlyn don't and never have (that I'm aware of) "stimmed", other than to repeatly vibrate a pencil or tap my foot, but generally not to excess and I am conscious (through learning) of aversive and encouraging social cues, though I've been known to ignore them more than many...
I can and do get edgy if I am in one spot too much, particularly if there is a crowd of folks about, if I am not totally absorbed in what I am doing. I was once told after an interview that if I was asked what time it was, I might respond by telling them how the watch was made or perhaps the theory of time. I can overdo it when it comes to information and my walls are plastered with quotes, articles, comics and pictures to a degree that others sometimes find over-stimulating. To me it's just mental wallpaper and as a friend once remarked - a model of my mind.
Truly I am more of an info-junkie than a people person as a get bored very quickly with folks or situations whom or which I don't consider stimulating and am quick to move on. However astrology tells me that, much of this is just Gemini traits... ; ), including skating over the surface of too much info...and diving too deep, sometimes...
Sante!
dj
Posted by NikkiT on June 19, 2000, at 11:15:47
In reply to Little Professor Syndrome - Asperger's - long..., posted by dj on June 18, 2000, at 11:06:29
I can't give a wonderful, elequent answer in the way you ahve been getting...
But, I've done a fair amount of reading and stuff on various forms of Autism, as my 7 year old nephew is quite severly autistic.
Once learning the basics, I can see autistic traits in so many members of my family, and also in friends... Someone else once said that the same as I ahve found - That most programmers have autistic tendencies.. and boy, I know alot of programmers, and they display alot of the characteristics.
No help... but mild forms are more commmon than we think - I can even see bits in me at times!!
Posted by dj on June 19, 2000, at 21:56:35
In reply to Re: Little Professor Syndrome - Asperger's - long..., posted by NikkiT on June 19, 2000, at 11:15:47
> I can't give a wonderful, elequent answer in the way you ahve been getting...
>Nikki, if you spent as much time and money as I have on learning and unlearning good and bad habits, in writing and life, you would probably be more eloqent than I. However, you are perfectly eloquent writing the way you do. I still get your core comments.
> ..I can see autistic traits in so many members of my family, and also in friends... Someone else once said that the same as I ahve found - That most programmers have autistic tendencies.. and boy, I know alot of programmers, and they display alot of the characteristics.
>I meant to mention in my previous note that stimming is probably what Bill Gates does. He's noted for being somewhat anti-social and for rocking away when discussion is going on around him and for being rude... ; ), and it hasn't stopped him a bit, from making lots of money and headlines.
> No help... but mild forms are more commmon than we think - I can even see bits in me at >times!!I think we all have tendencies toward all traits and some are just more defined and predominant in some of us, and even more so when stressed...we hold all possibilities within our grasps - the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful and so on and so forth...
Posted by Janice on June 19, 2000, at 23:57:20
In reply to Re: More on Little Professor Syndrome ..., posted by dj on June 18, 2000, at 21:07:46
so you like to know what is coming and what is expected, and what your role is? And to feel competent.
So you're probably completely not pretencious.
The Glenn Gould film I told you about was actually not a movie, it was a documentary with Glenn Gould in it. if you like music, if you like interestingly done movies, if you are interested in AS, if you want a bit of entertainment, RENT IT dj.
Janice
My uncle who very definately has Aspergers is very eccentric. He has a room in his house just for his socks. Last I heard he's been rotating them (he is worried about sun damage). He eats the same thing every day. The good part about him is his generousity (Do you know if this is a characteristic of the disorder?). He had a great job of high responsibility. What about depression, do you know if it often accompanies AS?
Posted by dj on June 20, 2000, at 8:30:31
In reply to dj…, posted by Janice on June 19, 2000, at 23:57:20
> so you like to know what is coming and what is expected, and what your role is? And to feel competent.
>Don't we all? Some of us perhaps more than others...
> So you're probably completely not pretencious.
Try not to be, and I have my moments...
>
> The Glenn Gould film ... RENT IT dj.Don't have a TV, so have to rely on friends. However, never been drawn to G. Gould
>generousity (Do you know if this is a >characteristic of the disorder?). He had a great >job of high responsibility. What about >depression, do you know if it often accompanies >AS?
Every thing I know about it is what I've read in the articles I posted and the comments I made. I sent a copy of the Little Proffesor article to one of my brothers who agreed I sometimes show some of the traits to some degree and those are often under conditions where I'm feeling stressed.
As I noted in my last post I believe we all have some of these tendencies, they are just much more marked and consistent in those for whom it is labelled a syndrome, because they are that much further from today's mainstream definition of normal. In the article some of the AS folks referred tot he normals though they were just referring to the predominant norm, which didn't match theirs.
What sort of work does your uncle do?
Posted by Sara T on June 20, 2000, at 10:24:15
In reply to dj…, posted by Janice on June 19, 2000, at 23:57:20
> so you like to know what is coming and what is expected, and what your role is? And to feel competent.
>
> So you're probably completely not pretencious.
>
> The Glenn Gould film I told you about was actually not a movie, it was a documentary with Glenn Gould in it. if you like music, if you like interestingly done movies, if you are interested in AS, if you want a bit of entertainment, RENT IT dj.
>
> Janice
>
> My uncle who very definately has Aspergers is very eccentric. He has a room in his house just for his socks. Last I heard he's been rotating them (he is worried about sun damage). He eats the same thing every day. The good part about him is his generousity (Do you know if this is a characteristic of the disorder?). He had a great job of high responsibility. What about depression, do you know if it often accompanies AS?Janice,
Your uncle sounds great. Extreme social niavity is part of AS, and may or may not be behind your uncle's generosity. Then again, he could just be a good soul. AS people are also known for their great loyalty, and their adherence to what they perceive as "the rules". And yes, depression often is a part of AS, as is OCD, and high anxiety. It is a population at risk for suicide due to depression, esp. during adolescence. See my first post to dj.take care,
Sara T.BTW, what is the name of the Gleen Gould movie? Are there other documentaries about him?
Posted by Sara T on June 20, 2000, at 22:34:42
In reply to janice query best suited for NikkiT or Sheri T, posted by dj on June 20, 2000, at 8:30:31
> As I noted in my last post I believe we all have some of these tendencies, they are just much more marked and consistent in those for whom it is labelled a syndrome, because they are that much further from today's mainstream definition of normal. In the article some of the AS folks referred tot he normals though they were just referring to the predominant norm, which didn't match theirs.
>
dj - I thought you might be interested in this. It's a look a normalcy from the other side of the glass.Taken from THE INSTIUTE FOR THE STUDY OF THE NEUROTYPICAL website -URL http://ISNT.Autistics.org
What Is NT?
Neurotypical syndrome is a neurobiological disorder characterized by preoccupation with social concerns, delusions of superiority, and obsession with conformity.Neurotypical individuals often assume that their experience of the world is either the only one, or the only correct one. NTs find it difficult to be alone. NTs are often intolerant of seemingly minor differences in others. When in groups NTs are socially and behaviorally rigid, and frequently insist upon the performance of dysfunctional, destructive, and even impossible rituals as a way of maintaining group identity. NTs find it difficult to communicate directly, and have a much higher incidence of lying as compared to persons on the autistic spectrum.
NT is believed to be genetic in origin. Autopsies have shown the brain of the neurotypical is typically smaller than that of an autistic individual and may have overdeveloped areas related to social behavior.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Normal Disorders: 666.00 Neurotypic Disorder
How Common Is It?
Tragically, as many as 9625 out of every 10,000 individuals may be neurotypical.Are There Any Treatments For NT?
There is no known cure for Neurotypical Syndrome.However, many NTs have learned to compensate for their disabilities and interact normally with autistic persons.
Could I be NT?
Take the Online NT Screening Test.Papers and Abstracts
The Theory of Social Delusion
NT Social Skills Deficiencies: A Case Study
The Sal and Anne Test: Implications, and Theory of Mind
Riviera N. The Sal and Annie Test: Implications, and Theory of Mind. Journal of Neurologic Obfuscation. 1998(8):302-987
Pheromone of Social Delusion: Theory, Discovery and Primary Test Results.
DSN entry for Normal Personality Disorder
DSN entry for Pseudosimultaneous Awareness Disorder
DSN entry for Psychiatry Disorder
NT Theory of Mind
About This Site
This site is an expression of autistic outrage.About a year ago I learned I was on the autistic spectrum. Inspired by this discovery, I read everything I could get my hands on about the autistic spectrum. Much of it makes sense-- for the first time in 41 years, I had a description, albiet an unexpected one, that fit me.
But a lot of what I've found out there, mostly written by "experts" and "professionals", has been arrogant, insulting, and just plain wrong. My bête noire of the moment is finding my emotions described as "flat". As someone with considerably greater expertise in my emotions than the "experts", I can state unequivocally that my emotions are not "flat". They are different, yes, but they are most certainly not "flat."
Perhaps tomorrow I'll be fired up over being described as "lacking empathy". Or I'll be outraged at an exceptionally clueless "training" method being inflicted upon autistic kids. Or maybe it will be some new paper written by some "expert" from the perspective that neurotypical perception is correct, and my brain is a genetic mistake.
My brain is a jewel. I am in awe of the mind that I have. I and my experience of life is not inferior, and may be superior, to the NT experience of life.
Hence, this "Institute". Persons on the autistic spectrum and NT supporters are invited to submit papers to the Institute, and to share your observations in "Current Research" (the guestbook).
-muskie
Copyright © 1998-1999 ISNT@grrltalk.net.
Posted by Janice on June 21, 2000, at 0:20:49
In reply to Re: dj… » Janice , posted by Sara T on June 20, 2000, at 10:24:15
My uncle works one of the banks, although his dream would have been to be a farmer. This was not possible so he turned farming into his passion and hobby. When he would have to travel to Toronto for business conferences, he would come to my house almost every evening to work in my garden plot.
yes Sara, he loves rules. I always wondered if he was judgemental and perhaps conventional. So many family members seemed scared to tell him certain things, like one cousin refused to tell him that she is gay, another cousin got a woman pregnet and he wanted to try to hide this from him. But in the 34 years I've known him, he has never said anything judgemental - and his loyalty to his family has been matched only by my dogs to me. he never married.
from my limited knowledge and exposure to this syndrome, it's not bad. I guess most disorders get really bad when mood disorders get involved.
I believe that film was called "32 short films about Glenn Gloud". It won alot of awards, both here in Canada and internationally. I'm sure it's 'the best' film ever on Glenn Gloud, and I imagine the article dj posted above was written and based on that film. The writer also cowrote and stared in the film 'The Red Violin', which I know for certain was in the States and did well there.
like thanks for posting that other disorder. I've got it like so bad--ouch!
fondly the hyperchondriac, Janice
Posted by dj on June 21, 2000, at 10:08:42
In reply to How to Diagnose a Neurotypical » dj, posted by Sara T on June 20, 2000, at 22:34:42
>
> But a lot of what I've found out there, mostly written by "experts" and "professionals", has been arrogant, insulting, and just plain wrong. ...
>
> My brain is a jewel. I am in awe of the mind that I have. I and my experience of life is not inferior, and may be superior, to the NT experience of life.
>Bang on!! Thanks for sharing that!!!
Posted by Johnturner77 on June 28, 2000, at 13:35:13
In reply to Re: How to Diagnose a Neurotypical, posted by dj on June 21, 2000, at 10:08:42
I never remember hearing it in the press, but Ted Kozinski must be an AS. The bizarre interests, social difficulties and obsessions.
I know a lady that is AS. She looks like a model but is a social oddball. She alternates isolation with going to Singles retreats where she is the center of attention. Her verbal reparte is phenomenal. She specializes in finding alternate meanings in whatever you say. She is very sensitive to loud sounds. A couple of years ago she discovered computer programming. Now she is going to school for it but is in no hurry to finish. She had a brief marriage to her date rapist. She now dates constantly but always drops the guys who get serious. They can prolong the friendship(it has to be platonic) by hiding that fact.
Actually my brother has a lot of charactereistics. High IQ, amd socially clueless. He is a little farther up the continuum toward normality.
Posted by noa on June 28, 2000, at 16:19:38
In reply to Re: Asperger's...Ted Kozinski is likely one..., posted by Johnturner77 on June 28, 2000, at 13:35:13
Interesting thought. I think with Kaczynski, though, there developed a co-existing delusional disorder (paranoia).
Posted by Sara T on June 28, 2000, at 22:54:34
In reply to Re: Asperger's...Ted Kozinski is likely one..., posted by Johnturner77 on June 28, 2000, at 13:35:13
> I never remember hearing it in the press, but Ted Kozinski must be an AS. The bizarre interests, social difficulties and obsessions.
>I am a bit disturbed at this post. Ted Kaczynski was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He believed that society was controlling him and his problems were all caused by outside influences.
Although some of the symptoms may look the same, there are fundamental difference. People with Asperger's syndrome and autism aren't psychotic unless they have a comorbid psychosis which is not any more common in that population than in the general one. They fail to recognize other people's mind states, called by some "mind blindness", therefore they tend to be very niave. Their obsessions generally involve things, or objects rather than people or large complex societal issues. They just don't get it why someone would cheat or lie because to understand that would imply that you are aware of others having a mental state which differs from your own. Thus they cannot predict someone else's state of mind. Paranoids, however, falsely predict other people's mental states, eg.,that someone is out to do them harm.
Just on the basis of that I'd say Kaczynski probably didn't have Asperger's syndrome. Also, most people with Asperger's syndrome recognize their disabilities just like people with ADD recognize their impaired functioning. Whereas Kaczynski never believed he was ill.
It's this kind of misunderstanding of neurological disorders that fuels myths about people with Asperger's syndrome as being violent. It perpetuates inappropriate negative responses on the part of the larger society that these people live in.
Sara T.
Posted by dj on June 29, 2000, at 2:19:27
In reply to Re: Asperger's...Ted Kozinski is likely one..., posted by noa on June 28, 2000, at 16:19:38
> Interesting thought. I think with Kaczynski, though, there developed a co-existing delusional >disorder (paranoia).
Kaczynski's reasoning, from his published treatise on society and technology, was described as credible (though not the violence he took on himself to commit), logical and a genuine reason for concern by the chief scientist from Sun Microsystems in a widely reported cover story in Wired magazine, back in April or so (can't figure out which pile of mags. I've go it in).
As well, in a recent (May or June I believe) cover story in the Atlantic a fellow Harvard student from Kaczynski's era details how Kaczynski was very young and driven when he arrived at Harvard (from what would now be termed as a dysfunctional family), how the values he promotes are in line with the values he learned in his studies at Harvard and in some cruel psych. experiments he was coerced into participating in...
There is a reason for everything, ever action and every re-action and if we look deeply and carefully enough at causes and effects we can see them, without reverting to simplistic diagnostics, third hand or so...
As Einstein noted: "Make things as simple as possible and no simpler." If we all followed that dictum our society would be much saner and healthier. Instead we have a society addicted to mass trivia and idiotic, pseudo-events like: Survivor which demontrates clearly the thesis behind the brilliant book: "Amusing Ourselves to Death: by Neil Postman.
Posted by noa on June 29, 2000, at 8:18:09
In reply to Re: Asperger's...Ted Kozinski is likely one... » Johnturner77, posted by Sara T on June 28, 2000, at 22:54:34
Thank you for pointing out the distinctions. I think what John Turner was focusing on in thinking kaczynski might have had aspergers is the shunning of stimulation and people, the high proficiency for math and science and home-made technology.
But the differences in "theory of mind" are enormous, as you point out. In aspergers, there is the absence of theory of mind, while in paranoid schizophrenia, there is almost an overactive theory of mind, ie, attributing intentions that are not really there.
I think, however, that there are probably plenty of folks who have been labeled as schizophrenic who might better be described as having something akin to aspergers, but they grew up before aspergers was widely understood by professionals. And, I imagine that to a certain degree, there might be individuals with aspergers who were misunderstood and mistreated because they were different, who subsequently developed feelings of paranoia based on their very real experiences of being picked on by peers and treated harshly by teachers and others. But I suspect that it would be the extremely rare occurence that this would develop into a full blown fixed paranoid delusional system, unless such a psychotic disorder was in the cards for them anyway, separate from the aspergers.
Posted by Johnturner77 on June 29, 2000, at 8:43:21
In reply to Re: Asperger's...Ted Kozinski is likely one... » Johnturner77, posted by Sara T on June 28, 2000, at 22:54:34
>
> Just on the basis of that I'd say Kaczynski probably didn't have Asperger's syndrome. Also, most people with Asperger's syndrome recognize their disabilities just like people with ADD recognize their impaired functioning. Whereas Kaczynski never believed he was ill.
>
> It's this kind of misunderstanding of neurological disorders that fuels myths about people with Asperger's syndrome as being violent. It perpetuates inappropriate negative responses on the part of the larger society that these people live in.
>
> Sara T.Yeah your right. I will consider my knuckles rapped! 8>) And I really Americanized his name spelling, too. I didn't follow the story that closely. I seem to remember some rather eccentric childhood interests mentioned. A double diagnosis is still a small possibility. That would really be a double whammy, wouldn't it.
Posted by Sara T on June 29, 2000, at 12:14:49
In reply to Re: Asperger's...Ted Kozinski is likely one..., posted by Johnturner77 on June 29, 2000, at 8:43:21
> >
> Yeah your right. I will consider my knuckles rapped! 8>) And I really Americanized his name spelling, too. I didn't follow the story that closely. I seem to remember some rather eccentric childhood interests mentioned. A double diagnosis is still a small possibility. That would really be a double whammy, wouldn't it.Thanks John,
I'm probably over sensitive on this issue since my son has Asperger's. My apology for getting on my high horse. And yes, that would be a double whammy!!
Noa - you are correct that many who were dx'd in the past were dx'd incorrectly as Atypical Schizophrenia - or with Schizoid Personality. As a result they weren't given the right treatments and really suffered.
Asperger was active at the same time as Kanner, who originally described classic autism. But with WWII, since Asperger was in Austria, his work was largely ignored until the 1980's when a British researcher translated his original thesis from the German. So it has been around for awhile but not in this country as a diagnostic category. However it has been in the WHO's diagnostic categories since the 80's.
Interestly, the word Autism was orginally used in connection with the withdrawal seen in schizophrenia. Kanner used it to describe the severe withdrawal of the children he described. Asperger, perhahps describing a set of higher functioning children used the term schizoid. There is or was a diagnostic category of Childhood Schizoid Disorder, but it apparently not very useful because it is so vague.
Nowadays, all disorders in the Autistic Spectrum are under the umbrella of Pervasive Developmental Disorders.
Thanks - Sara T.
Posted by harry b. on June 29, 2000, at 12:24:54
In reply to Re: Asperger's...Ted Kozinski is likely one..., posted by dj on June 29, 2000, at 2:19:27
> There is a reason for everything, ever action
>and every re-action...
>A take on a basic law of physics, applicable to
psychology and society.
>and if we look deeply and carefully enough at
>causes and effects we can see them, without reverting
>to simplistic diagnostics, third hand or so...I agree, with reservations. One constraint
is time, our very limited time. If, in my 50yrs,
I am unable to decipher the myriad causes and effects that
led me to who I am, how can we propose to know and explain
anothers psyche and motives? We can briefly examine the known
and supposed causes, the perceieved effects, and reach a conclusion.
That conclusion inevitably will fall short of the
reality and will inherently be subjective.Nature vs nurture is also a part of the equation.
Finally, we have the Chaos Theory. We are, after
all, creatures of the universe.Sometimes 'simplistic diagnostics' are adequate.
hb
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