My daughter’s diagnosis didn’t involve many tests like that, but years of observation and lots of tests to rule out other problems (her hearing was tested loads of times, for example). Actually, there might have been tests like that, but done in the observation sessions - at clinics and at school - rather than by asking her directly.
Of course, none of this would have happened if she didn’t have demonstrably large problems that the school couldn’t cope with - you couldn’t just roll up and say ‘test my child now!’ Not if you wanted a proper diagnosis, anyway.
If Sheldon was homeschooled, like someone above said, then some of the socialisation problems wouldn’t have been noticeable, or at least not as much, and there wouldn’t have been teachers making or suggesting referrals, so it wouldn’t be surprising that he didn’t have an official diagnosis.
Course, since he’s a TV character they can say what they like about his diagnosis anyway. Pigeonholing him as a character with Asperger’s would not only box them in regarding his character’s development (if they let him have any), but have people saying ‘that’s not what people with Asperger’s do!’ as if all people with Asperger’s always act in a certain defined way.
Sheldon is, in the context of a humorous fictional depiction, a representation of someone with Asperger’s Disorder.
The essential distinction between Autism and Asperger’s Disorder is the absence of delays or deficits in the use and development of language in the latter.
A “qualitative impairment in social interaction” does not necessarily mean that a person will have no friends or will be unable to ever interact with a novel individual during their life. Furthermore, eye contact is just one potential indicator of impaired nonverbal social behaviors. Anyone who would be just as content to have a remote controlled robot act in their stead throughout the day would reasonably be said to have some issues as regards social interactions.
I’d also say that he has an “apparently inflexible adherence to specific, non-functional routines and rituals.” He’s quite regimented about what food should be eaten on what days, where he sits, and so forth.
Individuals with autism and Asperger’s Disorder show quite a bit of ability to change during the course of their development, even without intervention, understanding that there are individual differences in initial severity and in rates of change. Their naturalistic developmental change is going to be much slower, however, because normal developmental change relies heavily on broad observation of others, appreciation of nuance in social interactions, ability to read and understand social cues, emotions in others, and abstractions. If you experience distress when confronted with human faces and don’t understand that one person may have intangible and unseen effects on others, you’re going to miss out on a lot of the things that facilitate typical development.
This is something I would agree with. To come back to the moralistic bend of my OP, is then somehow gauche to comically depict Asperger’s?
In the era of Family Guy and South Park, I’ve seen episodes making fun of down syndrome, and severe mental retardation, so IMO, jokingly handling someone’s Asperger’s is far from the worst offense. It may even been seen as empowering to see someone with this condition who is not only fairly social, but asides from a few quirks seems to lead a very adjusted life with a (successful?) career in academia.
Anyone care to take up that angle? I’m still tussling with it myself.
I’ve never seen Big Bang Theory, but it absolutely is possible to make a disabled character funny, as long as the jokes are written so you’re laughing with the character, not at them.
Unless you’re Parker and Stone, and then TIMMEH is a laugh fuckin’ riot.
He’s more often the one making the jokes than the one who’s the butt of the jokes. I’d say it’s fine. Anyway, fiction would be really dull if everyone in it were ‘normal.’
TBBT uses one of the basic tropes of humor that I call the “The Man from Mars”. This is an observer from outside our social matrix that point out the absurdities in our everyday life. It can be done literally like “My Favorite Martian”, “Mork and Mindy” and “Third Rock from The Sun” or a mild version like “The Beverly Hillbillies” or Latka on “Taxi”.
The important thing to understand is that from Sheldon’s point of view, he isn’t disabled, but a patient man dealing with a bunch of neurotic imbeciles. Frankly, I think Sheldon has a point. What he regards as arbitrary and senseless social conventions, are in fact, arbitrary and senseless social conventions.
I don’t see Sheldon as an outside observer in order to comment on peculiarities of social convention at all. I cannot think of an occasion where Sheldon and social norms intersected in a manner that suggested the social norms were unusual. His inflexibilities appear much more the point. Again, his regimented eating habits and difficulty with violations of his expectations there (such as being distressed at trying a new restaurant or eating a different dish), his seating preference, his extensive roommate rules (which he has internalized to the point of being able to reference specific subsections and paragraphs), his knocking ritual, his idiosyncratic and rote laugh (which suggests something other than a true experience of joy and humor), his difficulty grasping the nuances of gift giving, all point to Sheldon’s peculiarities rather than society’s.
By the way, I should point out that his knocking ritual is not a good representation of the ritual that someone with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) would engage in. OCD rituals are driven by a need to manage anxiety and internal distress, perhaps in response to an obsessive thought about something bad that might happen. Sheldon’s knocking is not portrayed as serving any purpose such as that. In fact, he isn’t shown to particularly experience anxiety much at all, except when his routines or expectations are violated.
Just because Sheldon (or you, or whomever) may not understand the reasoning behind (subsets of) social conventions doesn’t actually make them senseless. If someone struggles horrifically with math and they say that math is dumb and makes no sense… that means it doesn’t make sense to that individual. Obviously mathematics make a great deal of sense to many people.
Social skills are important, sorry. That’s one area Sheldon really is “dumb” about. Does that make him not overall intelligent? Not at all. But it also means that someone who has trouble with even basic arithmetic cannot automatically be labeled as “not overall intelligent”, either.*
Is that a quote from the show? Regardless, you can’t scale IQ-intelligence like that.
Personally, I can’t friggin’ stand watching TBBT. My husband loves it, though, so I’m familiar with the characters. Not meaning to threadshit, since I totally get why people do enjoy it.
You don’t think most people would read that sentence and think ‘she had her tested - that means she had a test done,’ rather than ‘she had 6 years of constant tests, psychiatrist visits, observations etc’?
On the other hand, it really doesn’t take (or shouldn’t) take six years, nor multiple visits or observations. Greater observations over time and evidence from different contexts would obviously give you more confidence in the diagnosis, but it really doesn’t require that much effort in order to generate a pretty solid sense regarding the presence or absence of the disorder.
It shouldn’t have taken six years, but the thing about a spectrum disorder is that it will present differently in different contexts and on different days. so multiple observations are essential or the diagnosis is worthless. With children, these have to be done over time to see how much of the behaviour is permanent and how much is just a phase. We’re not talking about non-verbal autism here.
No. I’d be surprised if any people read it that way, not if they’re native English speakers. If a testing process requires more than one test, and you only did one part of it, you don’t get to state a conclusion and follow it up with “because I was tested.” That’s not what that phrase means. It means you completed the testing process, however long it took.
No specific number of tests is implied by that phrasing other than “sufficient.”
But the main part of the process was not the tests - which were mostly things like hearing tests to rule out other problems - it was observations and clinical assessments.
What, seriously? You’d diagnose Asperger’s syndrome in a child without multiple observations over time? But then you’ll miss a lot of kids who do have it, and wrongly label a lot of kids who don’t.
Really? How many Type I and Type II errors will I make? How many evaluations are required before I can make a diagnosis? What is the relative improvement in the number of each type of error I will make for each additional observation period?
All diagnoses are based on criteria that have been evaluated to be our present most informed hypothesis about where to cleave largely continuous processes. The primary problem in making a diagnosis of Asperger’s Disorder would come at the high end of the “disordered”/low end of the “non-disordered” point of the continuum. So in those circumstances, I might err in terms of the application of the specific diagnosis of Aspergers Disorder. However, if a child is showing some symptoms and parents are reporting impairment, and those symptoms are not better accounted for by another diagnostic category, then I would simply use a Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified category to explain those symptoms and impairments, and recommend treatment for the problems that are evident.
Am I making this diagnosis in the dark, or am I getting a wealth of observational and historical evidence from my clinical interview with the child’s parents? How else am I going to find out whether or not the development of speech was delayed or if the child showed stereotyped, idiosyncratic or inflexible behaviors earlier in development, even if they are muted or absent now? Repeated observations will never, ever give me any better understanding of those things.
