The aspect missing from that list is the inability to understand the feelings of others - lack of social empathy. So when Sheldon does not understand that he’s getting on others nerves, does not understand sarcasm or jokes, does not understand why people should not do what he asks (demands) when he demands - that is classic Aspergers.
Yeah, that’s exactly what we’d expect an Asperger’s person to say.
I personally think this is the real meat of the Aspergers controversy. Many parents are probably embarrassed by their “struggles and is weird” kid, and find it a lot easier to claim that the kid has some problem and be defensive about it, than to come to grips with the idea that their kid is just weird and awkward.
If they have some medical condition, then it’s just luck, God, whatever, but if they’re fucked up and weird, many parents probably view it as a failing of their own.
Same thing goes for self-diagnosed people as well… they’d rather think they have some problem, rather than think they’re weird and awkward.
Having known a LOT of weird and awkward people over the years (was in G/T or honors stuff up through undergrad, to the point of having been in an honors/scholarship dorm for 4 years) there were only two people in all that time who probably honestly were Aspergers people.
Both were just super weird- not in a weird interests or weird views kind of way, but in a way characterized by inappropriate responses, lack of responses and psychotic interest in a very narrow set of things. Neither were none too good at personal hygiene either. They didn’t get jokes, and most of the time didn’t realize a joke had been made.
They were also prone to grandiose statements, which lost one of them fifty bucks on a bet once, because he pronounced that he and he alone was smart enough to know the answer to Final Jeopardy, and that my buddy’s answer couldn’t possibly be right. So my buddy made a fifty dollar bet that the answer was his answer, and this guy took it with a proclamation that he was smarter and would certainly know the answer.
Little did super-weirdo know that in our college town, the same episode of Jeopardy came on 2 different channels in 2 subsequent time slots (3:00 and 3:30, IIRC), and that he was watching the SECOND one, while my buddy had already watched the earlier showing.
Yup its real.
I have had my diagnosis for over 15 years and I have no doubt that is an actual physical difference in the way the brain is wired.
I have a hard time calling it a disease because, frankly, I think that my mind works better than those of most neuro-typical people. I have often thought that if we were in the majority we might come up with some therapies to help you poor souls think more like us.
Living with Aspergers is a matter of learning to pretend you are NT when necessary. You never “grow out of” or stop being Aspie, you just get better at pretending. It’s always an energy drain that NTs don’t have to deal with though because we have to be able to function in your world.
Sorry, meant to add.
That doesn’t mean that it isn’t a misused diagnosis sometimes. But then everything in psychiatry is a misused diagnosis sometimes.
You might as well ask if ADHD is “real.”
… and that is the reason why I really don’t think they should include Aspergers in Autistic Spectrum. Aspies can learn to pretend to be NT. My autistic 8yo cannot pretend he doesn’t have language problems.
My husband’s spent a lot of time working with teenagers with Asperger’s and he says it’s absolutely real. It’s not the same thing as a deficit of social skills. Someone can have Asperger’s and only have mild social problems (specially someone who’s been practising fitting in), while someone can have huge social problems and not have Asperger’s.
Asperger’s isn’t a deficit; it’s a difference, in the person’s whole relationship with the world.
Once you’ve spent a certain amount of time with people with Asperger’s, you start seeing that. There are differences between people who have Asperger’s and people who don’t - vocal differences, differences in physicality, in eye contact patterns, in speech patterns, in conversational patterns… My husband can identify it within minutes at this stage. Around nine times out of ten, he turns out to be right.
I scored an 8 on that test. I don’t think I have Asperger’s.
OK, I understand where you are coming from, but I also don’t agree with you.
There are other disorders that people can “fake” through. Like schizophrenia. 1% of the population has been diagnosed with schizophrenia at some point in their lives. Chances are you’ve met one of them and did not know it. Maybe their symptoms were in remission. Or maybe they had learned how to deal with the world through a curtain of hallucinations and delusions.
These people are just as schizophrenic as your institutionalized catatonic zombie. They just have learned to cope.
Like autism, schizophrenia has been conceptualized as a spectrum. You can be at the mild end, not even falling into the formal “schizophrenic” box, and yet still suffer tremendous pain and hardship in your life. You can benefit from similar therapies afforded to schizophrenics and watch out for the same co-morbidities. By conceptualizing schizophrenia as a spectrum, researchers can better pinpoint risk factors, causes, and find ways to prevent people from deteriorating.
There are people with Asperger’s who are successful, married with kids and the whole shebang. And then there are people with Asperger’s who will always require someone to take care of them and are worse off than people with HFA. Just like there are schizotypal people who are in worse situations than people with full-blown schizophrenia. It’s complicated.
I got the same score, and drew the same conclusion about the efficacy of the test. The biggest problem with it was there was no neutral option, for the several things I don’t give a shit about. For whatever reason, it seems to have misread my not requiring a great deal of social interaction for my comfort as actively disliking it. Which I don’t, although I’m somewhat picky about who I’ll hang out with by choice.
Don’t beat yerself up. It’s yo momma’s fault for having you vaccinated.
Another aspect I’ve found is a serious inablity to remember or recognize people. I can work with people for months before I can remember their names or tell them apart, and where characters look similar in a movie I have trouble remembering who is who.
Due to my rudimentary knowledge of mirror neurons I believe Asperger’s is a highly overdiagnosed condition by both professionals and “self-diagnosers” themselves. In order to feel empathy you merely need to stand in front of somebody. Mirror neurons work by passing whatever one person is feeling on to the other person. It’s why we enjoy being around happy people and stay away from nervous people. You do not need a certain higher cognitive capacity to do this.
My theory is that a large proportion of Asperger folks (and this is not based on personal experience or real-life contact, but merely videos, and writing) are people who are “in their heads” at an extreme level. When you are in your thoughts, you are not focused on the feelings in your body. It is why (to use a stereotype) nerds tend to be socially awkward and jocks (who are less thought-oriented) run the show socially.
In order to understand empathy I suggest anybody reading this to do this exercise. Close your eyes and clear your thoughts. Once your mind is clear put all focus on the feelings in your body. Focus on the blood rushing though your hands, focus on how your breath feels, etc. Then go and talk to the nearest person. If all your focus is on your body, you will feel a good amount of what the other person is feeling. It is how we connect as humans. It’s why it’s painful to watch somebody get kicked in the crotch and lovely to see two people in love.
I believe Asperger sufferers are merely out of touch with their body and are living primarily through their heads. This leads to a lack of self-awareness (strange body language, weird social behaviors), inability to connect with others (trouble making friends), and lack of empathy (“why is the person on TV crying?”). If anybody reading this is a self-diagnosed case, please try the following treatment and see if it helps at all (I’m really interested to find out):
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Cultivate a meditation habit. Meditate everyday. Just sit there, clear your head (VERY difficult at first if you are not used to this but don’t give up, everybody can do it). Focus on your breathing, when you breath you don’t think. Also, keep your eyes centered, if they start moving around just blink them back to the center. This should clear your thoughts and make you more present.
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Focus on the feelings in your body, especially when talking to somebody else. If you have severe social anxiety (which I suspect many do), just start with a family member. You must have your thoughts cleared while doing this, otherwise you will not be completely focused. Do you feel anything now? Don’t put labels on anything (for ex. sad or angry or happy), just focus on the feeling and feel it.
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Post a reply.
If anybody is reading this that does not have Asperger’s but tends to have social anxiety or difficulty connecting with others, feel free to try this as well. In fact, this is one of the best non-drug fixes for social anxiety.
In summary, your condition may just be a predominance to always be in your thoughts (very common among intellectual types) and are currently experiencing an extreme disconnect with your mind-body. This is my theory I would really appreciate it if somebody with this condition can test this and get back to me. Please PM if you do not feel comfortable posting for all to see.
I can’t tell if you’re serious or making a joke, so maybe you’re right.
I suspect that what the writers of The Big Bang Theory did was not to make Sheldon seem similar to someone with Asperger’s and yet believable, since as has been pointed out he’s not a believable character at all. His personality doesn’t really fit into any realistic pattern. I suspect that what they did was to take the symptoms of Asperger’s and give as many of them as they could to Sheldon without making him so hard to sympathize with that it would turn the audience off. Some of the symptoms of Asperger’s would cause the audience to say, “Why is this character acting so strange? It’s hard to sympathize with him at all. It’s also boring. Is this show supposed to be a sitcom or not? This isn’t funny.” So they decided to ignore any aspects of Asperger’s that didn’t fit into the typical pattern of American sitcoms, which basically aren’t realistic at all.
md2000 writes:
> Another aspect I’ve found is a serious inablity to remember or recognize people.
> I can work with people for months before I can remember their names or tell
> them apart, and where characters look similar in a movie I have trouble
> remembering who is who.
It’s possible that what you have is prosopagnosia in addition to having Asperger’s:
This is an inability to recognize and remember faces.
Have you ever read about schizoid personality disorder?
Many self-diagnosed Aspies may want to look into this as a differential diagnosis. I consider this a more parsimonious explanation for “weird” behavior because one doesn’t have demonstrate the neurological traits that Aspergerians have.
As some Dopers know, I am schizoid. To complicate matters, I have similar traits to folks on the autism spectrum (poor motor skills, repetitive movements (stereotypies and tics), intensely narrow interests…a familiar history of mood and psychotic disorders). Asperger’s has been brought up by multiple practitioners and I’ve always shut them down. It’s not impossible that I have ASD, though I don’t think it’s likely. I don’t have a good reason believing this other than it just doesn’t “right” and I think that it is inappropriate to give me this diagnosis as an adult, with just my accounting of how I was as a kid to go on. If an adult really needs a label, schizoid personality style or PD, IMHO, should be the default. Not ASD.
As far as your hypothesis about the body and mind, you are right that I’m not connected to my body very well. Schizoids (and folks on the schiz spectrum in general) typically are not very integrated (hence the “schiz” prefix). But really, I do not think your advice will help me connect to people. I understand why people feel the way they do (why people cry when they’ve been dumped…why people smile when they see a baby). It’s just that I do not usually feel those emotions, or if I do, I am not aware of them. So that makes it hard for me to identify or relate to others. I behave in an “as-if” manner. It’s kind of like how a person who is allergic to peanuts cannot relate to people who go on and on about how good peanut butter is, even though they do know how it feels to go on and on about something. I think I withdraw from people because the constant alienation and the pretending wear me out. Not poor social skills.
I think this type of “lack of empathy”–the “lack of feeling” kind–is more common than the “lack of understanding” kind. I wouldn’t be surprised if lots of people confuse the two.
You can have any theory you like as long as you continue to preface it with the disclaimer that you don’t really know what you are talking about.
Meditation is not a cure for Aspergers.
I have no lack of desire or lack of effort to understand others. I genuinely a lack of a sense that NTs have, an empathic sense if you like. You might as well tell a blind person that they could probably learn to see if they just really concentrate.
Hounding an Aspie to “just keep trying” is exactly the wrong thing to do. Therapy for Aspergers is helping them learn to compensate for the lack of this sense, just as you might teach a blind person braille or a deaf person lip reading, you teach an Aspie to decode expression and note key phases that give clues to what is happening in another person’s mind. You also teach the Aspie what the NTs expect of them so he can pretend effectively.
My only cite for this is John Elder Robinson’s Be Different (Robinson was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome as an adult and has written a couple of books on the subject), but he says that there is research indicating that people with autism spectrum disorders have some kind of dysfunction with their mirror neurons.
Thank you for this. If true this may prove my theory incorrect, however, it tells me that I’m still in the ballpark. I would love to know if the mirror neurons themselves have something wrong with them that can’t be fixed or if it is just issues with the synapses. In that case the mirror neuron connections can be strengthened through years of “practicing” empathy which is just focusing on your feelings and feeling the feelings of others.
There has been some resistance to the exercises I suggested but I still would like the people with Asperger’s to give them a try just to see what happens. It is non-intrusive and they lose nothing by giving it a try. It is merely a different way of processing the world around you, moving down from your head into your body.
It would let me know if their mirror neurons are at the bottom of the normal scale or at the top of the “abnormal” scale (to use a very vague layman’s analogy).
I can’t speak for people with ASD, but I know when you said to “clear your mind of all thoughts”, I was reading something written by someone who doesn’t really get how atypical neurological wiring and/or chemistry can make this a major hurdle in itself.
My thoughts are in constant loop. When I am busy tooling around, I am not very aware of the loop. As soon as I slow down and focus on them and getting rid of them, that is when they move to the forefront and become loud. And the loop becomes tighter…more repetitive. It is not comfortable; sometimes blurting the thoughts out loud (i.e., looking crazy) becomes the only way to release the pressure. For this reason I try not to block out all sources external sensory input when I’m doing relaxation exercises. I keep my eyes open or something. And I try not to focus on clearing my mind and rather just let it happen, if it’s gonna happen, all on its own.
(While doing relaxation poses in yoga, I’ve found placing heavy sandbags on my hands and forehead help to keep me from going bonkers.)
From what I’ve read, people with ASD are very sensitive to sensory input. Often, they are in fact very sensitive to other people’s emotions–not insensitive. This makes sense to me, even if it’s just from a psychological perspective. It doesn’t take long for a kid who’s always saying and doing the “wrong” thing, unintentionally provoking negative reactions from people, to become hyperaware of other people’s emotional states.
But I don’t think your idea is completely strange. Many folks with ASD can be described as alexithymic, or unable to put words to feelings. They may be able to interpret other people’s emotional states just fine, but be at a loss with their own. It is a frustrating thing to have–or to at least be diagnosed with. Imagine not knowing if you’re wound up because you’re sad or angry or frustrated and having to ask someone else how THEY would feel in your situation as a way of interpreting the physical sensations in your body. Or believing that you’re fine but someone else is saying, “No, you aren’t fine because you’re shaking like a leaf and your stutter is back! I think you’re anxious but don’t realize it, sister!”
It’s just that I don’t think your solution would make people feel instantly better, as your post seems to intimate it would. I’ve been practicing your advice for years, and I still have to ask, “How would you feel if you were me?” It is still hard for me to give an intelligent answer to, “How are you feeling?” unless the emotional state is pure and intense. Any ambivalency messes things up.
You should probably have picked “schizophrenia” or “diabetes” or something as an example instead, as there actually is a significant amount of skepticism around ADHD. Skepticism over the exploding number of ADHD diagnoses, at any rate, if not actual doubt over whether the disease exists. And likely even more controversial than Asperger’s, since ADHD is commonly treated with stimulant medications, frequently administered to children.
Seriously. Not all that long ago in the 80’s & early 90’s there were people who would have bet their lives that “facilitated communication” for profoundly autistic people was “real” until it was proved to be mostly BS.