So, the reality of it is that it is unlikely any of us even KNOW a person with AS, much less HAVE it.
Uh maybe not. Selection bias. Odds are that Aspergers is more common among certain subpopulations, including narrowly focused academicians, programmers, engineers, etc. If you han in those crowds you probably know some who could fit the label, (depending on how you define “severe” etc).
My cousin on my mom’s side has been diagnosed with Asperger’s. Believe me when I say, it’s one of the very first things you notice about him. He’s very hard to relate to and even communicate with. His personality is flatline, and can be awkward to be alone with, let alone start or hold a conversation. Now, I’m sure there are varying degrees, but his seems pretty severe. He’s smart as a whip, though and can function in life just as good as you or me. But you can tell he knows he’s different, and doesn’t like it. He always looks lost at family get-togethers.
It’s clear he has emotions, he just can’t read people. It’s very robotic from the outside, but on the inside, I’m sure he feels frustrated a lot around people and probably more lonely. So, when I hear people tell me, (online or IRL) they have Asperger’s, and I can’t see anything in them but a the usual nerdy awkwardness, I roll my eyes.
I spend time on a message board with a couple of members who are officially diagnosed with Asperger’s. They manage to fit in, although yes they can be rather odd at times. They will also jump on the ass of anyone claiming to be self-diagnosed or using Asperger’s as a justification for being an asshat. They emphasize that it is a disability for them and it does impact them daily.
One of them is married to a woman willing to accommodate some of his personality weirdness.
They very much want social interaction, they’re just really bad at it.
That’s really quite sad. Does he enjoy interacting with people who make an effort to work on his wavelength? Or is human interaction just not rewarding for him?
A close relative to me has it, though it is a point of controversy inside the family. (Clinically diagnosed, for what it’s worth.)
He has a lot of trouble fitting in, in a normal setting, but works very hard to make his particular interests - all things technical, from cars, computers, videos, physics and so forth - accessible in conversation. If he notices the conversation flagging, he will try to subtly steer the conversation on to a low-level technical issue he can contribute to. For example, “Hey, Jonas, I heard your car when you pulled up, bit of a choking noise from the gears? Want me to take a look at it later?” Or, “Hey, Arvid, how’s that new projector working out for you?” A rule of thumb my dad mentioned was to try to include topics that contain or revolve around facts when you’re trying to keep a conversation going. Facts can be established and the consequences thereof debated, but philosophical or abstract topics will usually just “lock” because he’s made up his mind after his own analysis. Politics are pretty much right out, since he’s a strict pragmatist and usually has all the facts, making the kind of emotional and ethical arguments that permeat amateur politics conversations stop working.
It’s sometimes uncomfortable, because you can tell that he works very, very hard not to show his baseline, somewhat physically aggressive personality. But he’s a good guy and he’s finally found a girl who also has a technical mind and can work with or around his social deficits. It’s just a lot of work, since the usual social lubricant banter doesn’t work - and if a small-talk subject actually grabs him, he will take it further by the time when one usually digresses or changes subject.
It is real, but plenty of people on the Internet lie about having it. Well, “lie” may be too harsh. They have perhaps honestly convinced themselves that they have Asperger’s syndrome, but if they have never been diagnosed then it’s likely just an excuse for not being able to get a date. I have encountered a couple of people who were diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, and they definitely stood out.
An interesting book for anyone curious about Asperger’s is Look Me In the Eye, a memoir by John Elder Robinson (older brother of Running With Scissors author Augusten Burroughs). He describes how he was well into elementary school before he figured out that a conversation didn’t consist of just saying whatever you happened to be thinking about, but that when another person said something to you they expected you to reply with something related to what they’d just said. This comes naturally to most people, but Robinson had to work it out intellectually.
Definitely a real disorder. My wife is a clinical social worker, and learned about a bunch of the research on Asperger’s when she was taking courses on mental illness as part of her masters degree. I’ve also met people who’ve been diagnosed with it.
I kind of think that it’s the sort of thing that may be both over diagnosed and under diagnosed, much like ADD. That is, there may be a number of people getting diagnosed with it (or self-diagnosing, anyway) who shouldn’t be, but there are also probably a lot of people who have it but just never get tested for it. I suspect it’s this way with a lot of mental illnesses: Some people want to have something “wrong with them” that explains their problems, and so self-diagnose or seek out a doctor who will tell them what they want to hear. But it seems there are just as many people who are unwilling or unable to even consider the possibility there might be something “wrong with their brain”. As someone with what I now know is a pretty textbook case of ADD, I can tell you I really resisted ever seeing a psychiatrist. I was convinced that I was just a chronic procrastinator who just needed more willpower to get things done. (Speaking of which, I’m supposed to be writing my Ph.D. thesis right now. :()
Anyway, let me tell you a story about my twin brother. He’s never been screened for Asperger’s, but by wife (the aforementioned therapist) has her suspicions. He’s very focused on certain specialized interests, and conversation with him often consists of him quizzing you on what you know about these subjects. (Although I think he’s more that way with people he’s really comfortable with, like family. With other people, he’s mostly very quiet.) He’s a successful computer programmer and seems perfectly happy with his life, so I guess at this point whether he has Asperger’s or is just a bit weird doesn’t really matter.
My brother and I attended the same college but didn’t room together. Sometime towards the end of our sophmore year, my dad was in town and we all went out to dinner together. Over dinner my dad asked my brother, “So, did you learn the names of any of your roommates yet?” I assumed he was joking. He’d been living with these guys for seven months! They had their own rooms, but shared a living room, bathroom, and kitchen. But my brother replied, “No.” Flabergasted, I asked “Don’t you ever talk to each other?” He said, “When I come home they say ‘hi’.” “And how do you reply?” “I say ‘hi’ back.”
Now, maybe I could imagine some sort of Seinfeldian scenario where a person doesn’t learn his roommates names right away, and after a while it feels too awkward to ask. But I swear, the names of everyone in the suite were posted on the door! I’m pretty sure I knew at least a couple of their names just from having stopped by to visit my brother. It just had never occurred to my brother to find out their names. They told him the first time they met, he forgot, and never checked again.
Needless to say, I thought this was all pretty funny. I told him “I’ll have to tell my roommate, he thinks it’s bad that I have trouble remembering your phone number!” (My roommate apparently thought I should know the number via psychic twin link, even though my brother had had it for less than a year and I didn’t really call him that often.) My brother replies, “I don’t know my phone number either.”
“You don’t know your own phone number?” I asked, incredulous. (Again, he’d been living there for seven months.)
“Well, I don’t need to call myself.”
Apparently the thought that he’d ever want to give his number to someone else hadn’t occurred to him.
Now, I don’t know if that’s Asperger’s. But it sure seems like something.
Like I say, he’s happy, and he’s generally polite except for not usually thinking to ask the appropriate personal questions or knowing how to make small talk. So really, it’s not much of an issue. If it is Asperger’s, I’m sure it helps that he’s found a line of work where underdeveloped social skills aren’t too unusual. Also, I think he’d be a pretty solitary person to begin with, so he doesn’t crave an extremely active social life. I think when Asperger’s is really hard is when people want to have a really active social life, but just don’t know how to make and maintain those sorts of connections.
Probably true but again remember selection bias. People who are overwhelmed in social situations but who have (unmet) social needs may be particularly attracted to socializing online. No eye contact needed. Less need to understand the give and take flow of real conversation. Able to escape at anytime. A good possession of specific facts praised. Others who may share your narrow range of interests.
It would be highly surprising to find that Asperger individuals didn’t spend an inordinate amount of time “socializing” online. Or that those who have mild undiagnosable autistic characteristics didn’t first meet each other as potential mates in that safer and same type selecting environment. (Subsequently to have children with larger doses of the genes and thereby more clearly autistic.)
I find this an interesting question. Two psychologists have said I had Aspergers and a third said I had high functioning autism, but sometimes I have doubts about all that. Sometimes it seems to make sense. I never used it as any sort of excuse at work. I never even heard of Aspergers till a couple years before I retired. But it’s not like ‘normal’ diseases, where an x-ray or a blood test tells the tale. All the testing I had was Q&A, pencil and paper, talking kind of stuff. And, for example, I don’t think this part applies to me:
At this point, it’s just something I’m curious about. I know my sisters accept it as fact; one of them was the first to tell me about it.
Online, I’d be willing to bet you that 99% of people claiming to have Asperger’s Syndrome are self-diagnosed fakes – probably because they like to be thought of as what I call “intelligent savants”. It’s romantic autism: savantism (Rain Man Style!) but without all the pesky disabilities that go with autism. At least, in their minds.
It’s Munchausen’s By Internet, if you ask me…
I have a young cousin who is on the autism spectrum, high functioning, probably fits the Asperger’s diagnosis. It’s one of the very first things you notice about him when you meet him. Unlike our “self-diagnosed” friends, he doesn’t just have what I call the “sexy” autism that only “flares” (flares! I’ve seen someone, online, use that – someone who actually was training her own service dog for this factitious autism of hers!) when it’s convenient…
You’ll note that a lot of the self-diagnosed crowd don’t have the less sexy symptoms or problems associated with the condition, or that these symptoms and problems don’t come up when it would be inconvenient. That’s usually a great way to tell them apart from true cases.
My take on this is the same as with alot of these psychiatric syndromes and disorders. They clearly exist, and in alot of cases are very real debilitating conditions.
However there is a huge grey area, where the dividing line between a genuine psychiatric condition and just normal human behaviour is very blurred. Some people are anti-social, some people are moody, they don’t have Asperger’s or Bipolar Disorder, but there are a alot of pharmaceutical companies (not that everything is the fault of big bad drug companies) that would like to convince them that they do.
I don’t doubt it, but I have encountered people online who were pretty open about how they’d diagnosed themselves with Asperger’s syndrome without ever seeing a specialist, and who had the attitude that this both made them better than other people (they apparently believed that everyone with Asperger’s was a misunderstood genius) and excused them for their personal failures. I’m pretty sure these people were just fooling themselves.
Yes, well, he’s the oldest brother out of a family of 5, and of course his parents… so he feels really comfortable around them, and they around him. But when with the rest of the extended family, he tends to just hang close to his other brother or his dad.
I remember one day (maybe 10 years ago?), we were over my parent’s house for a summer party. I was on the back patio, and without any introduction, just said “miggiresoza” I had no idea what he was saying and was kind dumbstruck. I kept asking him to repeat himself, because I didn’t catch his meaning, or where he was coming from. But he didn’t elaborate… just kept saying the same thing, over and over. Probably five times. Finally it clicked, “McGwire, Sosa.” He was talking about the baseball players. Now, normally he can construct a sentence just fine, but I think he was putting forth an effort to start a conversation with me. Unfortunately for him… I don’t follow sports! So, I tried to say what I could about the matter, and not patronize him, then he just kind of walked away. So yeh, it can be really hard on him, I’m sure. On other occasions, I’ve made an effort to talk with him. And as mentioned, he loves to just talk about facts, so it’s kind of stifling, because he doesn’t really seem to care to discuss anything between the facts.
Anyway, he’s almost through college now, but still lives with his parents. Not sure how he’s adjusted to school and his peers, though (as he was home schooled before).
I’m sure it’s rewarding for him when he can successfully interact with others, just like any of us. But he is definitely the “quiet type.”
Or, as I’ve heard it called, “Munchausen’s by Proxy Server”.
We had a student in our Taekwondo school who was diagnosed with Asperger’s. He had trouble focusing and the martial arts training really helped him.
Niiiice!
I can only report what I observed in my nephew and my friend. I saw a lot of them when they were young (at different times in my life). My friend is now 40, my nephew 20. Both clinically diagnosed, my nephew when he was young, my friend as an adult. I learned from them that Aspergers revolves around the results of a most curious inability, a kind of social blindness as profound and devastating as real blindness.
Both guys were in childhood, and continue to be, very, very deficient in being able to connect facial expressions and tone of voice and body language, to the emotions creating those expressions and postures and tones. It’s a strange lack that is typical of Asperger’s, an inability to detect or project emotions. They had a hard time telling if someone was angry or joking, whether they were inquisitive or insulted. They didn’t know, for example, that vertical little wrinkles between the eyebrows mean a question, and horizontal wrinkles above the eyebrows mean surprise. It’s something we never have to teach our kids … but they didn’t know that or any of the host of other ways we show our feelings.
And just as they had (and both still have) a hard time identifying the emotion in someone’s tone of voice, it applied to their own voices as well. Both of their voices have always had a flat quality, a lack of intonation and expression that is characteristic of the syndrome. It makes them sound disinterested in what is being discussed … not exactly a social grace.
For similar reasons, often their postures and facial expressions were not at all indicative of their inner state. They could be angry or sad, and I couldn’t tell.
This twin inability, to detect emotions in others, and to reveal ones own emotions through posture, gesture, and facial expression, lead them as children to endless frustration in all social interactions. In a group of kids, they simply didn’t understand what was going on around them. It didn’t make sense, they couldn’t follow the swings of conversation and emotion, they couldn’t tell who was upset and who was teasing, they just didn’t get it. And of course the other kids didn’t get them, because little of their inner emotions ever showed on the surface. This was the most visible and most profound of the symptoms of both kids.
The second symptom, which likely arises from the first, is a deep distrust and unease when confronted by change in a routine. Given their inability to detect what other people are feeling or what they are about to do, any new situation is fraught with danger. Safety lies in eating the cereal in the morning in the same bowl, with the same spoon, in the same order, with the Batman cape, whatever the ritual and the routine may be.
(Note that this desire of people with Aspergers for routine, often to the point of ritual, is very different from the obsessive-compulsive involvement with ritual. The obsessive-compulsive repeats an often meaningless ritual, often a certain number of times, in order to placate spirits, to bring good outcomes, to avert disasters, to protect themselves, and the like. The rituals often take on mystical attributes. The person with Aspergers, on the other hand, takes refuge in doing things in a routine and ritual way and is very disturbed when that is changed, simply because dealing with humans in a freeform manner is so frightening when you don’t know how they feel or why they do things.)
The third symptom was an obsession with some one thing, to the exclusion of everything else. I mean everything else. For my friend, it was Batman. For my nephew it was dinosaurs. Yeah, I know, all boys are into that, so was I, but not like this. Not anything like this, no way. Everything revolved around the subject of their obsession. At 40, my friend still puts on his Batman outfit and is happy to talk endlessly about Bruce Wayne. My nephew was more fortunate, he switched his obsession from dinosaurs to music, so he’s rolling with it rather than fighting it. But its still not the same. I’m a musician and I love playing music, but he’s obsessed.
Both my friend and my nephew are lonely men, and their condition has been a source of constant frustration to them. It has led to trouble in school, trouble at home with siblings, trouble in making and maintaining friendships, trouble with girlfriends.
The frustration is compounded by the fact that both of them are pretty bright, and nice guys, and not bad looking … but socially inept in a way that makes nerds and geeks look sophisticated. Both of them can easily insult or embarrass someone and not even begin to notice that they have done so.
So yes, while there are definitely “Munchausen’s by Proxy Server” folks out there (brilliant line, Cap’n) … spare a thought for my nephew and my friend, both smart enough to know that they are crippled by an inability to do the things everyone else does without thinking … to take the pulse of a room, or to establish a rapport with someone on a train, or to feel a crowd’s mood change, or to look at your friend and know they’re upset without a word being spoken … all the stuff everyone can do, even kids can do, and they simply can’t do it.
w.
Ah, that is also a symptom of autism, which connects the two conditions in my mind, even if other people figured it out years ago and have even told me how Aspberger’s is an autism-spectrum condition in this very thread.
It seems that one thing the Munchausen by Proxy Server (love it!) forget is that Aspberger’s does not mean you are especially smart, but that you have at least normal intelligence, but are so overspecialized that, when seen speaking on your speciality, casual observers assume you are highly intelligent generally. And it would make sense that a board like this, where you are allowed to spout off ad nauseum on your speciality, would attract more than its share of AS types.
Whatever. Let’s talk about baseball!