True, but it was very fortunate that his wife already had professional experience dealing with Asperger's Syndrome. I was a little surprised that she didn't diagnose him earlier in their marriage.
Asperger's is very poorly understood, and this misunderstanding is really hard on suffferers (I am one.) The cause of all the varied symptoms is that we have a slight delay in processing sounds, as explained in this article: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16174-brains-of-autist...
This means that if you say "Hi" to me, I know instantly that you said a word one syllable long, but it takes me a fraction of a second longer than a normal person to decipher the word as "hi." This isn't a problem when a person says just one syllable. But in a whole sentence, the delays snowball until I miss a big chunk of the sentence, especially if the person speaks quickly. That's why, in danteembermage's example, his son "has a hard time finding objects using verbal instructions 'grab your shoes buddy.'" If you handed him a piece of paper that said "grab your shoes, buddy," he would get the shoes as fast as anyone.
Poor speech comprehension is the root of all unusual Aspie behaviors. ShabbyDoo's son "physically cringes when there's lots of noise/confusion." The confusion comes because there is too much noise and not enough signal. Aspies shy from social situations because they can't understand what people are saying.
Even things that seem like deep-down problems can easily be explained by poor speech comprehension. The article spends a lot of time on empathy, but empathy is not an emotion, it's a social skill. You act like you care about somebody else's problems so you get along with them better. Aspies suck at it because they have a hard time understanding what people are saying, and they just have less chance to develop social skills in general, because it is so hard for them to talk to people.
I'm glad that others feel they benefit from this article, but somehow it rings false to me. It feels like a parody rather than the confession it purports to be. Here are a few of the wrong-notes for me:
* He's obsessed with cleaning-product slogans and cattle behaviour?
* He's working as a __marketing__ engineer?
* Standing alone at parties 'kind of dancing'?
* Calling 'methylchloroisothiazolinone' unpronounceable
* Being self-consciously self-centered?
I realize that there is a lot of variation within Asperger's, but this piece doesn't line up for me. It feels to me like a talented MFA student writing a credible impersonation of Mark Leyner or David Sedaris based around a caricature of Asperger's. Does anyone here know and vouch for the author? Does his description ring true to anyone's sense of self, or only of their perception of others with some similar characteristics?
The killer paradox of media. For anything to be interesting, it can't delve too deep. Anything in-depth can't be interesting.
And thus the curse: any journalism must follow the pattern of telling anecdotes of one or maybe two representative cases. This lends a personal feel, but gets mired in the trap of "anecdote is not the singular for of data".
Reporting that is engaging is rarely informative, at least to people that already have a working model of the topic.
I think you can do in-depth and be interesting. Its just quite hard. You're never going to please everyone, but you can inform a wide audience without being factually incorrect. This takes an enormous amount of work, though, and so its hard to pull off.
Marketing engineer generally means that you have enough technical design experience and intimate understanding of the product to sell it, probably to other technical people and companies given that his job is at a semiconductor company. I wouldn't immediately discredit the author for his title at work. And yes, people are really like this. Everyone is different.
Team sports are great if you can get into them, and completely pointless if they disdain them. Individually oriented physical activities that emphasise co-ordination are good for dyspraxia e.g. dance, martial arts, gymnastics. Spend lots of time explaining the blidingly obvious in terms of social skills. Premature advice: acting, improv, debating are all good for socialisation. They're likely to be nerdier than normal, encourage this, and making friends of like interests as otherwise the chances of having no friends whatsoever until they get to a big high school or college are high (unless you live in a major urban area) If you can get them into a gifted and talented programme, whether a summer school or a proper day school do so. They are likely to put no effort whatsoever into tasks and subjects that don't interest them, give up on this pre-emptively. Try to make sure they encounter challenging material relatively early in their education. I was ~16 by the time4 I got to that and nine years later my capacity for necessary grinding work is still low.
>Spend lots of time explaining the blidingly obvious in terms of social skills.
This is going to be interesting, especially for my wife. As I suspect I'm a bit of an Aspie myself, I can see social rules from an outsider's perspective. She'll have more trouble explaining why, for example, one (at least in America) can not mention an obese person's size in his/her presence. He knows he's fat, he knows that we know he's fat, and he we know that he knows that we know, etc/ Sp. whats the issue? That's a hard one. How do you explain the irrationality of allowing the fat person to suspend disbelief that we're thinking, "Oh mah gawd, you're really f'ing fat!"
The reality is, autism spectrum diagnoses are done with checklists. If you observe six of more symptoms out of a list of 12 than there is an autism diagnosis, if there is something less you have a not-quite-autism diagnosis. Depending on the practitioner it gets labeled high funcioning autism, asperger's, or my favorite Pervasive Development Disorder Not Otherwise Specified.
Basically it's a class of generic "something is wrong" but not with the severity of autism. Since the physiological pathways for these diseases are not well understood the diagnoses by definition are going to be a bit mushy.
That said, my son was diagnosed with autism to great degree because of a speech delay. His speech is improved so I'm not sure if he would qualify now, but he does still have physical symptoms. For example he flaps his arms a lot when he gets excited, he loves rough play, he has a hard time finding objects using verbal instructions "grab your shoes buddy" and some other random things.
Does he need a label? I think so. I think he benefited some from his therapy and special education in the public schools and a diagnosis helps determine which therapies might help and which won't. Is he going to be socially slower than he would have been if he'd just been treated like a normal kid. I don't think so; especially since a huge chuck of the kids in special ed in Arizona are just native Spanish speakers.
I think you're right to worry that parents will change their behavior based on a label, there just seems to be some worthwhile things that come out of formal diagnosis and whether or not to get one for a child is a serious parenting decision that has lots of consequences, good and bad.
EDIT: parent was worried about negative consequences of an Asperger's diagnosis on the child.
I didn't get a chance to read the parent posting before it was killed. Are we, his parents worried that labeling might do harm? Sure. But, we're a lot more worried that not taking preventative/corrective action would be a lot worse.
Our son is attending our public school's early intervention pre-school program (fantastic, btw), and we're sending him to private speech therapy and are considering other interventions.
Diagnosis wise, I agree with your view. Why not HFA or PDD-Nos? There's definitely something wrong though -- he shows little interest in playing with other children, physically cringes when there's lots of noise/confusion, and does a bunch of other stuff that strongly suggests an autism spectrum disorder.
OCD is one problem that is more common among Aspie's than in the general population; probably because some quirks in autism already tend that way (like flapping, rocking, and obsessive interests).
So I assume you guys approve of him lying to his wife to get her to marry him & possibly passing on something hereditary to his kids? It's fascinating the lengths people go to in order to reproduce.
Even better when it's a couple. Marriages go into meltdown mode every day for things a lot smaller than this.