Question

[stealthdragon.livejournal.com]

It's been suggested that multiplicity might be more common in people with/whose body has Aspergers' syndrome or autism, and I'm rather curious how well that holds up.

Do you or anyone in your system have Aspergers' syndrome or autism? If so, is it a system-wide thing, or particular to a certain person or group?


We have Aspergers' syndrome, and it appears to affect everyone in our system to some extent. (None of us is all that good at understanding social situations or reading body language, for instance, and the lot of us have 'odd' interests.)

(Posted as a result of this entry.)

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

According to the DSM-IV (http://www.autism-biomed.org/dsm-iv.htm), the difference is that with Asperger's, "there is no clinically significant general delay in language (e.g., single words used by age 2 years, communicative phrases used by age 3 years). There is no clinically significant delay in cognitive development or in the development of age-appropriate self-help skills, adaptive behavior (other than in social interaction), and curiosity about the environment in childhood.".

*shrugs* I think the distinction is a bogus one, but then, the whole DSM-IV is bogus, so that shouldn't really surprise anyone. Check out Amanda Baggs' essay, How To Differentiate Between Autism and Asperger's Syndrome
Once and For All (http://www.autistics.us/library/aspieautie.html) - she hits the nail on the head.

[echoesnspectres.livejournal.com]

We know that essay (and love it). We don't believe in those distinctions either; it's just that if they have to be made, they're going to be about language delay and the other things you quoted. If someone were to check a group of people who had those delays against a group of people who didn't have them, they'd probably find that overall they turned out very much the same in terms of "severity" or "impairment" or "level of functioning" or what have you.

What we're constantly trying to explain to people who say "oh the kid has PDD-NOS, it's a lot less worse than we thought because our GP talked about autism" and the like, is that those classifications have nothing to do with "severity", only with how many symptoms the psych can mark on his checklist. You can have one or two of those symptoms in a large degree and none of the others and be more disabled by them than someone else who has all the symptoms but only a little. (That is, if the symptoms listed were actual symptoms and not reactions to symptoms; say, sensory sensitivities.)

But they're really no use at all. They're not about "how autistic you are"; they're not even about "how you are autistic". The people who made those names have a serious case of weak central coherence. Not to mention a badly lacking theory of mind, since as you said diagnostic procedure is all based on behaviours not motivations.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

"The people who made those names have a serious case of weak central coherence. Not to mention a badly lacking theory of mind"

LOL, how true!

Y'know, I can see how it's difficult to figure out what's going on with a little kid - especially one who doesn't talk, of course, but even one who can isn't going to be able to say "I don't use or understand 'nonverbal communication' because all of you are constantly moving your eyes, faces, limbs and bodies at random - how do I tell which specific movements are supposed to mean something, let alone what they mean?" or "Just because you don't know what 'function' my routines serve doesn't mean they're "nonfunctional". Still, the Official Criteria are so drastically biased that they have no right to be called "scientific" in any sense of the word.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

What we're constantly trying to explain to people who say "oh the kid has PDD-NOS, it's a lot less worse than we thought because our GP talked about autism" and the like, is that those classifications have nothing to do with "severity", only with how many symptoms the psych can mark on his checklist. You can have one or two of those symptoms in a large degree and none of the others and be more disabled by them than someone else who has all the symptoms but only a little.

Pretty much-- and what I don't get is why the presence of a speech delay is supposed to be this vitally important thing which determines the extent of a person's future capacity. Some kids who aren't autistic start talking late (or later than what's considered to be 'normal,' although I'm on the verge of tossing the whole concept of 'normal' in a lake).

Also, as far as things like not sharing interests with others spontaneously-- we started out trying to do so, but were told that it was unhealthy to 'obsess,' so we clammed up. And 'lack of imaginative play' is in the eye of the beholder. Just because someone doesn't play in what's considered to be a conventional way doesn't mean they aren't playing at all. We did have a lot of 'conventional' play, but we'd also do things like lining up our marbles; what might not have been immediately obvious to outsiders was that the marbles all had their own personalities and that they talked with each other (just not out loud). If someone had *asked,* we would have told them what was going on-- but I think that's the researchers' deficient theory of mind at work again. *grin*