Abnormal Psych class and Autism

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We just started looking at Autism in my Abnormal Psych class. We started with ADHD, moved on to Autism today, are probably going to spend a couple lectures on it, and then we move on to Anxiety Disorders, Depression, Bipolar, Schizophrenia, Somatoform Disorders and Dissociative Disorders. When I refer to myself as autistic, I mean somewhere on the spectrum, including aspergers.

I didn't know a whole lot about ADHD so at least while we were studying that I was able to listen to the prof and learn. My problem with the Autism unit is that he's focusing mostly on low functioning. He described Temple Grandin and Rain Man as extremely high functioning. He described the spectrum as Autism being on the low end, PDD-NOS being in the middle, and Aspergers being on the high end. He said 70% of people with Autism are also mentally ret*d, and that no one really knows how people with Autism feel about things because they can't tell us.

I'm self-diagnosed, and his description and the things he says are making me cringe. It's also making me wonder if I'm autistic at all, if I'm able to go to class and do reasonably well in school.

So even if I'm in the Broader Autism Phenotype and not autistic (because I know I'm not completely neurotypical) I still know a lot about Autism, and have met and interacted with a lot of autistic people. And what he says doesn't match up to my experiences at all.

I wanted to stand up in my 600 person class and say "Hey, I know there must be some other Auties in this room. What do you think of this lecture?" But I wouldn't do that, not really. I knew I wasn't the only person sitting in lecture tapping his feet and taking apart his mechanical pencil and grumbling about how much the flickering light was bothering him.

But the questions people asked seemed just as ignorant as the prof seemed to me. I felt sad. Are there clinicians out there who really understand Autism?

Has anyone else ever studied Autism in school, and what were your experiences like?

It sounds like your professor doesn't know much about autism, or at least his information comes from a static knowledge base that has no real connection to current knowledge for a few decades.

What he's saying has no bearing on whether you're autistic or not. I am not at the moment able to write up a full response to your post, but at least this much: It's so easy to find autistic perspectives on how we (individually) feel online and in books that the premise that we can't communicate that is laughable. It may be harder (thanks alexithymia) but not impossible.

I haven't studied autism in school, but the last person I spoke to who did likes to say that "autistic people don't know that people are people." I don't really trust what's being taught in classes like abnormal psych.

Yes! He kept saying things like autistic people don't see people as people, they just see them as an object like a table or a lamp.

He did say this was mostly with low functioning autism, but still.

This can be the case with autistic children. A lot of professionals, clinicians and researchers, don't realize that autistic children who don't see people as people can grow up to become autistic adults who do see people as people and learn about other people's theories of mind. I used to be one of these children who didn't see people as people, but there are also autistic children who did see people as people at a matched age.

I don't entirely agree with this as a constant, but I most definitely do this when I'm really focusing on something or when I'm navigating my way through a busy mall. They just become things that are in my way. I've looked people I know in the face and unless they break my concentration, I don't realize I know them.... Or that they're human per se.


It sounds like your professor is reading something from the 40's though

I'm interested to see how he's going to approach the other "disorders". His views on Autism might be a little behind, but I've read his slides on Dissociative Identity Disorder, and they seem pretty up to date, especially since 20 years ago it was hardly known.

He did say that the vaccine theory was nonsense. But he also said that it was impossible to develop normally for the first year or two and then suddenly develop autistic symptoms - but that IS possible, isn't it? Or has that been debunked as well?

Your prof's information is about twenty years out of date. It was about as much as we knew in 1980-1990, but we've learned so much since then that he might as well be teaching the geocentric model of the Solar System in an astronomy class.

The idea of PDD-NOS having an intrinsic functioning level is something I'd react to with a total *facepalm*.

I wouldn't try to correct him in class. He's almost certainly not an autism specialist, or even a childhood-disorders specialist; and chances are he doesn't know any more than is in the textbook--whereas, you've specialized in autism for a while, because you very sensibly started learning about it when you got the information that you were on the spectrum. In our specialist subjects, I think we just have to learn that some people don't know as much as we do, and that that is okay because past high school, everybody has to specialize.

I'm much better off in my psych class, I think; we were doing a unit on intelligence today, and when I asked about the problems with IQ tests being normed for typical development, whether that meant that IQ tests would be invalid for people with atypical development such as what happens with autism, learning disabilities, and savant syndrome, my prof responded that she believed they weren't valid and that you had to use other tests more suited to the person being tested. I felt quite vindicated, because I have been saying the same thing for ages and it is nice to hear a confirmation from someone with an actual PhD.

What people like him know about people defined as "low functioning autistic" generally could fill a thimble. Most of the existing research is based on external observations, performance on tests that rely on language to understand them, and behaviors that are interpreted as one thing but are often a different thing.

I am not claiming to be an expert on "LFA" at all, but there are people who are described as "LFA" who can and do communicate via facilitated and often augmented communication, and what they say clashes strongly with the received wisdom on what autistic people are supposed to be like.

The other issue is treating autistic people like children, developmentally, as if none of us ever mature neurologically or experientially past six years old and treating observations of children as static truths throughout one's lifespan.

And I mean, I do remember at various times having people stop and say "Hey, could you stop doing that? It annoys me" and the idea of them having those thoughts and annoyances and a consciousness in general was shocking to me, like before that moment I didn't realize they were autonomous beings with their own unique consciousness. Although if you catch me outside a social situation I could certainly explain that I realize they are autonomous beings with their own unique consciousness. I mean, the fact that I sometimes interact with people like they're Turing machines simply means that the cognitive bandwidth to perceive them as people at the same time I am monitoring myself is not available at that particular time (and sometimes it is available). And the reverse is sometimes true - sometimes I am so focused on another person I forget to monitor myself (and sometimes I remember).

But none of this means I don't see people as people, but it does mean that sometimes it is very difficult to account for all of the variables that dealing with another person requires, but I think that's one of the clear impairments in autism (social skills and communication).

The problem I have with that description is that it is dehumanizing. And I think it collapses what may be fairly complex cognitive issues into a fairly negative-sounding soundbite.

If I was to "correct" a professor like that at all, I'd approach it by getting together a list of recommended reading about people one the spectrum, and bringing it to him and recommend he read said books.

I don't intend to correct him, he's a pretty major professor at my university and I'm just a second year undergrad. There are some things I would fight for, for instance if he decided to say that transgender people were misguided and wrong and should stay the gender they were assigned at birth, I would make a stink about that. Because I am actively transitioning from one gender to another right now and something like that would hurt me.

Hearing all of these inaccuracies about autism makes me annoyed, yes, but I don't quite take it as personally, as I've never had my diagnosis confirmed by a doctor. But who knows, that was only an hour's worth of lecture. There are still many more hours to go to cover all of his slides on autism. So maybe by the end I will be ready to discuss with him what I think.

I will restate a question I asked earlier in the thread though: He said today that it was impossible for a child to develop normally for the first few years and then all of the sudden develop autistic symptoms. Is that true?

I have no idea about this. I have always thought that when children are diagnosed with autism at age 3 or 5 or whatever, you can always look back into their infancy to notice abnormal behaviors that were there all along, but not noticed at the time. It's much easier to notice autism in a 5-year-old than a 1-year-old due to the child doing more activities and the social and communication demands being greater, but the child already exhibited abnormal behaviors at age 1.

He said one of the first symptoms that can be noticed is that when infants that are developing normally get picked up and held, they conform their body to match the person who is holding them, but autistic infants don't do this.

What I'm thinking of are the classic regression stories that the people who tried to sell the vaccine "cause" would use. Are all stories of children regressing into autism false?

I meant to answer this:

Autistic regression: http://www.brighttots.com/Autism/Autistic_regression

Yes, children do appear to develop as NT, and then lose skills and appear to regress.

Maybe this regression is childhood disintegrative disorder?

Yes, my prof said the cases of regression were probably Childhood Disintegrative Disorder.

I read that link you posted though, Verdandi. My psych class has a message board that students can discuss things on, and I think I'll post that link there and see if any of my fellow students want to discuss it. Sometimes the professor replies to posts on the message board too, so it's kind of an indirect way of suggesting another view to him.

I am not sure it is CDD, as it tends to happen later than the regression.

I also know that some people experience "regression" (or "burnouts") as adolescents and even into adulthood, and lose skills. Jim Sinclair talked about having to relearn how to read three or four times due to losing that skill.