When people say Asperger's is a 'mental health' problem...

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eatingcereal
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18 Feb 2011, 11:58 am

Autism is a mental health difference. It varies from what would be considered the average healthy human being. Whether you perceive it as a problem or not is completely subjective.



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18 Feb 2011, 12:28 pm

It is a problem/disability for any autist who by virtue of their underlying personality/temperament, feels a need for an emotionally-experienced connection with the outside world AS A WHOLE. Solutions might take as many forms as there are likeminded autists (see 'Myers-Briggs NFP types')



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18 Feb 2011, 12:40 pm

Quote:
autism is my brain and my mind


I see the word 'autism' as describing an absence of something that would be expected in a human; the alternative to 'NT' interaction etc. is whatever 'compensatory' skills one develops etc., which is not in itself autism



Daryl_Blonder
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18 Feb 2011, 11:49 pm

Although I am proud of being an Aspie and support the position that it is a difference and not a disability, I do not take offense in any way to it being called a “disorder.” We know that autism exists along a spectrum, and that people who are really far along on the spectrum can’t function at all. So it is safe to say that those who are high-functioning, do have some sort of disability despite the benefits of the condition.

And even if many of the difficulties we endure are a result of other people not taking the effort to understand us, there are still many intrinsic cognitive difficulties that need to be accounted for, and comorbid conditions—obsessive-compulsive behavior, depression, eating disorders, ADD, etc.—are clearly very common in people with ASD.

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19 Feb 2011, 4:40 am

[quote="Bloodheart"]...what do you say?

Asperger's counts as a mental health issue, as it's a condition that produces abnormal behaviour I suppose it is classed as a psychological disorder - although is my behaviour really all that abnormal, or is it just my way of thinking or looking at the world that makes me different from NT's? Why are NT's 'normal' and we're 'abnormal' - is it fair to consider us as 'abnormal'?

>>> but there are many, physiological disabilities that us Aspergers, or Autistics face. For instance, communication issues. We actually process information differently, and great patience must be taken to decode communication. At times over stimulation and thinking overstresses and tires us out severly.

While Aspergers is not a disease, it certainly could be classified as a mental health condition, for it's ability to pyshically affect us.



Chama
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19 Feb 2011, 5:03 am

Huh, I haven't thought about this in much depth at all. What a complicated question!

It's just so hard to decide what "mental health problem" really means. What would the criteria for that be? Then, does AS fit those criteria? Some mental illnesses come completely from inside a person's mind, some are triggered by outside factors, or a combination of both. Where is the line between an unhealthy environment's effects and mental illness? Are they considered the same thing?
I sort of have my own answers to these questions but it's too hard for me to put together, and it's just one person's opinion. So... what does mental health problem really mean to most people?



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19 Feb 2011, 4:30 pm

I think actually the definition of "mental health issue" is pretty simple: An issue currently mostly covered and dealt with by psychiatry. There's nothing intrinsic to these issues that marks them as different from non-psych issues overall. Just what field deals with them. Autism is something that straddles psychiatry and developmental disability because both fields deal with it.


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19 Feb 2011, 4:55 pm

The eighty-five percent association of alexithymia and research that suggests that it could be related to poor Hemispheric communications in Autistic people puts many people on the Spectrum in a different world than most experience. Whether it is a psychological condition that results from Autism or directly related to differences in the structure of the brain, it is a serious issue that cannot be successfully treated in some.

If it is biological in origin, it could be the underlying cause of many mental health related issues that Autistic people face. The inability to fully experience or understand ones emotions, can lead to many problems in life.



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19 Feb 2011, 7:37 pm

Trust me, being aware of your feelings while autistic is worse



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19 Feb 2011, 9:44 pm

undefineable wrote:
Trust me, being aware of your feelings while autistic is worse


Yes, I agree this can be the case. Some suggest this emotional turmoil eventually leads to to a psychological cause of alexithymia and the numbness that goes along with it. I understand forty percent of those with PTSD suffer from psychological alexithymia. None of it is pleasant.



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19 Feb 2011, 9:57 pm

I have both Asperger's and epilepsy and put them into the same category-- neurological conditions. (Interestingly, a hundred years ago or so people thought epilepsy was a mental illness, too.) Epilepsy is the equivalent of electric storms in the brain-- random electrical activity shorts out my temporal lobe's for a bit, which affects my ability to speak and measure time and distance when it happens. Asperger's causes me to be easily overwhelmed by external stimuli, impairs my motor skills, and makes it difficult for me to read other people's intentions. I take an anti-anxiety medication to help me deal with the chronic hyperarousal that goes along with AS and an anticonvulsant medication to reduce the risk of seizures. I also put these into the same category.

My admittedly unscientific distinction between neurological and psychiatric has two major components. Neurological conditions are permanent, whereas psychiatric conditions can be transitory (like a major depressive episode) or cyclical/episodic (like bipolar or schizophrenia). Nobody who is otherwise NT ever has a "major autistic episode". The other component of my admittedly unscientific distinction is that psychiatric disorders most often relate to a problem with the chemical balance of the brain (though there can also be a structural component) whereas neurological conditions are primarily structural (though there can also be a chemical component).



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19 Feb 2011, 11:02 pm

The reason psychiatric conditions are said to result from a chemical imbalance is not usually that they actually have been shown to, but because it's the easiest way to explain to someone why to take medications that affect neurotransmitters.

Interestingly many conditions such as Parkinson's which have truly been shown to be about chemicals in the brain are not generally one's considered psychiatric. (In fact I can't think of many if any psychiatric conditions where the chemical component is as obvious and proven as it is for many known neurological conditions. Probably because chemical imbalance is an inept theory of psychiatric conditions, also because the standards of science are so low in psychiatry that very few if any psychiatric conditions are realistically mapped out. By which I mean what we call schizophrenia is probably not one but dozens of totally unrelated or barely related conditions whereas Parkinson's is either one or at most a small number of conditions that are very tightly related. Autism science being much like all other psychiatric science, it's unclear whether autism is one thing and how closely related different forms are, and it is becoming clear that the genuine subgroupings of autism bear little to no true resemblance to the current autism/AS/CDD/PDDNOS official subgroups.

The chemical imbalance theory of mental illness is just a ridiculously oversimplified way to deal with medications -- "They reduce chemical X so if they work or are even purported to work it must be because the person has too much of chemical X". Which becomes obviously a bit silly when you look at medications for conditions that are considered physical or neurological -- even when the medications work by affecting chemicals the conditions are rarely described as chemical imbalances. They're explained like "This medication affects chemical X, which helps to slow down the movement of the digestive system, which helps to control symptoms of diarrhea." Note a lack of explanation then that the diarrhea must be from an imbalance of Chemical X. Likewise one of my epilepsy medications affects GABA but I am never told I have a GABA imbalance.

Many forms of epilepsy are in fact episodic and only appear during certain phases of life. Many psychiatric conditions are thought to have developmental lifelong components much like autism, for instance some forms of bipolar and schizophrenia.

So, yeah, unscientific, but then most psychiatry is unscientific compared to neurology. Which is why I am so insistent that a condition being psychiatric means only that psychiatrists cover it, nothing at all about its nature. Hopefully in the future psychiatry will be entirely replaced by a combination of neurology and another field that has yet to be named but is based in science instead of generations-long strings of guesswork where merely guessing something long enough is enough to make it real. By that time I doubt the idea of autism as currently viewed will have survived given that its origins are the usual psychiatric quicksand and the current concept will never be able to escape those beginnings any more than schizophrenia will.

So I guess another quality of psychiatric conditions are that they are sloppily defined, and guesswork and fancy can literally count as science. I'm saying that as someone who has read the historical writings on autism and many other conditions that were "discovered" by psychiatry. Literally anything goes even today in many respects if you know how to write it up, and the standards of proof of anything are abysmal. Plus the longer people repeat something the truer it is said to be. This stuff would not be remotely acceptable in most other disciplines.


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20 Feb 2011, 12:53 am

Epilepsy IS effectively a short circuit. It acts like one, is logical, and methods used to diagnose it basically indicate the same. I don't think you could call it an illness or even a syndrome, anymore than you can call a cut in the skin one. Still, it is a problem that could cause trouble.

AS is probably similar to Epilepsy in that way. It isn't an illness, but IS a difference in perception and thought processes. And the term Syndrome indicates a group of symptoms that people in that group are likely to have. The syndrome has NOTHING to do with cause, vector, etc... It has ONLY to do with symptoms.



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20 Feb 2011, 10:31 am

aghogday wrote:
undefineable wrote:
Trust me, being aware of your feelings while autistic is worse


Yes, I agree this can be the case. Some suggest this emotional turmoil eventually leads to to a psychological cause of alexithymia and the numbness that goes along with it. I understand forty percent of those with PTSD suffer from psychological alexithymia. None of it is pleasant.


I had to induce emotional numbness in myself from age 19 on, using the thought 'nothing can possibly matter' and other buddhism-derived nihilism, though I've had to use antidepressants to maintain the numbness from soon after my AS diagnosis at age 20. I'm about to explore if CBT can lessen my need for chemical aid in coping with my knowledge of the permanence of 'my problems', as I called AS symptoms during my teenage years.

I'm not strictly alexithymic for all this, though, as I could tell you what I'm feeling at most points. I would imagine that true alexithymia, where it exists alongside autism, contributes to the notion current among so many autistics that they wouldn't want anything internal to them or to their lives to change.



Last edited by undefineable on 20 Feb 2011, 10:35 am, edited 1 time in total.

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20 Feb 2011, 10:33 am

anbuend wrote:
The reason psychiatric conditions are said to result from a chemical imbalance is not usually that they actually have been shown to, but because it's the easiest way to explain to someone why to take medications that affect neurotransmitters.

Psychiatric conditions are clearly not just a chemical imbalance, but while we neuroscientists works to find out consistent neurological abnormalities, all we can rely on is that there is obviously a neurotransmitter problem, since the medications work. I am not saying psychiatry isn't flawed. At the present time, it is. We need to work on finding diagnostic tools to prove that psychiatric conditions are, in fact, brain disorders. But it is also flawed to criticize the chemical imbalance theory. There is clearly a link between neurotransmitters and psychiatric disorders, and this link has been shown in neurological patients, too. Why else would Parkinson's patients become psychotic on too much L-dopa?

As for your epilepsy medication, seizures already have been shown to be just that- an overdose of GABA. The neuroscientific way to describe a seizure is abnormally high brain activity, caused by an overrelease of GABA. The reason that it isn't called a "chemical imbalance" is because everybody already knows that seizures deal with the brain. People who have psychiatric conditions have to constantly prove to people that our conditions are neurobiologically based, as well, as a way to get rid of stigma and show that our disorders are no more our fault than somebody who has epilepsy or Huntington's or the like.


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20 Feb 2011, 10:49 am

OddDuckNash99 wrote:
anbuend wrote:
People who have psychiatric conditions have to constantly prove to people that our conditions are neurobiologically based, as well, as a way to get rid of stigma and show that our disorders are no more our fault than somebody who has epilepsy or Huntington's or the like.


I don't see that chemical imbalances in one's brain can be that person's fault entirely; when everything and everyone in a person's life - including genetically-determined elements of one's temperament - encourages stress, can a person really be wholly to blame for getting so 'stressed out' that they break down in some way?

As a believer in rebirth, however, I do feel that choices/actions in previous lives led directly to our autism in this one - If this were not the case, I wonder then why I would be autistic, as the only reason for 'me' to experience being 'me' (and not a non-autistic person) would then be pure chance (or ofcourse the will of God or somesuch). Also, the only plausible 'rational' explanation for autism seems to be Murphy's Law {Whatever can go wrong will go wrong on occasion} - Arguments favouring selective value fail to recognise that in survival situations (i.e. environments where natural selection is able to take place), NTs too fall under pressure to make maximum use of their more technical faculties, which can then be further developed alongside their empathising strengths etc..

If anyone is both confused and curious about my last paragraph, please PM me, as I am planning to write a philosophical thesis to prove that there is no need for a causal link between an individual thread of conscious experience and the individual set of conditions (body, circumstances etc.) to which it is connected {In other words, I feel I can demonstrate that there is no scientifically respectable reason why any of us should not have been born as a dog or a cat}.



Last edited by undefineable on 20 Feb 2011, 11:01 am, edited 2 times in total.