Page 1 of 2 [ 25 posts ]  Go to page 1, 2  Next

MidlifeAspie
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 1 Nov 2010
Age: 47
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,016

28 Feb 2011, 2:16 pm

This one comic does seem to answer a lot of the questions posted by the newer members.

http://www.dudeimanaspie.com/2011/02/is-it-because.html

Very funny stuff by one of our very own :)

Nice work 8)


_________________
Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.


Verdandi
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 7 Dec 2010
Age: 54
Gender: Female
Posts: 12,275
Location: University of California Sunnydale (fictional location - Real location Olympia, WA)

28 Feb 2011, 2:46 pm

The comic's funny, although I think I disagree with some of the answers - some of those traits are common on the spectrum and distinctive to the spectrum, even though they are not part of the necessarily limited diagnostic criteria.

Still, it's pretty funny. :D



ci
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 28 Nov 2010
Age: 43
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,546
Location: Humboldt County, California

28 Feb 2011, 3:28 pm

This is good. I think the incorporation of the dude concept can assist with helping youth and some younger adults relate to people with a form of autism. Humor is good public relations.


_________________
The peer politics creating intolerance toward compassion is coming to an end. Pity accusations, indifferent advocacy against isolation awareness and for pride in an image of autism is injustice. http://www.autismselfadvocacynetwork.com


anbuend
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 5 Jul 2004
Age: 43
Gender: Female
Posts: 5,039

28 Feb 2011, 4:07 pm

Yeah, it's funny, but also either wrong or... misleading, I guess even when it could be right.

Like the one about "hating to clean". On the face of it, yeah, lots of people hate to clean, and it's not because they're autistic. But I can easily see a person who has genuine autism-related difficulty with cleaning phrasing it as "hating to clean" rather than "being unable to clean". And actually, deficits in adaptive behavior are part of the definition of a developmental disability and autism is a developmental disability and cleaning is part of adaptive behavior skills. AS technically is not supposed to be diagnosed in someone with significant non-social adaptive behavior deficits, but in practice nearly all people with AS have significant non-social adaptive behavior deficits.

When the giraffe says that something being in the criteria is the way to tell whether it's part of autism or not, just no, no, no. That's not how it works. Autism encompasses a huge range of skills, not all of which can possibly be covered in the criteria. The criteria are how to identify autism easily from behavior. They are not the Word of God About Everything That Is Possibly An Autistic Trait. Even reading the longer parts of the DSM criteria will show you this. Because the long description says waaaaaaaay more about autism than the actual criteria do.

Repeating oneself is in fact part of being autistic. Period. It just is. That's why one of the three so-called "triad of impairments" is "restrictive and repetitive behavior". (At least in some places. Other places it's "social imagination". I'm not a big triad of impairments fan but I far prefer restricted and repetitive behavior as a better descriptor of what's actually going on.) The DSM criteria even call it "restricted repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests and activities". It's there. In the criteria even. (Although being in the criteria is far from the only things about autism, unlike the comic says.)

Always looking angry to other people is a definite part of autism for some people. It's part of our difficulties with using and/or understanding body language. Not everyone will look like that, of course. But some do, and it's because they either have trouble controlling their body's appearance, or have trouble predicting what that appearance will look like to others. Or both. Both of which are so very within the bounds of autistic trouble with body language that I am having trouble fathoming why the cartoonist decided to say that.

W-sitting is sometimes possibly linked to autism. It's unclear whether it is or not. But some conditions affecting motor skills and joint flexibility can result in W-sitting. There's a possibility that autism is sometimes linked with more flexible joints than normal (including hypermobility syndrome, Marfan's, Ehlers Danlos, etc.). People with hypermobile joints (i.e. people with any or all of these conditions) often W-sit because it's an easy way to stabilize themselves. It's unclear whether this link is real, but people like Tony Attwood sometimes even use it as part of their screening for autism. Autism can also be linked to poor motor skills and low muscle tone, both of which are sometimes linked to W-sitting. But all of that is less obvious than the other things I've covered so far. It's a "related to conditions that are sometimes possibly linked to autism" thing, not a "directly related to autism" thing. Usually.

I have to agree with him about the sex-obsession. :P I think the only reason some autistic people are obsessed with sex is because they have a hard time getting any, not just because they're autistic.

As for being more likely to be psychic, no. However. Being more likely to experience things that most people would call psychic? Absolutely.

First off, autistic people often have heightened senses. This means we're sometimes going to be perceiving things other people don't perceive.

Second off, autistic people often have fewer filters on our perceptions than most people do. As in, most people would filter out a lot of their environment, whereas we're more likely (although not always by any means) to perceive our environment in a much more direct and unfiltered manner. This also means we're sometimes going to be perceiving things other people don't perceive. (This also can result in inability to shut out perceptions of things our cultures tell us aren't there.)

Third off, some autistic people rely on a very different way of understanding the world than a lot of others do. (This includes me, so I'm pretty aware of how this works.) It involves, rather than relying on concepts and intellectual thinking, relying more on direct sensory information and the patterns formed by that sensory information. This (especially the patterns part) can make us aware of things that we're "not supposed to" be aware of. Not because there's anything "psychic" at work, but because our brains have a different way of figuring out our environment. It's hard to explain though. It's like... most people are able to tell certain things before they happen because they're used to certain patterns. Like if you drop something, you know it'll hit the ground. Autistic people can often sense a slightly different set of patterns, thereby making us aware of a slightly different set of things about our environment and what's about to happen etc. Which gets us called psychic too.

So, the person got 2 out of 8 right, and I'm not even sure whether those two couldn't be related to being autistic. (Nor do I understand how "Nobody's wrong all the time" even makes sense as a response to "People always say I'm wrong".) So my reaction to the comic is kind of... the premise is funny but they picked so many things that are either definitely related to autism or very possibly related to autism to say "No this is just not related to autism" to, that I'm kind of meh about it and unimpressed and a little disturbed that it'll spread misinformation about what is and isn't connected to being autistic. There are so many other things they could have picked and they picked the wrong ones.

Here's a quote from the DSM criteria for autistic disorder:

Quote:
Grammatical structures are often immature and include stereotyped and repetitive use of language (e.g.,repetition of words or phrases regardless of meaning; repeating jingles or commercials) or idiosyncratic language (i.e.,language that has meaning only to those familiar with the individual's communication style).


And that's besides other aspects of repetitive speech that are common to autistic people.

Another quote:

Quote:
The person may be highly attached to some inanimate object (e.g.,a piece of string or a rubber band).


...or possibly to Cheerios with peanut butter on a string!?! !

Another:

Quote:
Abnormalities of mood or affect (e.g.,giggling or weeping for no apparent reason, an apparent absence of emotional reaction) may be present.


Like.... looking angry to people even when you're not??

Quote:
In older individuals, tasks involving long-term memory (e.g.,train timetables, historical dates, chemical formulas, or recall the exact words of songs heard years before) may be excellent, but the information tends to be repeated over and over again, regardless of the appropriateness of the information to the social context.


Meaning, yes, more about repeating stuff.

From the book The World of the Autistic Child, which is fairly conservative (i.e. doesn't have "out there" opinions about) about its opinions of autism:

Quote:
The high-functioning autistic young person, however, usually has difficulty using adaptive skills in an independent living setting, and is ill prepared to cope with the social and employment aspects of the "real world." Typically, these young people do know how to make their bed, do laundry, microwave a pizza, and brush their teeth adequately. Left on their own, however, many never make their bed, wear only disheveled clothes, eat mainly lots of junk food, and have chronic bad breath.

What the higher functioning young person with autism or PDD needs is oversight for their daily living functions, rather than the close supervision and prompting that the more severely handicapped autistic person needs to accomplish these daily goals. There are very few programs that provide this kind of model. Such programs are actually less numerous than programs for severely handicapped students. A very good one that I have visited serves multiply learning disabled, borderline IQ clients; in addition, a few people who have Asperger's syndrome or who are very high-functioning autistics have participated in the program. All clients in the program live in sets of garden apartments within a quarter-mile of the program's center, which is located on a residential boulevard in a suburban community. The sets of apartments are in complexes where the majority of tenants are not in the program, but are people who might be neighbors anywhere. The program's center is in a building that looks like a professional office building; it contains a livingroom-type recreation center, a physical activities center, a conference room-classroom, a computer training room, as well as administrative offices for the program. Clients have time to spend together in the recreation center and in one another's apartments. In the first year of the program, clients learn the skills they need for living independently in their apartments, like cooking, shopping, and cleaning.


Why would autistic people need to be in a program that teaches them cleaning, if trouble cleaning up after oneself was not a common trait of autistic people?

Another part of the book says:

Quote:
The next area of skills training is the area of everyday living skills or what in educational terms is sometimes referred to as critical skills. This includes those things that a person needs to do to provide for his or her own self-care -- taking transportation, shopping, cleaning, cooking, doing laundry, maintaining one's house, and so on. On The Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales, these skills are called daily living skills, and there are age norms associated with part or complete mastery of various skills. For children without developmental disabilities, daily living skills are learned incidentally and are never formally taught in school (except, thank goodness, driver's education).

For the developmentally disabled person, and the autistic person in particular, daily living skills have to be taught specifically and made part of a routine.


So, again, daily living skills issues like cleaning trouble are part of autism for a lot of people.

What really irritates me about this whole thing is that it treats it like the diagnostic criteria are all there is to autism. And no, I don't even mean the full diagnostic criteria. I just mean the little short part at the end. The DSM actually contains a much longer description of autism, you just never see it. You only ever see the checklist. For those curious:

http://sites.google.com/site/gavinbolla ... for-autism
http://sites.google.com/site/gavinbolla ... -aspergers

Those are the entire diagnostic criteria. Not just the tiny bit at the end that's all most people ever hear about. They look a lot different than the short version.

Of course you'll note this part:

Quote:
Individuals with Asperger's Disorder do not have clinically significant delays in cognitive development or in age-appropriate self-help skills, adaptive behavior (other than in social interaction), and curiosity about the environment in childhood (Criterion E)


Which claims that people with AS don't have problems with adaptive behavior. But in practice, most do, and many actual clinicians who work with AS people every day have been trying to get that part changed. (Of course that was before the plan to merge AS and autism, at which point that won't make any difference either way, because that will no longer be a restriction placed on people who used to be called AS.) I think the TWotAC book I quoted was far more accurate on that, because the author (for all her faults in the way she sees autism in general) does actually see autistic people including AS-dxed people on a regular basis and knows what their actual skill patterns are. It's a difference between theory and practice.

Here's another thing she emphasizes in her book:

Quote:
Test of Adaptive Functioning. In addition to intelligence tests of the type just described, tests of "adaptive functioning" or "functional skills" are also used. These tests measure how the individual is able to use the intelligence she has to get along in everyday life. Tests of adaptive functioning are especially important for identifying skill deficiencies in adult autistic people, because some of the brightest individuals accumulate a lot of knowledge that is only of limited interest to other people (such as knowing the distances between planets, or the number of elevator banks in certain prominent skyscrapers). For an autistic person, knowing many such esoteric facts does not necessarily mean that he or she can make change from ten dollars, figure out how to ride public transportation, or independently know when to change bed linens. Although the intellectual skill may be there -- for example, to strip a bed and remake it -- the desire to do it may not be there.

[...]

Administering the VABS or a comparable test can be especially helpful when trying to obtain services for a child or adult with high cognitive functioning who has a diagnosis of PDD or Asperger's syndrome, since a number of public agencies do not serve people based on these diagnoses alone. A VABS may show that such an individual is functioning with significant adaptive impairment, despite a normal IQ.


So, again, yeah, adaptive skills including cleaning are part of autism. This isn't a fringe opinion. She even mentions the desire to clean, although I think that's partly because of her own biases. (She believes all autistic issues are ultimately social ones, pretty much, and therefore that if an autistic person is unable to do something that they theoretically understand how to do, then it must be because they're not subject to the social pressure to do it the way everyone else does it. This is what I mean when I say this is a very conservative book. But despite its inability to get the reasons straight, it describes the behaviors perfectly well, and failing to clean is one of them.

Sorry that this is so long but I don't want anyone getting the wrong idea from that cartoon. Especially about the cleaning. One reason that I get services from my state DD agency is because as a result of autism I'm unable to clean up after myself. Unable. (As I said, some autistic people will say "unwilling" when they really mean "unable", often due to lack of understanding or repeating what they've been told about themselves.) I wouldn't want someone to decide that their inability to clean up isn't related to autism, and thus not seek help for it from autism-related services. That can become a serious health hazard if the problem is severe enough, which for me and many others it was. I co-run a mailing list for autistic adults with problems with daily living skills, so I see a lot of people who have serious problems cleaning because they are autistic, not just "because they're weird and it isn't in the criteria so it's not autism". And a lot of them really suffer because they can't get help for it. Some of them have even lost their apartments over it and become homeless. It's not trivial and it's not unrelated to autism.


_________________
"In my world it's a place of patterns and feel. In my world it's a haven for what is real. It's my world, nobody can steal it, but people like me, we live in the shadows." -Donna Williams


Last edited by anbuend on 28 Feb 2011, 4:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

MidlifeAspie
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 1 Nov 2010
Age: 47
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,016

28 Feb 2011, 4:13 pm

Thank you Anbuend :D

That was well thought out and very thorough.


_________________
Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.


Verdandi
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 7 Dec 2010
Age: 54
Gender: Female
Posts: 12,275
Location: University of California Sunnydale (fictional location - Real location Olympia, WA)

28 Feb 2011, 4:22 pm

Thanks, anbuend. That is the sort of post I wanted to write, but the words weren't there.

I do think the idea of comedy about the things people ask about in relation to a disability they may have is pretty funny - I've seen some good ones related to ADHD, for example, and there probably are similar questions related to ASDs (I recall one about hearing voices in white noise, which most people can do), as an example.



anbuend
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 5 Jul 2004
Age: 43
Gender: Female
Posts: 5,039

28 Feb 2011, 4:28 pm

Thanks, I'm glad it was useful. Because my head is now... both pounding and... something. Like it feels like it's moving back and forth when it isn't. That much language does that.


_________________
"In my world it's a place of patterns and feel. In my world it's a haven for what is real. It's my world, nobody can steal it, but people like me, we live in the shadows." -Donna Williams


greenturtle74
Velociraptor
Velociraptor

User avatar

Joined: 4 May 2009
Age: 48
Gender: Male
Posts: 495
Location: Greater Philadelphia

28 Feb 2011, 10:18 pm

Hi, I'm the cartoonist, or the Dude, if you will. :) Thanks MidLifeAspie for sharing this latest post of mine, and thanks anbuend and others for your criticisms.

The point I was trying to make is that we like to try to find a nice, neat explanation for every little quirk we have. Asperger's explains away so much that is unexplainable, like faceblindness and lack of eye contact. So it's tempting to chalk other things up to Asperger's as well.

Admittedly, some of my examples fall into the gray area of, "Are they AS?" or "Are they not?" Looking angry is common to many Aspies, but not all. Many people who are not Aspies look angry all the time. So, looking angry, by itself, isn't a sign of AS, at least as I see it.

As for repeating oneself, anbuend is right in that repetitive routines are a defining AS characteristic. In the cartoon, I was specifically referring to repeating oneself verbally (not as a stim, just in a forgetful way) - again something not all Aspies do, and something non-Aspies also do. But I see how this could cause confusion for the reader.

As for inability to clean, I had not thought about it that way. I apologize if anyone was offended, because that wasn't my intention. I certainly do not get it right all the time, and I hope to continue my learning process so I can be an effective advocate. I always welcome your comments on my blog so that we can have a real dialogue and perhaps get closer to the truth of our experience.

Thanks again for reading and for your feedback.



just-lou
Toucan
Toucan

User avatar

Joined: 6 Aug 2010
Age: 38
Gender: Female
Posts: 252
Location: Sydney, Australia.

01 Mar 2011, 7:43 am

Apparently I really have no sense of humour. I don't mean any offence, but to me, things like that discourage people who are just learning they may be autistic from asking questions about it, for fear of sounding like just another idiot. I've seen many people posting here asking if anyone else shares some of their wierder characteristics, and whether it's common to aspies or not - often finding they are common things can help you feel like less of a freak.



ci
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 28 Nov 2010
Age: 43
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,546
Location: Humboldt County, California

01 Mar 2011, 12:04 pm

Why feel like a freak when you can be stuburn with it and not care.


_________________
The peer politics creating intolerance toward compassion is coming to an end. Pity accusations, indifferent advocacy against isolation awareness and for pride in an image of autism is injustice. http://www.autismselfadvocacynetwork.com


Gideon
Raven
Raven

User avatar

Joined: 21 Feb 2011
Gender: Male
Posts: 117

01 Mar 2011, 1:32 pm

The problem is that the experts have beem lumping Autism, HFA, aspergers, and a host of other disorders and problems together. I have been studying this hard for awhile and I just think that Autism and aspergers need a separate classification. I also think aspergers may even need to be broken up into two separate but similar classifications. It is like the experts see all these things they preceive as problems and decided to lump it all together.



anbuend
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 5 Jul 2004
Age: 43
Gender: Female
Posts: 5,039

01 Mar 2011, 3:07 pm

Actually... the way I see it, just because nonautistic people and autistic people can both do something, doesn't mean it's not autism-related for the autistic person. My repetitive language is very much related to autism and the way I process and handle language in general. Just because not all autistic people are like that and some nonautistic people are like that doesn't mean it's not autism-related for some people. I think you're getting confused about that, and thinking that if something's not universal to autistic people, or at least superficially resembles something nonautistic people sometimes do, then it's not autism-related. But that's not how things work.

I hate to use a disease model for anything, but like... some people with colds cough. Some people with colds don't cough. Some people without colds cough. Does this mean that when people with colds cough, it's not related to having a cold? It's the same with autism. Autistic people vary enough that there is no such thing as an autistic trait that is universal to autistic people or that is unique to autistic people. But it's still an autistic trait even if it's not universal or unique. It's an autistic trait because it's caused by autistic neurology, not because all autistic people do it or something. Yes, there are NTs who walk around looking angry. But when autistic people walk around looking angry, it really is probably because of autism-related trouble with facial expressions. Almost always that's going to be the case. For that to be the case, it doesn't have to be that all autistic people look angry, and it doesn't have to be that no nonautistic people look angry.

I did get the point of the cartoon, I just think if I did it I would have used totally unambiguous examples. I actually didn't find most of your examples in a grey area, they seemed pretty clearly to be quite common autistic traits. I would have picked things that literally had nothing to do with autism and had almost no possibility of having to do with autism, and then it would have made more sense. Because I do see a lot of autistic people running around thinking that everything they do must be an autistic thing, and that does get easily ridiculous enough to make a comic about. But the examples you gave were mostly examples that were autistic traits, so it kind of didn't work for me as well as it could have.


_________________
"In my world it's a place of patterns and feel. In my world it's a haven for what is real. It's my world, nobody can steal it, but people like me, we live in the shadows." -Donna Williams


Verdandi
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 7 Dec 2010
Age: 54
Gender: Female
Posts: 12,275
Location: University of California Sunnydale (fictional location - Real location Olympia, WA)

01 Mar 2011, 3:17 pm

Gideon wrote:
The problem is that the experts have beem lumping Autism, HFA, aspergers, and a host of other disorders and problems together. I have been studying this hard for awhile and I just think that Autism and aspergers need a separate classification. I also think aspergers may even need to be broken up into two separate but similar classifications. It is like the experts see all these things they preceive as problems and decided to lump it all together.


This is factually wrong. Experts lump autism, asperger's, and PDD-NOS together because they're all autistic spectrum disorders. "HFA" is not a separate diagnosis.

People who may have similar symptoms and experiences can be diagnosed as autistic disorder, Asperger's, PDD-NOS, they can be designated as "high-functioning" or "low-functioning." Someone diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome may have a lot more in common with someone diagnosed with autistic disorder than with other people diagnosed with Asperger's. And while yes, "autism" may be 20 or more similar but not identical neurological conditions that have been lumped together for diagnostic convenience and from a lack of understanding, these aren't divided neatly along "Asperger's A, Asperger's B, and autistic disorder" lines.

As I understand it, a significant number of people who fit the criteria for AS and are diagnosed AS also fit the criteria for autistic disorder. What does that mean if they are so distinctive they should be separate?



Gideon
Raven
Raven

User avatar

Joined: 21 Feb 2011
Gender: Male
Posts: 117

01 Mar 2011, 4:56 pm

No experts lump them together because they have a few outward similarities. I would bet you that over time say the next five years the two will be separated. Autism and aspergers that is.



MidlifeAspie
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 1 Nov 2010
Age: 47
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,016

01 Mar 2011, 4:59 pm

Gideon wrote:
No experts lump them together because they have a few outward similarities. I would bet you that over time say the next five years the two will be separated. Autism and aspergers that is.


Actually, the current draft of the DSM V removes Aspergers all together and lumps it into Autism Spectrum Disorder. Plenty of time for it to change still, but I personally don't think it will. PDD-NOS, Apergers and HFA will all go away and just leave Autism with a severity spectrum.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/articl ... nated.html


_________________
Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.


anbuend
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 5 Jul 2004
Age: 43
Gender: Female
Posts: 5,039

01 Mar 2011, 5:00 pm

What exactly do you think the differences are, that make the similarities only superficial?


_________________
"In my world it's a place of patterns and feel. In my world it's a haven for what is real. It's my world, nobody can steal it, but people like me, we live in the shadows." -Donna Williams