Just another personality type?

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with word definations all these words could mean different things in different languages. so the equivalent of 'society' in some language could mean a gathering of the faithful! maybe. guess the main theme is questioning what is 'normal', who defines it and maybe its time to change. would it stop being a disability if the general 'gathering of the faithful' stopped seeing it as one, was totally accepting and realised (just like any person) those considered aspies too has strengths and weaknesses which can be put to use for the general good of...society.

also i made the point re tv as it came across as you were basically saying go away this has been done to death, etc. but then my reaction was who are you to say that. if you dont like it move on you dont own this forum. but no disrespect meant maybe we just misunderstood.

The social functioning problems of AS go far beyond the lack of skillful adherence to the social norms that vary from culture to culture.

The social functioning problems of AS are only a subset of the problems of AS.

I think I see where you're going. Maybe.
ASD is a disability, yes. Sensory issues alone can make the world difficult to deal with never mind the social issues. The thing is, this is an invisible disability. It's not like blindness or a paraplegia, although people can be stupid about those too. We can look or sound just ever so slightly off, and that can lead to a lack of acceptance that is the real issue.

Just as an example of how attitudes contribute to the disability let's take blindness. Blindness is definitely a disability in a sighted world. With accommodations the disability isn't much more than an inconvenience. Society's attitudes towards making those accommodations make all the difference.

With some support ASD is still a disability but not an insurmountable one.

And just in case you wondered, most people with ASD, or the parents of people with ASD do not want a cure.

I'd like to see a cure for the widespread disability called rectocranial inversion that seems to afflict much of the population. We need more trained neuroproctologists.

We deal with the question of "What is normal?" all of the time. I get where you are coming from, because I've asked all the same questions and even thought the same things you're suggesting.

What eventually occurred to me is that all the "What if?" questions are all hypotheticals. The scenarios don't work in the real world.

What if society was totally accepting and realized that we have strengths that can be put to use? Life for us would be much better, yes. Trust me, we all want that, but it isn't the reality yet. Might it happen sometime in the future? Maybe, but we don't live in the future, we live in the here and now. And the here and now doesn't work well for us, or we don't work well for it, however you want to look at it, the results are the same, and the results amount to being disabled for all intents and purposes. That's what we have. That's what we have to deal with. Like it or not.

Would we like it to change? Of course we would! And there's quite a few here that are actually trying to do that. But we've got to live, learn, work and eat somehow right now, with the way things are while we work for change. In that "here and now reality," we are disabled.

You should get hold of the book, "Autism and Asperger's Syndrome," by Uta Frith. It's expensive, but worth the expense and the read. It's got the first English translations of Asperger's papers. At the end of his reports, just before the conclusion, he wrote the following:



As you can see, Asperger himself, from the very beginning, was in favor of societal adjustments to accomodate Autistics. That was over sixty years ago. We're a long way away from total acceptance, but things are already a hell of a lot better than they were when I was in school, between twenty-five and thirty-seven years after Asperger's research. Even then, barely anyone knew anything about Autism other than classic Autism.

Society considers it a disability. That's what makes it a disability. Self-proclaiming prophecy? Maybe. But until society adjusts to accomodate us, it's what we have. And to reject that is to reject what little accommodation does exist for us now.

Hope this helps.

It's a disability. There is not one society I would feel comfortable in. Unless it was just pitch black, but then my fears of the dark will trigger.

I might just say the same thing I say over and over again. If it is not a disability then why get diagnosed at all? Why even be here? I know people who have been diagnosed with many things and just forget about them and continue to live their lives. I don't agree with doing such a thing, but if you truly believe you don't have a disability then it makes more sense to just forget about it.

For the record: autistic, ADHD, epileptic as well as other disorders that cause me a great deal of grief. I just get on with life but I need the label to make me feel like I'm not alone, not some weird NT. I've got my good days and my bad but I can at least admit that I have a disability. I need a pension too. I probably even need a service dog. I still need people to do things for me even though I live semi-independently.

Oh well, I hate these types of threads. I hate this type of mindset. If it's in the DSM it's a disability, disorder, neurological.

I tend to look at aspergers, like certain other conditions (especially personality disorders), as a naturally occurring personality type which happens to be considered a disorder. Whether it's a bad thing or not depends on one's perspective, but it is a disorder by the definition of the word 'disorder' in the context of psychology.

I know people who look at autism as if it were a personality type.

They sometimes say things to me like "You don't talk like other autistic people. I don't think you're really on the spectrum."

Oh, wow. That's powerful. How do to DO that? I wish I had that power.

I don't know. It's my own fault for making jokes and using idioms, I guess.

I remember one person who said this to me was actually on this forum for a time. He said that everyone here wrote the same way - a sort of flat style with, as above, no jokes or idioms. And my thought was, "Do you actually read Wrong Planet?"

When I was really looking into this at first last year, one person who's been around many of the same parts of the internet that I have said that she always thought I was on the spectrum, and that my writing style was one style she'd seen several autistic people use. So it's kind of funny when others tell me the opposite. It's not like every autistic person is the same.

The most recent didn't actually say I wasn't autistic, but he said that I didn't communicate "strangely" like two other people he was thinking of. Except that my communication style over the past year has been about 2/3 of "communicating strangely" according to him and the few months I haven't been communicating like that, he believes is my natural communication style. This is, of course, after I spent some years trying to tone down my writing style in hopes that people would stop being so antagonized when I try to state simple facts. And now this effort is being used to tell me how autistic I am or am not.

He did think last May or June that I was subconsciously faking it, having wrongly convinced myself I was autistic.

So I guess it comes down to this:

Can someone send me the Autistic Writing Style Guide?

Mercury will Rise and Set in Rosetta Stone "The Elements of Autistic Style" Forthwith.

Failure to conform will result in a one-way trip to the Glue Factory.

Harsh, but fair.

Hopefully, the sniffing of the glue will induce sufficiently high levels of autism to right the wronger in "The Elements of Autistic Style".