Asperger's Community to NT Society at Large

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There's been over six and a half thousand visits to the Will Fruend thread posted by Sean though so clearly quite a few of them found they're way there.

Well a google search for "willam freund aspergers" brought me immediately to your post neant.

Hi. I picked up the Orange County Register this morning and was nearly floored when I read the front page piece on Willam Freund.

I was diagnosed with Aspergers/High Functioning Autism when I was 18. For years I tried to deny it and went deeper into the drug culture I had become a part of to hide that I was different.

It nearly killed me twice.

But never once, even in my deepest of drug induced hazes did I want to kill my family or anyone else for that matter. Unfortunately the only time Aspergers or any other form of Autism seems to hit the news is when one of us does something extremely bad or they make a sappy feel good movie about "Rain Man". Sadly this will cause many people who dont understand or are just ignorant to fear people like me and think we are dangerous.

Some days I just get tired of fighting stupidity and misconceptions.


To all of you I give thanks. Here you fight to help those like me and give acceptance to those of us that may feel alone and frustrated. You help keep people from being like Freund.

William Freund didn't just have Aspergers, he had many other mental problems and there was very little chance anything anyone would have done would have stopped him short of locking him up.

Sorry for the rambling nature of this post, I'm feeling a little out of it and just plain frustrated.

You know, what bothers me is when "society" decides that we are somehow less because we are different. Now with exactly one incident that even might be attributable to Asperger's, we're violent, too. This is the beginnings of another type of bigotry. Though I would rather be thought of as "feebleminded" than as the kind of dolt who thinks he's normal.

i absolutely agree, techstep.

They told me that they were "treating" me because I was having trouble with relating to others. Aaron commented about society being built on norms. It seems to me literally as if my treatment was aimed at somehow forcing me to successfully relate to others in certain unfathomable ways. If I couldn't, I had to accept life as a prisoner of the medical-industrial complex, a center for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars of profit for someone who was already rich. There is a serious violation of my civil rights involved here. I have a right to privacy. I have a right to be different. No one can deny my that right, except, apparently, anyone and everyone else. My "treatment" was a cover for a total lack of respect for me as a person and for my rights. By extension, it was disrespect for the civil rights of everyone. They're not rights if you don't have the right to deviate from the norm.