Thoughts: Aspergers Syndrome
You can google this if you want (if you aren't certain what it is), but first I want you to say what you think it is, based on what you may have heard, seen, or thought of. Misconceptions or not, let's hear it.
And of course, try to keep it out of the realm of comedy for now. You know who you are.
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Without looking it up I can tell you Asperger's Syndrome is an Autistic Spectrum disorder, essentially a somewhat higher functioning form of autism. People with Asperger's Syndrome are somewhat better at social interaction as opposed to those with true autism. My experience with Asperger's kids is that, unlike autistic children, they have a desire for social interaction but that they simply cannot understand the social cues or the rules of social interactions. Consequently, they might not realize when a conversation has begun (as opposed to idle banter) or when a conversation has been concluded. They also have a lot of trouble recognizing the affective states of other people, so they can't easily identify the emotions experienced by others. One of the major problems with this that I've observed is that many of them also struggle to identify their own emotions. Yes I banned you but I'll just tell you this: It's not a mental illness. It is a disability, but no, it's not a mental illness. The brain is just 'hard-wired' differently than most people. Some have even been calling it the 'new brain'. They think differently about the same topic that most NT's (Neurotypical) people would. They have social issues a lot of the time because they don't pick up on non-verbal communication, which is like about 80% of all communication. You can call it being 'mind-blind'. They normally can't pick up on that 80% so they're left with only the 20%. They also use more of their mental resources just figuring out how to respond to something. "Are they joking? Are they serious? Should I laugh, or stay silent? Should I talk about something this reminds me of? Will that offend them? Will it offend them if I say nothing at all? Am I offending them now? Is now a good time to bring up one of my needs?" etcetera ad nauseum. Also, while they're processing what was said and how to respond to it (this is probably why some people with AS seem 'slow' to respond; they just have more to think about), they are also processing their surrounding environment as people with AS are far more sensitive to things such as texture, noise, light, etc. Their senses can even be affected painfully so, depending on the individual. Not everyone with AS experiences these senses the same way, and a lot function just as normally as others. But they do feel things more. People with AS are left far more drained after social interactions than most people are, so they tend to isolate themselves. It's not that they don't want to interact (well, some actually don't but that's beside the point), they just aren't sure how to, and since people with AS are resistant to change and are established in their own routines, they tend to hate the chaotic nature of societal norms and how quickly they change. It makes them panic, frustrates them, angers or saddens them, etc. They prefer what is 'known' rather than what is 'unknown'. They steer towards their comfort levels, rather than away. And anyone who doesn't want to play in that comfort zone tends to get ignored, sometimes completely by accident since the person with AS doesn't always realize they are being rude or socially inappropriate. I could make an entire essay out of this (some might argue I have already) but you get the point. It's why it was redefined as part of Autism, I think. Because it's not a mental illness, but a disability. It's not like they hear voices, have delusions of grandeur (unless one's totally unhinged himself from reality but that's really another issue), etc. They're just people like you, even if they have a different brain than you do. If you want to actually research this more, I suggest the link below. What causes AS is the part that I'm less certain on. That, I've got to look up. But off the top of my head I'd imagine it's more likely to be neurobiological along the lines of structural changes in the brain or the absence of a protein used in neuroplastic development and pruning. Having just done some lite reading on the topic, yes, it seems to be largely structural during fetal brain development and with subtle, but global, structural changes which are inconsistent between individuals. What that means is, there isn't enough similarities between the brain structures of AS sufferers to use brain imaging techniques as a diagnostic method. The way I understand it is that they have the social problems of autism but without the intellectual impairment. Their brains are just 'hard-wired' differently than most. If 99% of people had AS, society would view those currently normal (the 1%) as the strange ones. People with AS think and feel just as much as neurotypical people. They just do it differently. If 99% of people had AS, society would view those currently normal (the 1%) as the strange ones. That's true, not just of AS but of any and all mental disorders. If 99% of people had schizophrenia, it would be considered normal. Under the Soviet psychiatric system, it was considered so "normal" to be a socialist that anyone who wasn't a socialist was committed to they asylums. And it's not that long ago in the Western psychiatric system that theism was considered so normal that "atheism" was considered reasonable grounds to hold someone in a psychiatric hospital. People with AS think and feel just as much as neurotypical people. They just do it differently. Differently, yes. But it's a question of degree. They think/feel SO differently that it's considered to be abnormal. And what's so problematic about AS in this sense is that because they can't recognize varying degrees of their own emotions (e.g. differences between disagreeing, frustration, and anger), there's tendency to express extremes of emotion. Therefore, they often respond to minor emotional triggers with extreme affective states because they're unclear about their own more subtle emotions or unsure of how to express those more subtle emotions. 1
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As some of you may know, I wear hearing aids because I'm practically deaf. So..., for a long time I thought that people were saying Ass Burgers. As you can imagine, that was a huge misconception. Now, some of you may think that's funny but let me assure you, being deaf is not a funny thing. Oh sure, some of you may be laughing at the Ass Burger bit (Yeah, you know who you are) so I'm not going to elaborate on it because I'm trying to keep this out of the realm of comedy for now. ;) 1
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