'Racket Aspergers'. Views?

This blog has been doing the rounds.
http://racketaspergers.blogspot.com/200 ... rgers.html
I suppose it's got a point because nobody actually seems to agree about the fine details of what AS entails.
And it's such a strange thing that all of a sudden everybody seems to think that someone in their family may 'have' it. Someone was objecting, the other day, that it's just not a natural way to speak of other members of the human race, who could just as easily be called normal (were it not that big pharma likes us all to have some illness). I can kinda sympathize.

It's the exclusion from work that makes it necessary. If I were not Asperger's I would've had normal access to work and generally to social inclusion. People automatically rate each other as to 'one of us' and 'not one of us' it's a basic survival technique and since the general population assesses people with AS as 'not one of us', and acts accordingly (fight or flight, stranger danger) it's also appropriate to confirm that through social/psychological definitions.

Postperson wrote:People automatically rate each other as to 'one of us' and 'not one of us' it's a basic survival technique and since the general population assesses people with AS as 'not one of us', and acts accordingly (fight or flight, stranger danger) it's also appropriate to confirm that through social/psychological definitions.

Sounds a strange way of going about things to me, as the medical profession is not the first place you would expect to find people trying to add weight to the animalistic instinct to be prejudiced against someone who seems in some way 'different'. It would make more sense were it that we were given a clearer picture of what actually constitutes AS; but this hasn't been forthcoming.

I kind of think of it as something I had. It explains my childhood - the isolation, the mute period, refusal to be touched and so on. Exceptional gifts at a young age.

Now, it has waned but am left with the after effects - like having had a debilitating illness for many years but slowly coming into a more manageable state of being.

I don't need hospitalization or special treatment just to find my own way of dealing, coping, and surviving like everyone else.

When I first stumbled across this I did cry because it made me remember my childhood and I realised how much I had fought against it, fruitlessly, because it had never been within my control and had never been my fault. . I felt angry too but that has subsided now. I don't want to use it as an excuse so am loathe to pretend it caused all my bad teenage behaviour or my chaotic twenties but there are things that I am now able to reflect upon that may be explained by this syndrome.

I wonder if my life of denial could have helped me in some way in so much it forced me to be social, to take jobs that were out of my comfort zone. It is only now that I realise how much I have fought against my own nature and am not sure if the knowledge will now slow me down. I have a deep desire to stop fighting, to stop struggling and just accept my limitations but it is hard to give in.

Ok. I don't know if I understood this right, cause I started agreeing with this article when it was saying we need a more tolerant society that accepts differences in people's personalities and abilities. Yes, we do. (Especially in this country), which is just what is described. I agree, society should tolerate eccentric people, but it does not!
Then the article goes on to saying that Aspergers is a label used as an excuse for antisocial? behaviour. I don't like that, I don't think it should ever be an excuse for bad behaviour, but perhaps an explanation one can work towards the better from.
Society can be quite intolerant and I do believe people with AS as kids need a lot of guidance and logical explaining even to the smallest most "obvious" bits of information, and what if they do not get it?
I do definitely think that people with AS can be or become very good people, very ethical people and not anti social at all, if they just learn to understand their surroundings and the fact that there are many people on this planet, all different, some good some rogues and their ideas, beliefs and space needs to be respected as long as they do not break laws or ruin lives.
But for instance my son hated playing football at school and did not want to participate in ring games. Now why that is such a problem for the school I don't know, if it is crucial for their education, then they must force him to join, or leave him alone, give him something else to do, it's as simple as that. But why is it such a problem for them that he does not want to do this? I guess he is being anti social by finding this - not fun or interesting at all?
Sometimes I wonder whether all these categories within psychology were created by Aspies and their need for explaining and categorising their environment and the people within it? There are so many categories! I know only some I can definitely say I do not belong in, like schizophrenia, I know definitely I do not see things that are not there, although as a child I might have a couple of times imagined something so strongly it was almost there.
I was going through the AS categories, because within AS there are categories made by someone! I found a couple of categories that I can well fit within. Sometimes I feel almost everyone in my family could fit into the AS sphere somewhere.
What is really a sure sign that a person is completely normal? Would it be that they do not believe in AS or any of the other disorders cause they can't see why people need to be categorized as anything other then a good person or a rogue, or is that an AS trait?
Sorry I am confused... Somebody help me, please.

Postperson wrote:It's the exclusion from work that makes it necessary.

I don't know whether I understand this comment, but -- taking it the way I have interpreted it -- what is it about AS that excludes (precludes?) you from work?

13243546 wrote:Then the article goes on to saying that Aspergers is a label used as an excuse for antisocial? behaviour. I don't like that, I don't think it should ever be an excuse for bad behaviour, but perhaps an explanation one can work towards the better from.

I fear it does happen. People get into trouble or find themselves blacklisted for their behavior and then they do everything they can to get the medical profession on their side. A diagnosis of AS always helps, even if it was obtained by manipulative means.

13243546 wrote:I was going through the AS categories, because within AS there are categories made by someone! I found a couple of categories that I can well fit within. Sometimes I feel almost everyone in my family could fit into the AS sphere somewhere.
What is really a sure sign that a person is completely normal? Would it be that they do not believe in AS or any of the other disorders cause they can't see why people need to be categorized as anything other then a good person or a rogue, or is that an AS trait?
Sorry I am confused... Somebody help me, please.

I think everyone is confused -- and that includes Lorna Wing and all the others who have followed in her research footsteps. I think it's Tony Attwood who speaks of 'the Asperger's puzzle' -- which looks to me like a way of concealing the chaotic state that this line of inquiry has been in, all along.
The blog is in its element when it criticizes Baron Cohen's AQ test.

It's basically just a new name for being a geek or an artist. A variant of human personality that has existed throughout history and has been largely responsible for the 'progress' of civilisation.
There's no real need to medicalise the milder forms, but understanding the neurological basis helps us to understand that its not our fault that we seem to be so emotionally detached from other people.

I am kind of upset that so many of us get bullied in school for being different, when we didn't really have that much of a choice how our personality developed. I think people need to be taught to be more tolerant of neurological difference in the same way as tolerance of racial/religious/gender/sexuality difference is now taught from an early age.

Just how many similar characteristics to AS are present in this?
http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/portrait_of_j_random_hacker.html

breakingout wrote:It's basically just a new name for being a geek or an artist.

Hang on. The relationship between the two concepts of Geek and the concept of AS, I can readily understand. But Geek and artist are two opposite poles. What is the rationale that unifies the two? I had never understood AS being something that has anything to do with creativity. If it supposedly does, then the medical profession is just being idiotic by putting in an intellectual box something that its researchers don't understand. What a surprise!

Well I think it just depends on which direction your special interest or natural talent takes you.
Some Aspies become great musicians and composers, some become visual artists (perhaps not through raw creativity as such but through repetition and attention to detail), some become actors or film directors. Others like myself spend all of their time trying to understand how things work and absorbing information and so turn into stereotypical nerds and geeks.

I never had a great thing for numbers or statistics, as far as I am concerned knowing that pi is 3.14159 is as much details as I ever need to worry about. I just wanted to understand the mechanisms behind everything from the internal combustion engine, telephone, television, computers etc. in general, once I learned about how it all fit together I would move on to something else.
Of course computer hardware and software is pretty complicated and ever-changing, so I got stuck on that for rather a long time, now I seem to be stuck on autism, psychology, neuroscience etc, with a side in history and philosophy, which is again a pretty huge
area that I am unlikely to crack.

How does one go about switching interest to something more productive?