who's playing this game?
Brynne:
Oh, yes, Asperger's exists. My son has it. He's a high-functioning autistic, extremely intelligent, but years behind emotionally and mentally. He didn't speak until he was 3. He's now 10. It is most definitely not rubbish and I always feel like crying when I hear people say that, as that's a sensitive subject for me. He has such a struggle with things we take for granted, and it breaks my heart. I think what is "rubbish" is when people are wrongly diagnosed, or merely assumed to have, Asperger's strictly going on the "nerd-like" tendencies, social awkwardness, etc, which is what I think you're referring to, JM. But real Asperger's is much, much deeper than that. While many can go on to lead somewhat normal lives, and do often end up being that quirky physics professor and other such stereotypes, many will have a much more difficult time. When my son was 3, I was told he would be "bagging groceries at Kroger" for life. He is in a special needs school, and has improved tremedously, but he still has a long way to go, and he may never get there. KristalRose, I know what you mean about being "terrified" about high school. My son is about to enter the middle school years, and even for non-asperger's kids, those are usually pretty tough years. Your story sounds remarkably similar to mine.
Jamie got his first taste of being picked on for being "different" about 2 years ago. And can you believe it was from the parent of a child in our neighborhood? Jamie was playing with his two "friends" (they are twin brothers who have since abandoned him as a friend) and a third child who is the neighborhood bully. I did not know this at the time. They all went to the bully-kids house, and the father let the twins in, but told my son at the front door to go home. Jamie cried and the father sang 'Crybaby Ha Ha!" It's all I can do to keep myself from burning their house down. I may sic JM on them.
Wow, I'd love to chat with all of you who have experience with this, sometime!
veilchen:
The best way to discribe this sub-group of autism comes from www.aspergers.com
Asperger's Disorder is a milder variant of Autistic Disorder. Both Asperger's Disorder and Autistic Disorder are in fact subgroups of a larger diagnostic category. This larger category is called either Autistic Spectrum Disorders, mostly in European countries, or Pervasive Developmental Disorders ("PDD"), in the United States. In Asperger's Disorder, affected individuals are characterized by social isolation and eccentric behavior in childhood. There are impairments in two-sided social interaction and non-verbal communication. Though grammatical, their speech is peculiar due to abnormalities of inflection and a repetitive pattern. Clumsiness is prominent both in their articulation and gross motor behavior. They usually have a circumscribed area of interest which usually leaves no space for more age appropriate, common interests. Some examples are cars, trains, French Literature, door knobs, hinges, cappucino, meteorology, astronomy or history.
Diagnosis for autism in general and the sub-groups in particular are designed to help the child/adult, not to label them. The problem arises when doctors/psychologists/psychiatrists mis-diagnose or over-diagnose because they can't be bothered to focus on their client and her/his particular problem. Some even just describe medication without going further than that, and that is just plain reckless.
Patients with Asperger's have the same problem any of the high and low end autism diagnosed have, and that is a severe problem with short-term memory. It leads to information overload, and can't be handled well by the population diagnosed with this disorder. On the other hand, the long-term memory is usually excellent. I have seen people with high end autism, and especially Asperger's being highly successful in school and even University. But it does take a lot of care and involvement.
I am a counselor, not a Psyc-doc, but I always advocate the involvement of all family members. Social support is grossly undervalued and the supporters themselves face a lot of heart-ache and difficulties.
The biggest problem for all counselors and psychologists are the american HMO's. They allot a certain amount of time for counseling and then demand that the patients get cut off. If you are not a private patient or have access to superior health insurance you are more or less screwed (pardon the expression). I don't want to go on about this, it will only lead to a tirade...let's just say that I don't like the way health care is handled by the HMO's, whose priorities are as followed:
1. Profit
2. Profit
3. Profit
4. Health? What's that?
5. Patient? How much can we make off her/him?
Well, you get my drift
Brynne:
Oh, yes, we wound up paying out of pocket quite a bit when we were with an hmo way back when. Luckily, Georgia has a lot of free programs for special needs children.
The thing with autism is, if you look at all the "symptoms" required for diagnosis, just about anyone can relate to many of them. And some doctors who aren't specialized in the area carelessly misdiagnose autism. Jamie's physician knew better and referred us to a specialist. He was concerned about the fact that he wasn't speaking yet (except for echolalia, which is a common autistic trait which means the person "parrots back to you" everything you say to him/her) and mentioned autism as a possibility, but did not diagnose it. In fact he said he couldn't diagnose it, as that wasn't his specialty.
veilchen:
Bravo to your physician. I get very upset when health care providers haphazardly diagnose, prescribe, treat, etc. A few bad apples usually give the whole profession a proverbial 'black eye'. True, very true, for autism and its diagnosis and treatment you need a specialist, especially since the problems faced by the individual and her/his family are so many.
The prominent features of autism, such as lack of responsiveness, language and communication problems, unusual motor movements, rigid behavior, are usually misunderstood, and prone to lead to misdiagnosis of the actual disorder. They cover a whole range of other disorders, many of them of pure biological origin. A specialist is the only one that can properly diagnose, prescribe and treat. I'm so very glad you have access to free services. Behavioral therapy, communication training, parent training, and hopefully community integration take time and effort. It is especially important that the patients and their social support system don't lose heart or hope.
Renatus:
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However, it is not an effort to label people (a mighty task that all social workers avoid to the point of sometimes being too phlegmatic), particularly children, but a short hand method of understanding WHY someone has the behaviours.
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Diagnosis for autism in general and the sub-groups in particular are designed to help the child/adult, not to label them.
THANK YOU, both of you, for saying this. My family has a lot of mental difficulties and illness in it, and I've had struggles myself, but trying to get some of my 'friends' to understand that when I do research about mental health and muse in writing about what I've gone through and discovered I'm not being a drama queen or looking for pity has been damned near impossible. Some of them don't even believe most mental illness exists, on basis of what I don't know. It's like they can't understand that a diagnosis doesn't magically put someone into a little box from which they cannot or will not escape - it's a way to understand what is going on with that person and how to deal with it. I've been wanting to take them by the shoulders and shake them in sheer frustration. Thank you for letting me know that there are people who get it.
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