
Dealing with Asperger's Syndrome, with the help of his wife. - amichail
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/fashion/17love.html
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rriepe
It's always inspiring to hear a story of someone who acknowledges his
problems, buckles down, and works through it.

Even better when it's a couple. Marriages go into meltdown mode every day for
things a lot smaller than this.

~~~
kqr2
True, but it was very fortunate that his wife already had professional
experience dealing with Asperger's Syndrome. I was a little surprised that she
didn't diagnose him earlier in their marriage.

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ColemanF
Asperger's is very poorly understood, and this misunderstanding is really hard
on suffferers (I am one.) The cause of all the varied symptoms is that we have
a slight delay in processing sounds, as explained in this article:
[http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16174-brains-of-
autist...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16174-brains-of-autistic-
children-slower-at-processing-sound.html) This means that if you say "Hi" to
me, I know instantly that you said a word one syllable long, but it takes me a
fraction of a second longer than a normal person to decipher the word as "hi."
This isn't a problem when a person says just one syllable. But in a whole
sentence, the delays snowball until I miss a big chunk of the sentence,
especially if the person speaks quickly. That's why, in danteembermage's
example, his son "has a hard time finding objects using verbal instructions
'grab your shoes buddy.'" If you handed him a piece of paper that said "grab
your shoes, buddy," he would get the shoes as fast as anyone. Poor speech
comprehension is the root of all unusual Aspie behaviors. ShabbyDoo's son
"physically cringes when there's lots of noise/confusion." The confusion comes
because there is too much noise and not enough signal. Aspies shy from social
situations because they can't understand what people are saying. Even things
that seem like deep-down problems can easily be explained by poor speech
comprehension. The article spends a lot of time on empathy, but empathy is not
an emotion, it's a social skill. You act like you care about somebody else's
problems so you get along with them better. Aspies suck at it because they
have a hard time understanding what people are saying, and they just have less
chance to develop social skills in general, because it is so hard for them to
talk to people.

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nkurz
I'm glad that others feel they benefit from this article, but somehow it rings
false to me. It feels like a parody rather than the confession it purports to
be. Here are a few of the wrong-notes for me:

    
    
      * He's obsessed with cleaning-product slogans and cattle behaviour?
      * He's working as a __marketing__ engineer?
      * Standing alone at parties 'kind of dancing'?
      * Calling 'methylchloroisothiazolinone' unpronounceable
      * Being self-consciously self-centered?
    

I realize that there is a lot of variation within Asperger's, but this piece
doesn't line up for me. It feels to me like a talented MFA student writing a
credible impersonation of Mark Leyner or David Sedaris based around a
caricature of Asperger's. Does anyone here know and vouch for the author? Does
his description ring true to anyone's sense of self, or only of their
perception of others with some similar characteristics?

~~~
rjurney
It wouldn't really be possible to list his symptoms exhaustively and in terms
of the DSM, and have the article be readable by a general audience.

~~~
CWuestefeld
The killer paradox of media. For anything to be interesting, it can't delve
too deep. Anything in-depth can't be interesting.

And thus the curse: any journalism must follow the pattern of telling
anecdotes of one or maybe two representative cases. This lends a personal
feel, but gets mired in the trap of "anecdote is not the singular for of
data".

Reporting that is engaging is rarely informative, at least to people that
already have a working model of the topic.

~~~
rjurney
I think you can do in-depth and be interesting. Its just quite hard. You're
never going to please everyone, but you can inform a wide audience without
being factually incorrect. This takes an enormous amount of work, though, and
so its hard to pull off.

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dukeofchutney
Interesting thing is we all (if we were to delve deep enough into ourselves)
have Aspergers to some degree.

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ShabbyDoo
Some of his issues sound a lot more OCD than Asperger's-like. Caring about
having an even number of gas pumps?

Our three year-old recently was diagnosed with Asperger's, so we're learning.
Is anyone here an Aspie who could offer some advice?

~~~
barry-cotter
Team sports are great if you can get into them, and completely pointless if
they disdain them. Individually oriented physical activities that emphasise
co-ordination are good for dyspraxia e.g. dance, martial arts, gymnastics.
Spend lots of time explaining the blidingly obvious in terms of social skills.
Premature advice: acting, improv, debating are all good for socialisation.
They're likely to be nerdier than normal, encourage this, and making friends
of like interests as otherwise the chances of having no friends whatsoever
until they get to a big high school or college are high (unless you live in a
major urban area) If you can get them into a gifted and talented programme,
whether a summer school or a proper day school do so. They are likely to put
no effort whatsoever into tasks and subjects that don't interest them, give up
on this pre-emptively. Try to make sure they encounter challenging material
relatively early in their education. I was ~16 by the time4 I got to that and
nine years later my capacity for necessary grinding work is still low.

~~~
ShabbyDoo
Thanks for the suggestions.

>Spend lots of time explaining the blidingly obvious in terms of social
skills.

This is going to be interesting, especially for my wife. As I suspect I'm a
bit of an Aspie myself, I can see social rules from an outsider's perspective.
She'll have more trouble explaining why, for example, one (at least in
America) can not mention an obese person's size in his/her presence. He knows
he's fat, he knows that we know he's fat, and he we know that he knows that we
know, etc/ Sp. whats the issue? That's a hard one. How do you explain the
irrationality of allowing the fat person to suspend disbelief that we're
thinking, "Oh mah gawd, you're really f'ing fat!"

------
Herring
Seduction and deceit in humans.

~~~
Herring
So I assume you guys approve of him lying to his wife to get her to marry him
& possibly passing on something hereditary to his kids? It's fascinating the
lengths people go to in order to reproduce.

~~~
helveticaman
The length organisms will go to reproduce is "as far as it takes".

