Life with Aspergers

I've already discussed perfection in a previous post . This post is intended to provide a bit more background. We already know that aspies can be obsessed with patterns. In many cases, particularly school work, patterns only make sense when something is perfect and/or complete. It therefore follows that aspies often have major hang-ups about perfection and completeness at school and at work. This obsession with impossible levels of perfection and completion can cause a lot of stress, particularly in young aspies at school and particularly where other factors, such as learning difficulties, writing problems or other forms of work-impairment are present. For example; An aspie with poor writing skills may find that he is constantly crossing out and redoing entire paragraphs of work because it doesn't meet his or her standards. Often they will tear out a page in their exercise books rather than leave imperfect work on the page. This isn't limited to writing and can happen d...

I had my attention drawn to this video recently. It's actually a year old (possibly older) but I think it's still quite relevant and interesting.

I just found this news article on ComputerWorld and thought I'd bring it to your attention. It's dated 2 April 2008, so it's a little over a month old. Asperger's and IT: Dark secret or open secret?

A lot of the more common behaviours and feelings associated with Aspergers seem to lend themselves to a definition of Introversion and it's tempting to see aspies as simply "introverts" but this clearly isn't the case. It is true however, to suggest that there are more introverted aspies than extroverted ones. Most aspies feel very much like "a fish out of water" at social gatherings. Often, we don't care for a lot of social contact and we need a lot of "alone-time" particularly following intense social gatherings like school, work and parties. It's fairly accurate to describe aspies as "nerds" but that shouldn't imply that we are all scientifically minded and boring dressers. Can Aspies be Extroverts? Many aspies will do extroverted things to their appearance, like get a tattoo, dye their hair or wear "loud" or colourful clothing. Unlike NTs though, they'll do this because they personally like a particular loo...

First of all, I'm not intending to cover this from a "medical" perspective. If you want to know this look it up in a medical journal or on wikipedia . Ritalin is a medication which has had 50 years of field testing in children, it's therefore generally considered to be safe and to have minimal side-effects. Of course, being a parent and giving my child a daily drug which is deemed safe isn't quite enough for me. I need to know what's really going on. Since my child doesn't communicate in any detail about the effects of the drug, I decided that I should give it a go myself. Since my genes are closest to his, I expect it's the next best thing to testing it on him (and getting decent reporting). He's currently 7 years of age and is on 1.5 tablets in the morning and 1 at midday of Ritalin 10. I did two tests, which gave me a good indication of the short term effects. I don't intend to do any further testing - not because of any side-effects b...