Life with Aspergers

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...

Aspies are often described as unfriendly, yet we (reportedly) have the unique ability to be friendly with everyone regardless of physical characteristics such as age or color. So why are we perceived as being so unfriendly? The Early Morning Aspie-Initiated Hello In the morning as I stroll through my office to get a cup of coffee, there are always a lot of people with their heads down doing work, looking for things or otherwise engaged in activities. Interrupting them to say "Good Morning" makes no sense to me. In any case, how do I know if it's good? and don't they already know that it's morning? Usually, I'll truncate my "sayings" to Hello, or Morning, and even then, I'll say it very quietly. I just don't get it you see. Half of the people in my office will ask me a work-related question at some point during the day and I'll often greet them with a "hello" then. The other half usually don't ask for help and can probab...

Aspies have a lot of trouble with food. I've already covered parts of this as part of the "under-eating in children" section of How the Whole Asperger's thing can be detrimental to your Health but now it's time for more detail and a few real-world examples. Why don't aspie children eat? Texture Memory Distraction Medication Taste Texture Texture plays a very important in aspie eating habits. For example, I have problems eating peaches because of the feel of their skin and because of the "powdery" taste of the fruit within. I also have a lot of problems relating to sultanas which I believe began with texture issues. For a long time I could eat sultanas in biscuits because they were dried out but not when they were in cakes. now I can't eat them no matter where they are. Possible Solution: if you have a texture issue, you can get around it by mashing or blending the ingredients. Just make sure that there is no skin left on the object before you ...

Assuming that Other People are Mind Readers is commonly described as an aspie trait though I don't think it's the result of aspie assumptions. Instead I think it's an NT interpretation of their behaviour. Behaviour 1: Sudden changes of topic in mid-conversation This stems from the aspies difficulty with small-talk. Aspies won't stand around discussing the weather but tend to discuss and resolve a single topic, then quickly move onto the next. NT conversation is quite different and they will tend to move to a neutral topic before starting on something completely different. There is nothing wrong with either approach but NTs talking to aspies often get lost at this point and think that the aspie has found something new to add to the original topic. Behaviour 2: Expecting People to have a Shared Memory A lot of things come back to the aspie memory. Aspies often have very clear memories of events and quotations. In conversation, they may drop a remark which links back...

Don't ask me where I get these topics from (sigh). They usually come up because I read someone's comments about something in a forum and start applying them to myself to see if they fit. The answer is; Amongst People who don't know them very well - NO Amongst Friends - YES. Why is this? There are a lot of social cues that people use to determine whether or not someone is lying. These include; Eye Contact (which aspies have trouble doing) Certain "nervous" body gestures like clasping hands (which aspies do naturally) Differences in vocal tone (which aspies don't vary as much) Facial Tics or twitches (which aspies often have naturally) This means that when someone who doesn't know the aspie well is talking to them, they often interpret the aspie as lying even when they're telling the truth. Conversely, when someone who knows the aspie and their behavior very well is talking to them, they won't be able to use these things as clues. They know that ...

Continuing the discussion about how Asperger's traits can directly cause depression, I'll be working through the list from the end of my last post. Very good long Term Memory How can a having a good long-term memory be responsible for depression? The key to understanding this is to approach it from the point of view of an NT. Most of the time, it seems to me that detailed memories just aren't available for NTs without external assistance. By external assistance, I mean the use of video cameras or photo albums. In the movie One Hour Photo , Robin William's character says, while looking at birthday snaps, " Nobody takes a picture of something they want to forget ". I think that this is particularly relevant to the issue because it means that NT's tend only to remember the good things in any detail. The Aspie however, with their long term memory often has perfect recall of past events and conversations. They will spend hours analyzing a conversation that ...

In my last post, I introduced the idea of depression in Asperger's, made a few lists and cited a little bit of research. My apologies if I became a bit clinical. To the people who have told me to keep this blog personal rather then following established research, I am listening. In this post, I will be explaining some of the entries in the lists of the previous post. Social Troubles related to fitting in. This should be fairly self explanatory. Despite the appearance of being loners, Aspies often suffer from loneliness. Their poor conversational skills often make it more difficult for them to make and keep friends and to have a social life in general. This leads to loneliness and loneliness leads to depression. Guilt or Regret over Past Actions There is some truth to the phrase "this is going to hurt me more than it will hurt you". When an Aspie is stirred to the point of outburst and/or meltdown, they can temporarily lose control. When this happens, invariably somet...

What is a Meltdown? A meltdown is a condition where the Aspie temporarily loses control due to emotional responses to environmental factors. It generally appears that the aspie has lost control over a single and specific issue however this is very rarely the case. Usually, the problem is the cumulation of a number of irritations which could span a fairly long period of time, particularly given the strong long-term memory facilities of the aspie. Why the Problems Seem Hidden Aspies don't tend to give a lot of clues that they are very irritated; their facial expressions very often will not convey the irritation their vocal tones will often remain flat even when they are fairly annoyed. Some things which annoy aspies would not be considered annoying to neurotypicals. This makes NT's less likely to pick up on a potential problem. Often Aspie grievances are aired as part of their normal conversation and may even be interpreted by NTs as part of their standard whinge. What happens...

One of the defining traits of aspergers syndrome is the "photographic-memory" whereby aspies can recall with precision events and conversations that are years old and forgotten by the other participants. As with all aspie traits, they differ from one person to another. Indeed some aspies claim to not have this memory - this could be true or it could be the result of misleading information in the Asperger's books which don't really describe the condition well. The Filmographic, not Photographic Memory First of all, I want to redefine the terminology. It is more correct to say that the aspie has a filmographic rather than photographic memory. This means that the memory is more like watching a film than recounting items in a picture. I'm not convinced that an aspie would do especially well in those psychological tests where they remove objects behind a screen. In fact, because we're talking about short term memory there, I think an aspie would do considerab...