screwtape wrote:Shatterface as Guest wrote:The Man Who Fell to Earth
Shatterface
Back to Heinlein!
Heinlein beat Tevis by a year but I prefer
The Man Who Fell to Earth. The film's great too. As well as the fish out of water aspect to the character of Newton there's some sensory overload issues I relate to.
Autism has been a rag-bag diagnosis involving epilepsy and brain damage as well as an underlying, but clinically similar set of individuals. When you sift out the birth anoxias, the uncontrolled seizure disorders and so on, what is left is the folks we generally think of as autistic. Probably not the place to get into whether Asperger's and autism are the same (DSM V has finally concluded they are, just a matter of degree. I have a quick and dirty test for differentiating the two that I will explain to anyone interested.) What remains, after removing the poor kids who were brain damaged at birth, are pretty much always explicable by genetics. I used the word 'responsible' deliberately. I wouldn't inflict my genes on someone if I knew it would hurt them, but there is no doubt that my genes have resulted in his diagnosis. He is entirely OK with that, and wouldn't become a 'typpie' if he could. He likes being focussed and not distracted by sex, social media etc. I don't think of it as a matter of blame as there was no intent, no mens rea as M'sieu Steersman might say if that language has penetrated that far west. Merely a matter for remark, cogitation and remembrance.
We use ICD-10 in the UK so Aspergers is still a distinct diagnosis but I'm fine with ASD.
The history of the terms 'autism' and 'Aspergers' are complex: originally 'autistic' referred to a symptom of schizophrenia; Hans Asperger's name for the condition which now bears his name was 'autistic psychopathy' (which kind of makes it sound scary). It wasn't classified as a form of autism until Uta Frith (I think) translated Asperger's work in the early Eighties. Frith also thought Aspergers was a schizoid personality type but didn't think defining it as such was particularly useful.
To make it even more complicated those who have reviewed Asperger's original studies wouldn't now classify some of his patients as Aspies.
I mentioned in an earlier post that Philip K Dick generally treated autism, schizoid personality disorder and schizophrenia as parts of the same spectrum; that was correct according to the psychiatry of the time.
Until an cause is determined classification of disorders can be quite fluid. And you won't even get a referral to an assessment if the condition isn't severe enough to have a negative impact on your life - by which time you might have developed a co-morbid condition like depression.
TL; DR: There's not yet a Periodic Table for the mind.
Shatterface
