Part 5 Autism and Asperger's

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Part 5 Autism spectrum disorders

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) result in difficulty blocking out stimuli. Imagine living every day in the middle of a marching band and a laser light show. The only way to survive would be to give all of your focus to a few things. Accordingly, learning subtle things, like social cues, which most of us just pick up and have a hard time even describing, can be a major problem. For example, what are the rules on flirting? How long do you maintain a hand shake with a person?

Many people with ASD go through life like a person who cannot hear music trying to fit in at a dance. They watch, they mimic the movements of the people they see, but you can tell that they just don't feel the rhythm.

The Spectrum part of ASD means that impairment falls on a continuum. Like problems with vision or hearing. Some people just need reading glasses, some people are totally blind, and yet these are all problems of the visual spectrum.

In ASD the degree of impairment can make it so a child never learns to differentiate words from background noise, and may never learn to talk. Other highly functional individuals like Temple Grandin (author of the excellent book Thinking in Pictures) may go years without being able to speak due to their reaction to too much stimuli at that time.

While a number of people with ASD are mentally retarded others are geniuses and bring a laser like intensity to their topics of interest, which might lead to innovations that the average person could never create.

It is hard to determine who has a related disorder like asperger's, in which there can be pronounced social impairment and an inability to read social cues, along with some rigidity, and topics of intense interest (stims), but rarely the kind of communication impairment seen in ASD. It is often stated that Bill Gates seems like he may have a mild form of asperger's.

In my experience I have never met a student who had a diagnosis of ASD or asperger's that I did not feel was accurate. I have met a great number of kids whose parents were resistant to one of these diagnoses despite the presence of symptoms. No parent wants to think their child might have a disorder that cannot be fixed. They want to imagine their children growing up to be “normal” and while many people with ASD may be extremely successful, they will never be “normal”. They just need to learn that this isn't a bad thing.

There has been an exponential increase in diagnosis of ASD in the last few years but I do not think this is a media creation. When you work with these students you can feel the distress they get from too much stimuli and there is often a quality in the body language and voice tone, a flatness of verbal emotional range that no one could or would fake.

Why the increase? I don't know. I know some parents blame it on vaccinations. From my experience it seems to be more prevalent in more affluent communities, and I do not think that is a factor of better diagnosis as much as I think there may be a missing environmental factor. There does seem to be some genetic relationship as well.

Regardless of the cause the result is that in the future people with ASD will be in every work place and in every community. Public education must be increased so we can benefit from the unique tools people with ASD can bring to us all.