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9:28pm December 23, 2011

➸ We survived by the skin of our teeth.: So utterly annoyed right now... [warning, rant alert]

wheretheheartlives:

There’s a film being released of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a book by Jonathon Safran Foer. The child in the book is unusual, blunt, but altogether very loveable and caring. I’ve just seen a clip from the film saying he was tested for Asperges… now, to be…

Unfortunately I know the probable sources of the malice thing:

1. Hans Asperger himself.  What was probably, from the examples he gave, misinterpretation of other things. 

2. Digby Tantam, who is doing his damnedest to resurrect the idea. 

As for the source of the schizoid stuff:

Lots of professionals have talked about what used to be called “schizoid children” (and many adults) as possibly being autistic.  Despite the name, schizoid has little to nothing to do with schizophrenia, and more to do with social isolation and lack of (obvious to shrinks) emotion.  Keeping in mind that the way many people are diagnosed as schizoid has to do less with their inner experience and more with their outer appearance and assumptions on the part of the psychiatrist.  So naturally what counts as schizoid and what counts as autism or AS has bounced around a lot.  Probably where they got that part was the book Loners by Sula Wolffe, or any of the many ideas spawned from the book. 

The confusion was such that I was twice labeled as schizoid (despite that not being allowed in children) before receiving an autism diagnosis, on the basis of my appearance and lack of friends.

So it’s still not required for diagnosis but I can see someone reading the wrong book and getting that idea. 

(And the history of autism and schizophrenia itself as concepts is too complicated to explain. But suffice to say there seems to have been a lot of borrowing back and forth over the past century or so in various related concepts. But such is what happens in a field where anyone with a theory can publish and very little is rigorous or scientific to the same level as other fields. The whole reason they have to make the huge point about autistic people not being schizophrenic is that the diagnostic criteria are such that otherwise most of us would be diagnosable.)

Not that I’m in any way defending any of this. I just think I know where they got it. In the autism world, as noted, practically anyone with a theory can publish.  I only know this stuff because of a time period when I hit the local university library and tried to read everything I could touch on the history of autism and a few other things.  I promptly forgot it all on a conscious level and can only retrieve it to varying degrees when something like this reminds me just right.