What autism mystery? So what is ASD?
I got this a question about the nature of ‘Autism Spectrum Disorder’. I was asked
In your opinion is ASD a learning disability, a neurological
condition or a mental health issue…or something entirely unique perhaps?
Here was my answer….
In my book The Jumbled Jigsaw I indicated that ASD is like a fruit salad.
In that fruit salad are personality features which are confused with the condition:
ie
- avoidant personality disorder,
- obsessive compulsive personality disorder,
- dependent personality disorder,
- schizoid personality disorder
can all be mistaken for ASD,
- passive aggressive personality disorder,
- narcissistic personality disorder,
- schizotypal personality, paranoid personality
- cyclothymic personality disorder
can also resemble different aspects of ASD stereotypes.
Agnosias are also common in ASD:
- social emotional agnosia is synonymous with the social communication issues in Asperger’s and autism
- face blindness accounts for many autistic behaviours and is common to 30% on the spectrum
- auditory verbal agnosia and auditory agnosia account for the meaning deafness issues and inability to easily distinguish words from general sound
- visual verbal agnosia accounts for difficulty reading with meaning common to many with autism
- visual verbal and auditory verbal agnosia could account for most cases of semantic pragmatic disorder
- visual form agnosia could easily account for the common context blindness, object blindness and seeing of the part but losing process of the whole common to people with autism.
- Tactile agnosia including pain agnosia may account for some of the body issues and fascination with body feedback explored by many with autism.
All of these are sensory perceptual disorders.
Then,
are common to a significant percentage and left untreated can contribute to learning disability and progressively imbalanced brain chemistry.
- Mood (rapid cycling bipolar, depression) ,
- anxiety (including Exposure Anxiety, Separation Anxiety, RAD, PTSD, Selective Mutism)
- compulsive disorders (OCD and Tourette‘s tics)
are common co-morbids and untreated are especially confused with the severity of someone’s ‘autism’.
- RAD (reactive attachment disorder)
in particular can result in infants with severe sensory perceptual disorders such as face blindness, social emotional agnosia, form agnosia (where an infant may never perceive the parent’s body or face as a whole) verbal agnosia (meaning deafness and tactile agnosia (inability to process body feedback reliably) which can limit the bonding experiences usually build in emotional/verbal/physical interactions.
are common in people with ASD and have their own, sometimes treatable, often improvable, underlying causes and will make functioning and learning problematic.
also are commonly misdiagnosed as ‘the autism’.
In the Jumbled Jigsaw, I suggested each person’s ASD fruit salad components were identifiable, often manageable and that ASD only exists as the developmental combined impact of such things when they are not identified and treated or adapted to in the healthiest and most constructive means possible.
As an autism consultant I identify individual ‘fruit salads’ and write action plans based on this, particularly in the context of specific trouble shooting issues.
Yes, many sensory perceptual, health and psychiatric challenges To treat all ASD as learning disability is ‘old school’ and out dated.
Donna Williams, Dip Ed, BA Hons
author, public speaker and autism consultant
As an Aspie, I have suffered from allergies, an immunological disorder that is, as of yet, unknown. (We thought with dread for a while that it was lupus.) I also have severe encopresis, and have had it for six years. I was in the “pre-encopretic” stage for pretty much my whole life, and nothing gets rid of it.
I also have a lot of symptoms that identify me as an Aspie, but they vary widely in degree and how they manifest themselves, and when. Most people, when they meet me, first think that I’m slow, or that something “just isn’t right.” But they are polite enough to lay off, and usually, we do fine.
Donna, if anybody who is in doubt or confused read the Jumbled Jigsaw and realize all the views and thoughts therein, you would have nothing to do.
Please, do you address the pretending-to-be-normal theme in any of your older books? In general way and from the perspective of others? May be this is not a hot topic for you, but psychiatrists are so undereducated and refuse to admit auties are able of such high sophisticated skills.
You have my respect. Keep writing.
D.
I wrote about emulating non-spectrum people in Nobody Nowhere, then about others in Somebody Somewhere and in Like Colour To The Blind, the character Ian is emotionally crippled by this, breaks free of it but goes back to it. In Exposure Anxiety; The Invisible Cage I’ve also written about those with Exposure Anxiety using characters to hide behind because they are unable to dare the exposure of self. Some people are too challenged with other things to be able to emulate or adhere to the patterns of non-spectrum people, some are driven by anxiety or threat to do so at all costs, some can manage it for minutes or hours but then escape and find autie space albeit in a toilet cubicle or store room which is a shit of a way to live, some can manage it during a work day then go home and let their autie stuff hang out, alone, in a kind of social shame, some ‘succeed’ in burying themselves alive under such performance (which is considered the height of autistic ‘success’ in ABA terms) only to have intermittent ‘breakdown episodes’, death-wish behaviour or attempt suicide. The filmscript of Nobody Nowhere certainly addresses this issue directly.