Monthly Archives: December 2013

Social Skills

Socializing: Reboot

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I had jury duty recently. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the US jury service system, US citizens are periodically required to fulfill our civic duty by reporting to a local courthouse and making ourselves available to sit on a jury panel for a criminal or civil trial. The processes vary quite a bit from place to place but often you show up for a day at the courthouse and get sent home without actually sitting on a jury.

Unless you’re really lucky. Like me. Then, somehow, you get put on a jury 2 out of the 3 times you’ve ever been called to serve.

Together with seven other people, I got assigned to a jury panel for a 3-day civil trial. The case was strange. The testimony was at times fascinating, at times mind-numbingly boring. None of that is especially what I want to talk about.

Like so much else in life these days, I approached jury duty as an experiment. A socializing experiment. I decided it was the perfect opportunity to reboot my approach to interacting with strangers. It was a relatively safe, time-limited interaction–if things went poorly, I knew that I would only have to spend three days with these people and then I’d never see them again.

In the past, I would have done my best to pass, hoping that my fellow jurors would like me and more importantly, not think I was too weird. This time around, I made a conscious decision not to worry about that.  Continue reading Socializing: Reboot →

Cognitive Function

Autistic Regression and Fluid Adaptation

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In my last post, I talked about my recent language difficulties and mentioned autistic regression. Sometimes called autistic burnout, autistic regression is a loss of skills or coping mechanisms.

Regression can refer to a specific set of skills or abilities:

  • progressively losing the ability to speak

  • deteriorating executive function

  • reduced memory capacity

  • loss of self-care capabilities

  • loss of social skills

  • reduced ability to tolerate sensory or social overload

It can also refer to a general loss of the ability to cope with life or to accomplish all of the necessary daily tasks of living.

Sometimes the loss is temporary–a period of a few weeks or months–after which a person regains the lost abilities. Other times the deterioration in skills or coping mechanisms takes place over years. It may be come permanent or semi-permanent, with skills being regained but not to the level at which they previously existed.

Often a period of autistic regression begins during or after puberty or during the transition to adulthood (late teens to early twenties). Mid-life is also a common time for autistic people to experience burnout or regression. In fact, many people (including me) list a noticeable change in their ability to cope with daily life as one of the reasons for seeking a diagnosis. However, autistic regression can happen at any age and is often preceded by a major life change or a period of increased stress.  Continue reading Autistic Regression and Fluid Adaptation →

Diagnosis

Comorbid Conditions: Diagnosis and Misdiagnosis in Autistic Women

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There’s a new article today at Autism Women’s Network: Autistic Women: Misdiagnosis and the Importance of Getting it Right

The rate of being diagnosed with a co-occuring condition if you’re autistic is very high. In fact, I’m curious if there’s anyone here whose sole diagnosis is autism or Asperger’s. I have a comorbid diagnosis of an anxiety disorder and probably have mild undiagnosed OCD. The really interesting thing is that so many of us don’t feel that all of our comorbid diagnoses are a good fit. I wrote about how my anxiety doesn’t feel disordered to me and so I don’t think the diagnosis fits.

I also think it’s interesting that we’re often given diagnoses for conditions that have many overlapping traits with autism. For example, dyspraxia and sensory processing disorder share nearly all of their traits in common with autism. How do clinicians decide that one autistic person should also get a dyspraxia or SPD diagnosis while another person with a very similar profile doesn’t? I would love to hear your thoughts on this or anything related to the article in the comments here.

Also, I owe a huge thank you to the people who filled out the survey about comorbid conditions and patiently worked with me on sharing their stories for this article.  My next article for AWN will be about motherhood and the challenges that being on the spectrum can present as well as how it might affect our choices regarding childbearing. Okay, so that’s likely more than one article.

If you’d like to share your thoughts and experiences, I’ve created a short 5-question survey at  Questions about Autistic Motherhood. It’s open to both women with children and women who do not have children. As long as you identify as being on the spectrum and would use the term mother to refer to yourself if you had a child, then you’re welcome to take the survey. I’m especially interested in the question about what supports autistic moms would benefit from–if there are enough responses, that will be its own article, because I think its a subject that doesn’t get nearly enough attention.

Communication

Uncooperative Words and Where I Go From Here

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Something strange is going on in my brain. Aside from the usual strangeness, I mean, which I’m quite used to. Back in March I wrote about my missing word problem. Over the past few months, I’ve developed some funky new issues with writing:

  • The missing words are no longer just small words like a or the. Now I also skip right over important words, and sometimes pairs of words. A particularly bad sentence might have three words missing.

  • Sometimes I repeat phrases, typing things like “I was about to about to change directions.” Those are fairly easy to catch when editing.

  • Verb forms have become interchangeable at times, which results in me sending ridiculous texts like “I’m exciting to see you” and mixing tenses in paragraphs.

  • Contractions are occasionally problematic, specifically leaving off the apostrophe and what comes after it.

  • The weird word substitutions continue, perhaps more frequently, definitely in more obvious forms. Also substituting homonyms like to/too and you’re/your, even though I know the correct usage and it drives me bonkers when other people do this.

  • My spelling has become erratic. In some writing sessions, I backspace over every third word, often more than once until I get it right. The biggest problem seems to be the letters coming out in the wrong order. Yesterday I tried to type Walmart into my GPS and I had “mwla” before I realized that wasn’t going to get me to where I needed to go.

This all adds up to making writing–from a blog posts to one sentence emails–very frustrating. Even a single line reply on Facebook will end up with some glaring–though not to me–error. In spite of multiple proofreadings. In spite of taking my time and being extra careful.  Continue reading Uncooperative Words and Where I Go From Here →

Aspie Traits

Gender and Autism: A Preliminary Survey Post

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I’ve been planning to write about gender and autism for a while now. Months ago, I wrote a personal reflection piece. It got two emphatic thumbs down in beta, so I let it languish in my drafts folder. Then, after some feedback from commenters here, I decided I would write a more informative companion post as context for the personal reflections, but that never happened. Then I cannibalized the personal reflections piece for something I was invited to submit to an anthology, which took me weeks to write because apparently everything takes me weeks to write lately.

Which left me still wanting to write about gender and autism here. As a first attempt, I’ve  surveyed some of the ideas that people have put forth about gender and autism over the years, starting with Asperger himself.

Note: I’ve linked to a bunch of articles in this post, many of which I don’t agree with. However,I want to share the background information that I used so you can make your own decisions. Also, most references here are to binary gender and gender norms because that is the way most of the research is framed.

The Original Gender Link

In his paper describing his case studies, Hans Asperger hypothesized that autism must be a sex-limited or sex-linked condition because he had only observed it in boys. However, he also noted that some mothers of boys at his clinic who had autistic traits, which he found puzzling given the lack of girls who fit his model. His explanation for why there might be autistic women but not autistic girls was to suggest that autistic traits develop in females only after puberty.

He went on to state that he’d studied over 200 additional autistic children and had concluded from his observations that the autistic personality is an extreme variant of male intelligence. It’s important to note here that Asperger’s model was developed based on case studies of 4 boys who had been referred to him for behavior problems in school. All of them were considered to be uneducable in the traditional school system, creating a very specific profile on which Asperger based his observations.

It’s interesting to contrast Asperger’s idea of male versus female intelligence with Simon Baron-Cohen’s male and female brain models. Asperger believed that females were better learners with a tendency toward concrete practical thinking and tidy methodical work. He thought that males, on the other hand, were naturally gifted with logical ability, abstraction, precise thinking and formulating, and were predisposed to excel at independent scientific investigation.  Continue reading Gender and Autism: A Preliminary Survey Post →