Comment by tangled_zans | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tangled_zans | Hacker News Reader

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"When I was younger, before learning to read people, I read descriptions of Aspergers and it sounded much like me. Now when I read them it sounds not very much like me, because a significant component of those symptom descriptions involve poor social skills."

I've met a lot of people who describe themselves in such a way.

I think the problem is that the DSM relies on very arbitrary and subjective behavioural signs to diagnose a lot of what it considers a mental illness. That is something that really annoys me about the psychiatric profession. I would be quite keen to see a more mathematical and objectively grounded theory of mental disorder than the vague, hand waved criteria that we have now.

In your case though, I'll quote a character from the Rosie Effect (an amazing book by the way which you might enjoy reading) who said that the main criteria is... pathology. If you are able to maintain an adequate lifestyle (job, education, family, friends) then you're fine. It's only when those "autistic" traits interfere with your life and preclude you from reaching your potential that they're considered abnormal and a diagnosis is apt.

I have an alternate view is like you to consider.

My wife and I had major conflict. My son (at 2) was showing very unusual behaviour. He lacked empathy and my wife felt it was normal. When we got to school, his behaviour exploded into destructiveness. My wife stuck to her guns until someone had the courage to say "he's almost certainly autistic". Then, a few good specialists confirmed it. My wife relented and we helped our son learn to adjust (I focussed heavily on empathy, networking, etc). Now, if we waited until it mattered, he would not be anywhere as capable as he is today. The specialists are amazed at how far he's come. The difference is that people were aware and proactive. They looked for the cues (of which there are many and I see them often - eg. Flapping fingers like a birds wings to release energy/stress).

The DSM isn't perfect, but the industry (well, maybe 1 in 5) does a good job of recognising and managing proactively, not retrospectively.

Much of what we become is hard wired by the time we are 8. The sooner problems are diagnosed and managed, the better.

TL;DR - if you find out when you're going for a job, it's almost certainly too late to influence things.

Hi, thanks for sharing your story.

Yes, you are correct that it is different for children. As adults we can learn to cope and compensate for our weaknesses, but for a child whose mind is very different from the norm it could be nearly impossible to do so without outside intervention. So it's good that you persisted and found him the help that he needed!

I am very critical of the DSM, but that criticism is more due to my tendency towards mathematical purity, and I do agree that there are people helped immensely by it that wouldn't have been otherwise.

However, I also think that if we had better models of the mind, then perhaps we could even help more people. In your case your son was showing some clear signals that allowed several independent specialists to reach the same conclusion. I wonder how many children with less visible signs of autism that nevertheless would have benefited from some form of intervention and assistance in their youth. Perhaps, even, most people have some form of blind spots, be it in social interaction or mathematical aptitude, and a more individualised approach to education would allow all children to grow up maximizing their potential in every area. But I understand that that kind of thinking is utopic.

I suspect that the recurring phenomenon where adults self-identify with autistic traits is due to such a problem - they perhaps struggled with social interaction as children, but were not given the adequate tools to understand that at the time, and have only come to realize it as they grew older.

It sounds to me like you and the parent poster are actually in complete agreement. They wrote:

    "It's only when those "autistic" traits interfere with
     your life and preclude you from reaching your potential 
     that they're considered abnormal and a diagnosis is apt."

Isn't this exactly what happened with your son? Your son reached a situation (school) where his traits began to interfere with his life and his ability to reach his potential. And at that point, the need for diagnosis and treatment became clear. (Or at least as clear as these things ever are. They're certainly never simple, eh?)

Regardless, much respect to you for recognizing the problem and working with your son to get the help he needs. Not an easy thing to do, but you're doing it, and in an ideal world parents would get medals for this sort of thing. Good luck!

His point was it was obvious something was wrong even before school. So, waiting untill someone is forced out of there comfort zone and problems show up is wasteful. But, even if school was almost working ignoring it until people really can't cope may be to late.

Yeah I did not think that me and rustynails really disagree on much either!

Before I made the changes I found friendships to be anxiety inducing, and I was hopeless with women. Now I do very well with both as a result of learning body language. (Of course, I had to take the observations and use them to change my own habits. But body language reading was the necessary element that was missing.)

So it went from pathology to not pathology. Very far from it. My intuition is that I couldn't learn my way out of Aspergers, and so I probably just had a case of poor social skills, in a non-clinical sense.

Hmm, yes, I understand where you're coming from. If I can pick your brain a little bit more, I do find what you say about body language to be quite interesting - particularly because I am largely unconscious of mine most of the time.

In a broad sense, what sort of changes did you make to the way you present your body language, and what sort of cues do you look for in other people?

I wrote about how I improved here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11316187

That's mostly about improving the reading of body language. Send me a message if you want to know more about the other aspects, probably a bit long to write here. Contact info it in my profile.

Yeah that's very interesting, we should defo chat more! I'll send you an e-mail after work.

"Diagnostic labels are like arbitrary geographic borders placed on vast stretches of land"

I.e., everything (including personality traits), exists on a continuum. Diagnoses are descriptively labeled points on that continuum.

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