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Autism and Asperger syndrome - Treatment - NHS Choices



Many famous and successful people have Asperger's Syndrome.

Asperger's is characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication, alongside restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests.

This failure to react appropriately to social interaction may appear as disregard for other people's feelings, and may come across as insensitive.


Anonymous said...

The articles on Asperger's always make it sound so cut-and-dried, as if every person with the syndrome behaves according to a set of symptoms, whereas in fact they differ from one another as much as so-called normal people do.

Some experts (like Dr Tony Atwood) say the low rate of diagnosis in girls is not so much because they don't have it but because it manifests differently in girls and is more difficult to diagnose.

I have several people with Asperger's in my family, male and female.

The one thing they all have tragically in common is misunderstanding and being misunderstood by others, and feeling alienated and alone.

It is very difficult for both them and those around them to live with, and agonising to see what they go through sometimes.

One of the most difficult aspects is that they are, to all intents and purposes, disabled, but you can't necessarily see and notice anything overt that suggests disability about them, so people expect them to act perfectly normally and can be very intolerant of them when they can't.

They can absolutely exhaust themselves during a school or work day, desperately trying to act normal, which is why children in particular often have meltdowns once they get home, and adults often suffer from depression.

Whereas physically disabled people are usually visibly and obviously disabled, and their needs can be specifically provided for, this is not the case with a hidden disability like Asperger's.

Alternatively, people who know they have Asperger's but don't know very much about it assume that they are backward and stupid, and talk down to them.

It can be hell to live with, is all I can say about it, whether you have it or someone close to you has it.

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Autism diagnoses level off in Britain after five-fold surge during the 1990s

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Lots of famous people have the problem.

Anonymous said...

The medical ethics of the category of Asperger's syndrome is an absolute minefield, and that is not only because it violates the basic tenet of medicine that medical conditions may be considered mild, but never 'borderline': it is also because viewing it as a 'problem' is inevitably related to cultural attitudes; and, further, because the the whole idea of what actually constitutes the syndrome is entirely amorphous and keeps changing, on a rather, I think, arbitrary basis.

I notice that the article includes a photo of Michael Palin (now removed), with the caption 'lots of famous people suffer from this syndrome'. (I imagine this inclusion is influenced by a website that - by its own admission - very, very speculatively puts forwards names of famous people that the author of the articles there believes might have the syndrome; a practice that could be distressing for those whom it identifies). Well, I had always read that Asperger's was be characterised by difficulty in understanding irony, and subtlety and nuance in human behaviour. If you're suggesting that this characterises Michael Palin, of all people, you really are throwing the cat among the intellectual pigeons. And that is not merely because genius is uncategorisable; it's because Palin is very obviously at the other end of the spectrum.

Anonymous said...

In my family autism is NOT caused by vaccines, it's clearly genetic. 

If people wish to think it's vaccine related then that's their wish.

Paul Coker comments:

What about the Mercury?

When a study revealed that mercury in childhood vaccines may have caused autism in thousands of kids, the government rushed to conceal the data - and to prevent parents from suing drug companies for their role in the epidemic.

by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center in Norcross, Ga.

Convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the meeting was held at this Methodist retreat center, nestled in wooded farmland next to the Chattahoochee River, to ensure complete secrecy. 

The agency had issued no public announcement of the session - only private invitations to 52 attendees. 

There were high-level officials from the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, the top vaccine specialist from the World Health Organization in Geneva, and representatives of every major vaccine manufacturer, including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Wyeth and Aventis Pasteur. 

All of the scientific data under discussion, CDC officials repeatedly reminded the participants, was strictly "embargoed." 

 There would be no making photocopies of documents, no taking papers with them when they left.

The federal officials and industry representatives had assembled to discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and young children. 

According to a CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraeten, who had analyzed the agency's massive database containing the medical records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based preservative in the vaccines - thimerosal - appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children.

"I was actually stunned by what I saw," Verstraeten told those assembled at Simpsonwood, citing the staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link between thimerosal and speech delays, attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity and autism. 

Since 1991, when the CDC and the FDA had recommended that three additional vaccines laced with the preservative be given to extremely young infants - in one case, within hours of birth -- the estimated number of cases of autism had increased fifteenfold, from one in every 2,500 children to one in 166 children.

News Spike: Deadly Immunity

Paul Coker has left a new comment:

The infant vaccination schedule in the US was stepped up enormously in 1989, coinciding with the US autism rate beginning to sky-rocket from 1991 onwards, the first point at which it would have been detectable in victims.

Themerisol has been used as a preservative in vaccine solutions since the 1930s and is probably harmless in small doses, and to fully grown adults; but it has a highly cumulative effect and there have been contradictory findings arrived at via different methodologies that makes it impossible to say for sure or predict how long it remains in the areas of the brain it typically accumulates in, or how to make an educated guess about safety, especially as a parent.

Upon being forced by the Congress to conduct their own investigation as to the possible risk of neurological damage presented by continued use of the additive, Big Phama met in secret to compare notes in 2000; they began a phased withdrawal of Themerisol, beginning in 2001.

This is the origin of the MMR Scare, and the parallel Straw Man attack co-ordinated by Big Pharma as a rear-guard action - they insist that the withdrawal is "purely precautionary, but this is simply a means to back away from what Coroporate Lawyers call "a very actionable position" from the point of view of Billion Dollar class action lawsuits.

They attack, discredit and demonise this one man, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who published a paper using very weak and flawed methodology to demonstrate anecdotally that there was a correlation between the combined MMR vaccine (three inoculations in one) might be linked to Autism and neuro developmental deficit disorders.

But Wakefield wasn't an expert and didn't know what he was talking about - he was built up and his claims exaggerated so he could be attacked and publicly attacked and ridiculed for endangering public safety.

But the pathogens in the combined vaccine don't cause autism - it was the delivery media which was poorly understood and highly neurotoxic

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