It’s not much fun having the sensory amplification of autism, particularly when it’s severe. It’s sort of like having a permanent migraine or a hangover. When you see autistic kids who won’t take their fingers out of their ears, it’s because everything is so loud to them that it’s actually painful. Children who bang their heads will sometimes voice that they were in so much pain the only thing that helped was hitting a wall.

The most inaccurate description of autism’s sensory disturbance I’ve heard was from that silly GAPS diet ‘doctor’. She described autistic’s brains as being ‘clogged with toxicity’ and ‘all this sensory information cannot be processed properly, it turns into a noise, a mush’.

There is nothing mush-like about it. It’s just someone turned the volume knob all the way up.

I’m sensitive to light. I always squint on sunny days. Bright lights hurt my eyes. I hate fluorescents. I don’t like dark either, and often switch on bulbs on a grey day just to cheer the place up a bit. Strobe lights and flashing lights bother me. Imagine if you had a hangover or a migraine, wouldn’t those things bother you too?

Loud noises make me yelp in pain. Quiet noises are highly irritating. I am like Captain Hook, I can’t stand ticking clocks. The high pitched whine of electronic equipment drives me crazy. On the plus side, I can tell from across the other side of the house if someone is raiding the snack cupboard or the dog is up to mischief. I even know what the dog is doing – if he’s quietly tossing socks in the air or having a sneaky gnaw of his bed, I can tell. I have a perfect ear, so I could have made a good musician. However, because I don’t exercise my vocal chords by making conversation, I wouldn’t dream of singing in public. Unlike most of the applicants to the X-Factor, I can hear the bum notes I make when my vocal chords misbehave!

You can learn to filter out noise as long as it’s not above a certain level. I’m often in that state, switched off to TV or radio noise. Some noises I can’t filter out. Music is a problem for me. I can’t work and listen to music, because the music takes over my brain. I do very badly in nightclubs and always have. As a teenager I used to put my fingers in my ears on the dance floor and get laughed at because of it (‘you geek’). I often found some quiet corner to go sit in if I could. I’d close my eyes and think ‘please let this be over soon’. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a nightclub and not thought at some point in the evening ‘please let this be over’ because of the noise and stress of people. I tend to zone out and start acting weird or sulking, because the music overwhelms me and interferes with my ability to think.

I have problems distinguishing voices from background noise, and it is normal for me to be unable to follow a conversation in a busy pub. I tend to smile and nod and hope people don’t ask me questions. I also have problems with accents or with people I haven’t met before. I often mishear things, usually if I am doorstepped, or I am talking to a checkout assistant. Sometimes someone can say something, and it sounds like gibberish. Usually my brain forms it into words that weren’t said and don’t make sense. I’ve described this as ‘aural dyslexia’ before, a term arrived at independently by many with asperger’s syndrome to describe what they experience. The official name for this is CAPD, Central Auditory Processing Disorder.

The sensation of drunkenness does not make me feel relaxed and carefree, unless I am so drunk I am about to fall over. Drinking brings on a variety of unpleasant physical sensations, including nausea, after around two or three units of alcohol. I experience a feeling of dislocation from reality, everything gets louder, which contributes to the inability to understand conversation. Various of my body parts begin to ache or hurt. My legs start to feel like lead and I become incredibly fatigued and whiny. This doesn’t make me a great partygoer.

The skin sensations are the worst problem. Since being a child I have cut out all the labels in my clothing because they scratch and irritate so much. I couldn’t wear wool until after I went on the Atkins diet a few years ago (which helped clear up a lot of my random skin rashes too). Wool does not feel soft to me. I still itch from wearing it, but I am able to filter it out better. Now I’m on the failsafe diet, I feel proud that I can wear cashmere at last!

I hate synthetic clothing that has polyester in it, it always feels so cold to wear, like it’s sucking the heat right out of my body. I get annoyed by the amount of knitwear that contains polyester, which lends a ubiquitous cheapness to all highstreet clothes. What is the point of wearing knitwear that doesn’t keep you warm? I’m extremely temperature sensitive. If I sit around I get very cold, if I go out and exercise, I practically have to strip off all my clothes as soon as I get in the door because I can’t bear feeling too hot either. I used to think this was a thyroid problem. It’s not, it’s a sensory issue common to autism and also fibromyalgia. It’s something amplified horrendously by food chemicals. I complain a lot less about being cold since being on the failsafe diet, but I still drive my partner crazy with the central heating.

Sometimes someone’s physical presence touching me can overwhelm me so much that I start squawking and yelling really loudly – such as if my partner tickles me with his beard or hugs me unexpectedly, or the dog jumps on me and digs my lap. It’s an effective if alarming way to get others to back off, though my poor partner’s eardrums tend to suffer! This squawking, yelling behaviour is one of those little things autistic kids do when they’re touched and they don’t like it. It’s automatic, I can’t help it. I sometimes ponder the morbid possibility of getting injured during a mugging, simply because I would be incapable of controlling an automatic yell if someone touched me.

As I mentioned, these same sensory disturbances are also a feature of fibromyalgia. If you compare the sensory disturbances of both, you’ll be astonished no one has made a stronger connection. I think fibromyalgia has a couple of distinct sensory issues – the dreaded sensitive ‘bruised/burning’ skin patches, and the tender points. It’s not much fun having those either. Poke me in a tender point and you’ll get squawked at pretty loudly. My tender points never go away, although I only get prickly skin patches when I cheat on my diet. Salicylates seem to be the main trigger.

What seems crazy to me is that autistic people are believed without question, yet people with fibromyalgia are still characterised by the medical profession as malingerers, Munchausen’s sufferers, hypochondriacs and drug seekers. Why the cognitive dissonance? Neither syndrome is more or less objective than the other. I have both asperger’s syndrome and fibromyalgia, lucky me. As far as sensory perception goes, you can imagine how these two don’t double up too well for me. Both syndromes have the same roots. I’m sure people with fibromyalgia have some similar brain differences, especially to the amygdala and insula (the seat of many emotions). I suspect triggering infections might cause some changes to the brain.

I’ve wondered for some time that part of the reason I always have some physical complaint or I’m having a food reaction is because I am very sensitive, and this very sensitive state also makes me more sensitive to pain. I think I feel things physically that wouldn’t even register in other people. I get pain in my DVT leg, I get gout in my big toe. I have chronic back pain as soon as I deviate from my diet. I think this is because I have enhanced pain perception, not because I actually have anything physically or metabolically wrong, though muscle tension is involved in the back pain. In the case of my back, I think there’s a feedback mechanism. The muscles get very tense which causes pain, which causes further tension. My back makes a lot of physical cracking noises, but the origin of the problem is in what my brain is telling my back to do. The pain problem has puzzled me for a while, because I know I only have mild issues with endorphins/opioid-like peptides (which can be a big problem for others, especially redheads). It seems like the pain is probably more an integral feature of the heightened sensory perception in autism than anything else. I feel like I have nerve endings where nerve endings shouldn’t even exist.

Then there are the emotional issues.

Autistics are often described by the ignorant as being ‘soulless’, ‘lacking in empathy’ or like automatons. I think these people don’t even know what autism is. Autistics have very strong emotions. If you read autistic and aspie blogs, you’ll find they are always freaking out about something, feeling miserable, feeling happy, feeling angry, feeling overwhelmed.

I know I feel things very, very deeply, I get hurt very easily, and I am afraid of people. I do have strong feelings for other people, but because I can’t/won’t/don’t interact with them due to the fear/shyness/stress response, I can find it hard to predict what they will do or understand them fully, often resorting to false assumptions that they are ‘like me’ in their attitudes in some way that they are not. Before the age of twenty-two, it didn’t even occur to me to try to see the world through someone else’s eyes. Learning to empathise was a process I went through consciously, after I developed an unsuitable crush on a boy I was working with and had to use lots of brain power to try to figure him out (it didn’t work, it was a disaster). The ‘theory of the mind’ or ‘mind-blindness’ is just something I was slow to learn my way through because I didn’t interact with people, and I found other topics more interesting. I don’t think it’s central to the origin of autism, just a side-effect of it.

Autistics have good memories. Rather like elephants, we never forget. This is particularly true of emotional memories, usually negative ones.

Children act like packs of hyenas. You can imagine how unpleasant it is for an autistic kid who is bullied at school because he or she is singled out as weird and different. It’s bad enough any kid getting bullied, but autistic kids are hit very hard because they are very easily hurt and are then effectively tortured by those negative memories. Autistic kids don’t have a support network of friends to help them deal with bullying and put it behind them emotionally. Autistics can become very bitter and twisted when assaulted by those memories. This is why I am a separatist. I don’t believe in teaching autistic children in mainstream schools. Mainstream schools are awful places for autistics. They will never not be awful places. They set autistic children up for failure and humiliation. Children will never change, they will always be vicious little pack animals who prey on the weak. Being autistic in a mainstream school is rather like being fed to the lions.

Even as an adult, if people hurt me, I find it very hard to forget what they have done or get over feeling hurt when I think about them. When I fall in love, I fall in love very deeply. This makes me rather fragile. As a child I learned that it was better to stay away from people who were obviously different from me or who had the potential to hurt me. I could never sleep around like some people can, it doesn’t even compute. I am very selective about who I am friends with, and I’m always rather puzzled by the half-aspie people I know who aren’t selective enough and who are friends with people who obviously aren’t suitable for them. I’m very protective of my emotional state (I need to stay calm for my sanity), and because I am hurt easily and deeply, I do drop friends who hurt me so they can’t do it again. Sometimes I am too emotional to even explain myself. When I cry I literally become autistic. I rock, I withdraw, and I become incapable of speech, and this can have the unfortunate effect of perpetuating arguments and misunderstandings.

Like most autistics, I’m incapable of lying, probably because the cognitive dissonance between what I feel and what I say would be too overwhelming for my brain. It took me thirty years to learn to give or receive a compliment, because of what I feel when I do so. Giving compliments makes me feel overwhelmed and vulnerable and embarrassed and afraid, like my heart is about to stop. When I give compliments, I genuinely mean them, the same when I ask people how they are.

I don’t understand people who have the ability to be fake or two-faced or lie to people, though I’ve often been a victim of them. Who are these people who can ‘network’ and ‘work the room’ and schmooze around for the sake of their career? I just decided not to go to an important conference last weekend because the noisy interaction and the schmoozing and the fakey-friendship behaviour you see at these places would have been too much for me. It drives me crazy when someone talks behind another person’s back and then acts all sycophantic to their face. I do bitch about people when they do things to annoy me, but I am only ever civil to their face, I don’t try to be two-faced about it, and I don’t use my mutual hatred of someone to cement a bond with someone else. Those kinds of bonds are very shallow, and you are likely to find yourself on the receiving end of the same kind of behaviour.

The two sides of the brain deal with different aspects of language. One side deals with automatic language and clichés (‘hi, how are you?’, ‘lovely weather’, ‘thank you for having us’), the other side with conscious language. The side of my brain that deals with automatic language appears not to work. I still have to consciously think about mundane and obvious things to say. Smalltalk does not come easily to me. Usually the silent running commentary in my mind is saying, ‘that sounds stupid/fake/clichéd’ at the same time.

I am a bit of a cranky old grump. I am a bit like Dr. Gregory House or Chloe O’Brian – though I assure you I’m not quite that rude and I never say things deliberately to hurt people. I don’t suffer fools gladly and I’m often blunt. If you’re wrong, I’ll tell you so. I’ll often be misinterpreted for this. I am far more interested in ideas than in people. I don’t say things to get the better of someone or to put them down, I say things because they are right, and ‘right’ things ought to go on record. I try not to correct small mistakes, but I do have that tendency. I am a perfectionist. I sometimes get into a tangle with friends who think I am talking about them when I am not talking about them, or I’ve picked up on an opinion of theirs that I don’t like and they take criticism personally.

Because I’m not that social, I act as an observer, studying the things that people do from outside of the group. People – mostly teenagers and young adults – behave very irrationally. They will often make a huge fuss over something small, and really what is going on is they are trying to assert themselves in the pecking order of the group. They try to gain friends and influence by picking on weaker members of the group, rather like animals do. It can be very curious to watch, rather like The Emperor’s New Clothes. The illusion of there being a real issue to fight over only remains as long as the members of the group really believe it is what they are fighting over, because they wouldn’t admit the truth to themselves as this behaviour is immoral. It’s rather like watching Big Brother. Everyone picks on a weaker housemate to cement group ties and social hierarchy. Rachel Rice got picked on and bitched about all the way through the UK series of Big Brother this year, just so the other housemates could feel closer to each other and higher up the pecking order. Most of the viewers could see what was really going on, which is why she won the show. A shame most people can’t actually see it when they are doing it themselves. Aspies would probably lead much happier lives if they did.

NEW YORK (CNN) — He’s only 5½ years old, and yet he’s practically memorized the entire New York subway grid.He reads at the fourth-grade level, plays two-handed piano compositions and is better versed than most adults about the Fibonacci code, a complex mathematics sequence.

Dylan loves Italian music and draws pictures that artist Jackson Pollock would be proud of.

He also happens to be autistic.

Gwenyth Jackaway, Dylan’s mother, is a professor at New York’s Fordham University. She’s single but had always wanted to have a child. So she contacted California Cryobank, one of the largest sperm donor banks in the country.

Cryobank doesn’t reveal the identities of donors but allows people to choose based on the traits they’d like their child to have. Jackaway decided on “Donor X” because he appeared philosophical and intelligent on paper. He liked music, loved to travel and had a high IQ and a degree in economics.

What she couldn’t know then is that her son would have autism. So she started to wonder whether Donor X might carry a gene that could have contributed.

The cause or causes of autism are not known and are hotly debated. Most experts believe that genetics are a component, making a child predisposed to autism or responsive to an environmental trigger.

“It’s a combination of being genetically vulnerable and then having some kind of social or toxicant exposure that tips you over,” according to Dr. Gary Goldstein of the Kennedy Krieger Institute.

Researchers have found some genetic areas associated with autism, but it could take years before the gene or genes that cause autism or contribute to it will be determined.

Until then, Geri Dawson, chief science officer for the Manhattan-based advocacy group Autism Speaks, says there’s no way to screen for those genes and prevent them from being passed to a child.

“We wouldn’t be able to screen a donor for autism because we don’t yet know the specific genes that are contributing to autism,” Dawson said. “But there is a lot of research going on, and I would say in the next five to 10 years, we will have identified between five and 10 genes that we know raise the risk for autism.”

Once the autism gene or genes have been identified, it would theoretically be possible to screen for those genes, according to Dawson.

Jackaway says she went into a period of mourning when Dylan’s autism was diagnosed at age 2.

“When you’re handed a diagnosis of some sort of developmental disorder, you have to let go of the child you thought you were going to have,” Jackaway said. “There’s a sense of loss of the child, a grieving process. There’s denial, there’s rage, and then there’s the tremendous sadness, and hopefully you get to a place of accepting.”

Jackaway says she had to accept that “I don’t have that child I thought I was going to have. But I have this child instead, who’s right here in front of me.”

Through a Web site called Donor Sibling Registry, she reached out to other women who used Donor X. She found six families who had used the same donor.

Two years ago, she visited Theresa Pergola in the New York area; she had given birth to triplets using sperm from Donor X. Just minutes into their meeting, Jackaway noticed Pergola’s son, Joseph, 2, exhibiting some of the same behavior as her son.

“He was walking on his toes; he was flapping his hands. There seemed to be eye contact issues,” recalled Jackaway, who immediately suggested screening Joseph for autism.

“She told me that she saw characteristics of autism, and it was very upsetting to me at that time,” Pergola said. “I didn’t know what to expect from that point on. I know I was scared, and she was there to let me know that it was going to be OK.”

Pergola says she was afraid because she had an image of autism in her head and believed her son would be “in the corner and rocking and not talking.”

She says Jackaway reassured her that wouldn’t be the case.

One month later, a test confirmed what Pergola already knew: Joseph was autistic. The diagnosis brought her to tears, and now these two women whose sons share a father were immediately connected by another bond: autism.

“She was terribly upset,” Jackaway remembered. “That moment is a terribly frightening moment. You get handed a diagnosis, and you get handed an entirely new future.”

In six families Jackaway contacted that had used Donor X, three of the children are autistic, and one is showing signs of autism.

But would Jackaway be happier today if there had been a way to screen Donor X for an autism gene?

“I’ve done a lot of thinking about this, and to say yes to that is to say that I wish Dylan isn’t Dylan,” Jackaway said. “I love my son and everything about him, and that means loving his autism also. Loving your children means loving everything about them. Our children don’t have autism; they are autistic. It’s part of who they are.”

There is currently no way to screen for autism, and in a statement, the company said in part:

“There is no current genetic test to detect autism. California Cryobank (CCB) employs one of the most thorough and rigorous donor screening processes in the industry, with less than 1% of all applicants actually becoming donors. The standard CCB procedure for screening donors involves extensive physical, genetic and health screening …”

Since the discovery of autism in some of the families that used Donor X, Cryobank had this to say about his samples:

“… per CCB policy, the donor’s samples were removed from the general catalog. These vials may only be sold to a client who has previously used specimens of this donor and is interested in ordering additional specimens. In this case the client is made aware of the new medical information and potential issues …”

The families don’t blame the sperm bank. In fact, Theresa Pergola says she’s still uncertain about an autism screening process, if and when it ever becomes available.

“It can go either way, on the one hand it could be helpful so that people could make choices about what risks they want to take,” says Pergola. “On the other hand it’s like, what else are they going to screen for, you know? Are they going to screen for certain personality traits? It’s hard to say. It’s really hard to say.” Autistic children linked to same sperm donor

Would it be silly of me to point out that I am not at all surprised that the offspring of a female professor and an economics graduate who likes music and has a high IQ ends up with an autism diagnosis?

Boy, you NTs really want to live in a Brave New World. Says Bev of Asperger Square 8:

It’s the fact that a mother can express such positive regard, and that a child can so clearly have much to offer, far from being a burden on society, and still…this is how the story ends:

“Per CCB policy, the donor’s samples were removed from the general catalog.”

Not just identified or labeled. Removed. As if another child like this one would be unacceptable. For anyone who doubts the implications of potential prenatal screenings, here is a wakeup call. Autism, even “shiny autism,” even when attached to obvious brilliance and supported by a loving and accepting family, is still judged to have no place in the “general catalog” of humanity. The Point of Awareness

No more Vincent Van Gogh, Leonardo Da Vinci, Andy Warhol, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, HP Lovecraft, Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, George Bernard Shaw, George Orwell, Isaac Asimov, Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Bob Dylan, Michael Jackson, Woody Allen, Michael Palin, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, Bill Gates, Immanuel Kant, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton… These are just some of the individuals who have been attributed today as having asperger’s syndrome or autism.

What would a world be like without autism? No more inventors, innovators, computer programmers, mathematicians, engineers, doctors, surgeons, artists, designers, composers, authors, actors, geniuses, entrepreneurs. It takes vital little traits from each of these personalities to coincide and produce autism. To exterminate autism, you need to exterminate all the genes that cause autism. Most intelligence genes would be erradicated in one fell swoop. Women who terminate their pregancies because their foetuses have a high chance of developing autism are going to have a big shock when they find that autism or ASDs repeatedly show up in the foetus whenever they become pregnant. That’s going to be a bit of a downer.

What would you have left if you took away all the autistic genes? Builders. Telephone sales people. Jocks. Cheerleaders. Administrators. Soccer moms. Hairdressers. HR managers. Radio Discjockeys. People who get liquored up and go to clubs. Oh my god, the Golgafrinchans! Nooo!

Good luck with the future of the human race. Be sure to preserve a few of our genes so you have something to fall back on when you remember you need some rocket scientists for that moon landing.

We know that children with Asperger’s Syndrome elicit from others, either strong maternal or ‘predatory’ behaviour. If the person’s natural peer group is girls, they are more likely to be supported and included by a greater majority of their peers. Thus girls with Asperger’s Syndrome are often ‘mothered’ by other girls. They may prompt the child when they are unsure what to do or say in social situations and comfort them when they are distressed. In contrast, boys are notorious for their intolerance of children who are different and are more prone to be ‘predatory’.

I was never really mothered by my peers, but I was accepted by the other girls at junior school and never really got into fights with them. I just tagged along quietly. The boys were predatory towards me. They did bully me. At secondary school things changed – girls start getting bitchy as they become teenagers, and that’s how I ended up a loner.

The fun came from setting up and arranging things. Maybe this desire to organise things rather than play with things, is the reason I never had a great interest in my peers. They always wanted to use the things I had so carefully arranged. They would want to rearrange and redo. They did not let me control the environment.

When involved with solitary play with dolls, the girl with Asperger’s Syndrome has total control and can script and direct the play without interference and having to accept outcomes suggested by others. The script and actions can be an almost perfect reproduction of a real event or scene from a book or film. While the special interest in collecting and playing with dolls can be assumed to be an age appropriate activity and not indicative of psychopathology, the dominance and intensity of the interest is unusual. Playing with and talking to imaginary friends and dolls can also continue into the teenage years when the person would have been expected to mature beyond such play. This quality can be misinterpreted as evidence of hallucinations and delusions and a diagnostic assessment for schizophrenia rather than Asperger’s Syndrome.

I didn’t play with dolls, I played with My Little Ponies. My sister and I had huge collections. We did do a lot of organising when we played. Our favourite games included ‘finding the right mummy for our new baby pony’ and ‘reorganising ponyland’. It wasn’t really about control, it was about categorising and systemising.

[T]he author has noted that some ladies with Asperger’s Syndrome can be unusual in their tone of voice. Their tone resembles a much younger person, having an almost child like quality. Many are concerned about the physiological changes during puberty and prefer to maintain the characteristics of childhood.

I used to speak in a childish voice all the time to my long-suffering partner. With me at least, it has nothing to do with puberty – though I didn’t particularly want to go through puberty. It’s a way of bypassing shyness or showing deference. I only know of two other girls who do this. One is my sister. The other is a female programmer I used to work with who I’m pretty sure was somewhere on the spectrum. She rarely talked in anything BUT a childish voice.

As with boys with Asperger’s Syndrome, they may see no value in being fashionable, preferring practical clothing and not using cosmetics or deodorants. This latter characteristic can be quite conspicuous.

That was me. I had no fashion sense whatsoever and I always wore awful clothes. I thought fashion, celebrities, pop music, gossip, makeup, were all shallow. Since then I’ve learned what a good way fashion is of ‘passing’ as normal and fitting in. I’ve even come to enjoy reading gossip magazines as a way to relax, and the aesthetics of nice clothes.

Some individuals with Asperger’s Syndrome can be quite ingenious in using imitation and modelling to camouflage their difficulties in social situations. One strategy that has been used by many girls and some boys is to observe people who are socially skilled and to copy their mannerisms, voice and persona. This is a form of social echolalia or mirroring where the person acquires a superficial social competence by acting the part of another person. This is illustrated in Liane Holliday-Willeys intriguing new autobiography, titled, “Pretending to be Normal”.

I was oblivious to the possibilities until I was in my late teens. Then I went through a phase where I came out of my shell at University. This involved me developing a close relationship with a girl on a fashion course. I emulated her style and she dropped hints that I was copying her, but she didn’t seem to mind. Under her influence I started using makeup and dyed my hair red (and pink for a while!). She did bitch and laugh about me behind my back though.

I still don’t wear makeup today – even before I developed eczema, I still hated the disgusting ‘dirty’ sensation of it on my skin.

The most popular special interests of boys with Asperger’s Syndrome are types of transport, specialist areas of science and electronics, particularly computers. It has now become a more common reaction of clinicians to consider whether a boy with an encyclopaedic knowledge in these areas has Asperger’s Syndrome. Girls with Asperger’s Syndrome can be interested in the same topics but clinical experience suggests their special interest can be animals and classic literature. These interests are not typically associated with boys with Asperger’s Syndrome.

Loves animals – check. Loves literature – check. I prefer science fiction and fantasy though!

The interest in animals can be focussed on horses or native animals and this characteristic dismissed as simply typical of young girls. However, the intensity and qualitative aspects of the interest are unusual.

My sister is obsessed with horses. I’m more of a dog person. But put me in front of any animal and I’ll usually squawk and squeal in delight. I feel a great deal of empathy for animals. A lot more than for humans – I always found most humans rather horrible, alien, and hurtful, so I’ve never had a huge amount of empathy for them.

Teenage girls with Asperger’s Syndrome can also develop a fascination with classic literature such as the plays of Shakespeare and poetry. Both have an intrinsic rhythm that they find entrancing and some develop their writing skills and fascination with words to become a successful author, poet or academic in English literature. Some adults with Asperger’s Syndrome are now examining the works of famous authors for indications of the unusual perception and reasoning associated with Asperger’s Syndrome. One example is the short story, “Cold” in “Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice” by A.S. Byatt.

I’m ashamed to say I really was fascinated with Shakespearean sonnets when I was a teenager. I used to memorise literary quotes to pass time on the bus. And I am most definitely a writer. The fact that writing talent is noted in Asperger’s girls is a big confirmation for me.

The Pattern of Abilities and Development of Girls with Asperger’s Syndrome

The psychiatric literature is rife with studies of childhood disabilities in which detailed and particular attention is given to personality traits in the mother presumed relevant to the disorder in her child. [...]

This study of the fathers of autistic children was undertaken in an effort to contribute to a broader view of the family dynamics related to the personality development of the child. Special emphasis has been placed on those personality characteristics which involve the ability to form meaningful relationships with other people and which influence marital and parent-child configurations. [...]

The results to be reported are based on a careful review of the material recorded in the case histories about family structure. Since, from the first, certain unusual aspects of the family unit had been noted.

This 1956 psychiatric study of autism examined 100 families of autistic children, looking for signs of unusual personality typing in the father.

After recounting a number of cases describing adult fathers who obviously had undiagnosed, unpathologised asperger’s syndrome, the authors go on to write this:

The characteristics exemplified in these illustrative vignettes recur with monotonous regularity in 85 of the fathers in this series of 100. They tend to be obsessive, detached and humorless individuals. An unusually large number have college degrees, as do their wives. Though intellectually facile, they are not original thinkers. Perfectionistic to an extreme, they are pre-occupied with detailed minutiae to the exclusion of concern for over-all meanings. Thus, though a number are scientists, none is a major contributor to his field. They have a capacity for concentration on their own pursuits amidst veritable chaos about them. One father, in describing this feature in himself, cited as an example the prototypical behavior of his own father who, in the midst of a train wreck, was discovered by a rescue squad working away at a manuscript while seated in a railroad car tilted 20 degrees from the vertical!

Rather unpleasant put-downs and mischaracterisations aside, what we can conclude from this is that 85% of the autistic children studied had fathers with asperger’s syndrome. Being typical psychiatrists, the authors imply that it is ‘refrigerator fathers’ who are responsible for autistic children.

For purposes of comparison, a brief survey was made of the fathers of a control group of 50 private patients. These men had achieved levels of educational and professional attainment that were measurably lower. Far more striking, however, was the absence of the coldly mechanical attitude toward child rearing and the formalistic approach to marriage so widespread in the autistic group. This is to be contrasted with the total absence of overt psychosis among fathers of autistic children; indeed, only one was alcoholic and one other had exhibited an acute anxiety neurosis. This differs sharply from the experience of Bender with the fathers of schizophrenic children.

Predictably, the neurotypical children have neurotypical fathers. And the schizophrenic children have fathers who are more prone to psychosis.

At the same time, it should be noted that in 15 of the 100 fathers in this series, the usual pattern was not at all in evidence. They were described as warm, giving and devoted. While it is true that in 11 of these instances there was obvious maternal psychopathology, there remain 4 families in which neither parent exhibited such qualities.

So fifteen fathers were normal. But in eleven of those cases, there was “obvious maternal psychopathology”. I presume this means the mothers had asperger’s syndrome instead! Only in four families did the parents both appear neurotypical. Since asperger’s syndrome and autism appear to be caused by a combination of genes and increased homozygosity of those genes, it is not hard to see how those four ostensibly neurotypical parents could have, by chance, had autistic children.

The paper ends with an amusing cautionary note:

Equally disturbing for any theory of a simple one-to-one correlation between parental attitudes and children’s behavior is the observation that of 131 known siblings of our 100 children only 8 gave evidence of an emotional disorder, 3 of whom were autistic. That is to say, the fathers of autistic progeny were capable of rearing an equal number of normal offspring. Caution is indicated before implicating the characteristics of these parents too exclusively in the genesis of the disorder in their children, although it is difficult to believe that such gross distortions in paternal behavior were without effect on the development of these children.

Well, this looks like a roughly 50/50 chance of siblings having autism to me. It totally blasts the theory of refrigerator-anything as the cause of autism. It is, however, consistent with a genetic theory of autism.

Most of the aspies I’ve met online are female aspies who have self-diagnosed in adulthood. The male aspies I’ve met seem to be more extreme, probably because the male brain is less suited to social skills in the first place. I personally think that most of the genes may occur in a 1:1 ratio, but that being female acts to mask some of the more extreme differences of asperger’s. The only gene I know of that is sex linked is monoamine oxidase. Males only have one copy, so if they get an inefficient version they become more vulnerable to amines. A female has two copies of the gene, so statistically they have more protection against amines.

In my family, there is a definite trend for eccentric women as well as eccentric men – both grandmothers in particular! I had a particularly crotchety and unsociable great aunt, Aunt Kath, on my father’s side who my mother really disliked (my mother dislikes most of the aspies in the family). Aunt Kath, I’m told, liked me but disliked all the other grandchildren. Perhaps I was less alien to her.

I’ve been thinking about when I was at secondary school. The school had well over a thousand pupils – perhaps 180-200 in each year. In my year there were four girls I considered ‘like me’. They were like me for slightly different reasons than each other. One was very quiet and studious and tagged along with the privileged girls. She went on to get a masters degree – I think the only person from my year to do so that I know of apart from me. The other two were my friends. I didn’t meet them until I was about fifteen – I was a loner for most of my time at secondary school. There was a neurotypical girl (we’ll call her R.) who seemed to collect eccentrics and went to unusual measures to be my friend. Her two other friends were M. and A.

M. was so quiet that she never spoke of her own accord, and when you addressed her directly her response would be monosyllabic. I don’t recall her having a problem with eye contact. I don’t recall her appearing shy or embarrassed, but she always seemed to have a funny Mona Lisa smile on her face that made me think she was probably enjoying a secret joke at everyone else’s expense. In hindsight, I think she was probably just very embarrassed, but also quite amused by our other friend, A. who was very noisy.

A. reminded me of my sister a bit because she was noisy. She was very opinionated and talkative, and definitely had a case of ‘little professor syndrome’. She would lecture you on any subject under the sun given half a chance. I used to describe her personality as a mixture of C-3PO and Mary Poppins. She held some very eccentric ideas about the world and I once had an argument with her because she thought that radio waves could be blown around by the wind. Whilst I was maths blind, she was extremely good at maths and physics, and went on to study as an engineer at university. She had two other sisters, one who was totally NT and the other was older and a bit wild. A. also had middle-child syndrome. She was my best friend for several years until we went our separate ways to university. She often took things very literally, and she seemed blind to the fact that R. was always mocking her. No one ever ‘got’ her jokes, and she complained that people were always misinterpreting her.

So that’s four girls in my year of 200 pupils who had the potential to score very highly – or one in fifty. I have no idea how many boys would score highly. I don’t remember much about the boys at secondary school. I don’t remember their names, and I didn’t interact with them. Seriously.

The first boys I met who were in any way ‘like me’ were on my masters degree. I think most of the people on my masters degree were quite eccentric and had social interaction issues in one way or another. I expect people on a masters course make up a very small, select segment of society. I guess most of the neurotypicals had been weeded out by that stage! Several of them seemed to be incapable of talking about anything but sex. Others didn’t talk much at all, or were very, very sensitive. One was a (really lovely) schizophrenic – who would not have had her creative talent if not for her schizophrenia. I’m big on neurodiversity.

I happen to think there’s an undiagnosed syndrome in existence – let’s call it auteur syndrome for want of a better name. It’s not neurotypical, and it comes with creative talent, whether it be writing, acting, painting, music, or something else. It might manifest as a kind of creative asperger’s syndrome, or it might manifest like my maternal cousins and my sister – as popularity and sociability combined with creative flare. It seems to go hand in hand with obsessions, bipolar disorder and ADHD. People like this get very frustrated in ordinary office jobs and have to do something a bit unusual with their lives – like being chefs, actresses, comedians or rock stars. I think it must be a dopamine thing. Aspies often have people like this in their family – brothers or sisters or cousins.

When I first started meeting computer programmers through temping work after university I was surprised to discover how much I had in common with them in terms of personality. I should have guessed then I suppose! My other half, a programmer, was the first person I met who I felt was really like me. He scores high-normal, and there are only five IQ points between us. I use him as a social crutch. He’s also the smarter one. Just.

I think we agreed my maternal grandmother, Mama, had a few autistic traits. Mama was so set in her routines she could have worn a groove in the space-time continuum. Sometimes I would get on the train and go all the way to visit my parents, and if I was a little late I would miss my Mama visiting them for lunch because she would go off on her shopping routine come hell or high water and not adjust it for anyone. Then she would complain that she never saw me! She had a different routine for every day of the week. Tuesdays was always visiting Arnold, Thursdays was Morrison’s shopping. Wednesday and Saturday nights were always club nights, she always had fish and chips for Saturday lunch…

She had another trait: malapropisms. We had a standing joke in our family about Mama’s inability to name objects using the right word. She was terrible with names. She called all her grandchildren by numbers: I was “number one granddaughter”. She would reel out all of our names one after the other in an attempt to get the right one. I was usually called Sarah, Natalie and even Nick before she got to Emma! She also saw a great significance in numbers. She was always proud of her birthday cards, but it was the number of birthday cards that was most important. “I had twelve birthday cards this year,” she would say proudly.

She was however a very emotional and sensitive person who was prone to think you had fallen out with her if you didn’t see or speak to her regularly. Being very withdrawn and having a problem using the phone, it took me something like ten years to figure out she thought I had fallen out with her, at which point I started to write her letters. She understood immediately, probably because she has also always been nervous about answering the phone. My Mama was the only person in our family with serious irrational phobias, being terrified of rats, which she called ‘long-tails’ as if the euphemism would ward them off. In later life she was terrified of anything that almost looked like a rat – including hamsters and squirrels. My Mama has always eaten a very bland diet. She likes her eggs and her white toast and her white fish and mussels. I once tried to feed her Mexican food, and I don’t think it went down well. When she died, she had both breast cancer and emphysema.

My maternal grandfather, Dada, is eccentric too, though not nearly to the same extent. He is very creative (apparently where I get my imagination for stories from), a big joker, and very good with children. He was always a big tease and a trouble maker when we were growing up. He loved winding us up with silly stories and tall tales, and also loved winding up the pet dogs by getting them to chase squirrels, cats, flies, or getting them to go crazy at nothing just with the slightest change in his expression. He is prone to depression and has been through one or two bad patches during his life. He was a crafty bugger and during the war enrolled in the army though he was underage. He spent most of his married life hiding the fact that he still smokes from my Mama, by sneaking out for cigarettes and then eating a Polo mint when he comes back in the house!

My Mum is quite an emotional person like my Mama. She has always had an inferiority complex because she left school when she was sixteen to be a nursery nurse, whilst my Dad went on to do a degree. My Dad is such a know-it-all he could make anyone feel stupid unintentionally (guess where I got that trait). My mum is actually quite clever and psychologically quite sensible and mature. The little talks she gave me when I was growing up have always stuck in my head and made me very sensible. However, in spite of being sensible, my mum has always struggled to keep a lid on her emotions. She spent a lot of time shouting, being argumentative and crying when we were younger and I felt she made some unreasonable demands on my Dad to always be home at the same time every day – not because she was paranoid or jealous, but because she always had to eat at the same time or she ended up with an upset stomach or feeling ill or an emotional mess (guess where I got that trait).

My Mum didn’t have an easy time with my sister and I as we spent a lot of time fighting. She was a very good, very dedicated Mum who spent a lot of time teaching us things and trying to feed us and bring us up properly, so I feel quite sorry for her and it makes me quite angry when people say ADHD is the parent’s fault. In those days they didn’t really diagnose children with attention deficit, defiance or developmental problems, though my sister was informally diagnosed ‘hyperactive’. My Mum had lots of health problems. Her periods stopped being regular when she was still young, and she was put on HRT. She blamed her emotional state on her hormones. On HRT she calmed down somewhat, but the difference wasn’t exactly life-changing. Now she is on the other side of the menopause, and she’s still an emotional person who cries and rants and argues. Though my mum and I have always had a lot of problems ‘connecting’, since she just doesn’t understand my aspie personality, it’s really quite funny how similar we are. It’s like that joke about how women always turn into their mothers. I really, really think my Mum has food chemical problems.

Our maternal uncle is a pretty regular, straight-forward, hard-working guy who is always tinkering around with cars. He can be a very humorous guy. He can be a bit up-and-down and does get stressed easily. Something he shares with his son, is that he will sometimes suddenly develop full body hives from strong chemicals in washing powder or deodorant. His wife is a lovely outgoing, loud, eccentric woman with a great sense of humour. She likes being spontaneous and is always doing impressions and putting on voices. Of our maternal cousins, their son is an ambitious, popular, creative chef who has been body-building since his early teens, and their daughter is a popular, creative, arty, drama graduate and teacher.

My paternal grandfather, Grandad, was a school teacher. He could be quite gruff and bellow at people, especially my Grandma, but he was good with children. He seemed to always have a low-grade depression. He had diabetes in later life and after several years of that had a heart attack. He spent most of his spare time in the garage inventing things, doing DIY and tinkering with cars. Apparently he once invented an electric paint stirrer and proudly showed it to my Dad. When he tested it the paint leapt out of the tin all over him and the side of the house, much to my Grandma’s amusement. He loved dogs – or at least, he loved to hate his springer spaniel.

My paternal grandmother was another funny fish. She was a school teacher, one daughter of four? five? of a Frenchman who was an African missionary, a fellow who was quite possibly an alcoholic and who died in the African jungle of an asthma attack. This was back in the days when asthma was pretty unusual. In the inter-war period my Grandma learned to drive and set off and drove her car all around Europe. Because she felt like it. This was a time when women did not drive, and did not own cars, and did not go off on their own around Europe. When she met my Grandad they did not get married but lived in sin until after the war, because in those days female school teachers had to give up their jobs when they got married. She had two sons, and the second was my Dad, whom she had when she was forty. She died when I was still a teenager, but from what I remember she was quite eccentric and had a number of talents. She was a good dressmaker, and she could play several musical instruments very well, including the violin, viola, and piano. She was very stubborn. When she got diagnosed with breast cancer she decided she wasn’t going to eat, and that was that. She lived out in the Peak District (I do take after her), where she kept bees, grew vegetables and fruit, made homemade damson jam from the wild tree in the garden, and collected far too much Denby stoneware. She too loved animals and owned some very badly behaved dogs. Both my paternal grandparents were collectors and owned far too much stuff. They ate a very good, traditional meat and potatoes diet but had weaknesses for homemade jam and honey (hence my Grandad’s diabetes in later life). Once when I was being very difficult as a child, I went to stay with them for a week and apparently I was an angel the whole time I was there. I wonder how much that had to do with diet, or with grandparent-blinkers? I’m told I look uncannily like my Grandma, both in my face and in my figure. My Grandma had Alzheimer’s when she died, and considering the state of my Dad’s memory, it doesn’t bode well.

My Dad is very clever and articulate, he has an IQ of over 150 and scores incredibly highly on 3D spacial tasks. He collects clutter and can’t throw anything away, he’s a know-it-all, and he knows some pretty obscure things. He always knows how machinery works. When I was about eleven or twelve he would teach me astrophysics or geology while he was preparing dinner. He does a lot of DIY and makes things, he takes cars apart and he once invented a toilet seat for disabled people that’s still being sold today. He currently works as a college lecturer in business though he has a history of unusual jobs (including adding food additives to processed food. Ha). He can be a bit embarrassing in company. He once told me he isn’t very confident socially, so he normally rehearses what he wants to say in his head before he says it – something that has also become my coping strategy. He’s very cynical about people’s motives and knows full well that money makes the world go around, often shouting at politicians on BBC radio 4. You have to be careful not to get him going about things, because he will go on and on and has a tendency to lecture, and really doesn’t notice if you’re bored! He seems to have spent a lot of his life with a low-grade depression. He absolutely loves dogs and humanises them far too much. We have owned a series of very naughty dogs as a consequence.

My paternal uncle is quite similar to my Dad. He failed his eleven plus exam, but went on to get a really good degree and worked in Cambridge on very brainy top secret engineering/technology and microchip design projects. My uncle is a bit up-and-down bipolar and in a lot of ways more extreme than my Dad. He gets crosser, he gets sadder, and he gets happier. Though his house is a lot less cluttered than my parent’s, he has an enormous cactus collection! I feel he’s more socially withdrawn in some ways than my Dad and he likes living on his own. He’s not very good at small talk, though he can go on for ages about intellectual things that interest him. Apparently he was a seriously moody teenager who was rarely seen outside of his bedroom. Both he and my Dad had bad asthma as children, in spite of their good diet. His son is a computer programmer who has dyslexia, and one of his daughters was a very, very moody teen who had life-threatening asthma that warranted steroid treatment.

My sister has always been characterised by my Mum as ‘opposite’ me. She’s a lot more sociable and very loud whilst I’m very quiet. She was hyperactive, whilst I was away with the fairies. But she’s actually a lot more like me than opposite. We talked about our similarities recently. We both have special talents – mine is writing, hers is music. We’re both very focussed, ambitious and single-minded people. We prefer to work intensely and in great detail on one single task. We don’t multitask very well at all and if we have to, we always get stressed and in a flap about having too many things to do. We usually both reach explosion point when we have more than six or seven things to do in a day’s work, in other words, when our short term memory fills up! We’ve both had problems at work where in spite of huge amounts of dilligent hard work, our efforts haven’t been appreciated and we’ve been passed over for special projects and promotions. Though I have always thought of my sister as the popular, pretty one, she is actually a geek at heart who always felt inadequate next to her more popular best friend, our maternal cousin – as I mentioned an outgoing, arty thespian of a girl who is creative but also has a high EQ. She often felt that people were friends with her just because she was our cousin’s friend, or that they hated her because she was our cousin’s friend. My sister sits on the geeks’ table at work, just as I always did. She socialises much better than me, but says that her coping strategy is just to be really loud, get drunk, and say stupid things, and people generally laugh at her and decide she’s alright, though often she makes enemies of other girls who call her cruel names behind her back. Like me, she suffered from asthma when she was little, and also had much worse eczema. Unlike me, her junk food snacks of choice were Coca-Cola and ready salted crisps, whereas mine was always breakfast cereal – usually Rice Krispies as wheat based cereals upset my digestion.

My whole nuclear family – Mum, Dad, sister and myself, all came down with fibromyalgia when I was about thirteen years old. Apparently Mum and Dad have ‘very similar tissue types’, whatever that means.

So what can I deduce from all of this? It seems as though both of my parents and all of my grandparents are a bit unusual, which isn’t surprising since methylation cycle polymorphisms are very, very common and a number appear heterozygously in as much as 30% of the population. Probably a lot of people have a couple of polymorphisms at least, and it seems to be the chance of getting several of them at once that makes one aspie, autie, or prone to developing fibromyalgia. It seems as though people with these traits tend to be attracted to each other, as the homozygosity rates for these genes are higher than chance compared to the heterozygosity rates. My whole family seems to have been unconsciously playing Russian roulette with genetics and I guess with me it finally blew up in their face!

There is definitely a dominant genetic line going down from my paternal grandmother to both her sons and most of their children that has caused us all to inherit asthma. Both of of my paternal grandparents were typical intelligent systemisers and collectors. This appears to have been passed to both of their sons. I am sure we have inherited something from the original asthmatic systemiser in the family – my Grandma’s French African missionary father.

Artistic creativity is a trait my paternal grandmother (music) and my maternal grandfather (stories) share. It’s been passed to my sister and I. Our maternal cousins seem to have inherited a creative flair without the introversion or obsessiveness that can sometimes go with it. I don’t know whether this came from our maternal grandfather or whether it’s something they’ve inherited from their mother – whose brother, incidentally, is introverted, lives alone, and doesn’t own a bank account, and whose mother was equally eccentric.

My maternal grandmother’s need for routine makes her a systemiser too, but in a different way to my paternal grandparents. Perhaps systemising in more of an autie way than an aspie way. She passed the need for routine and her emotionality on to our Mum. I wonder whether my maternal uncle’s interest in stripping down cars is a higher-functioning aspect of the same thing, and whether his hives are something he has inherited from her, as I can’t help but feel she ate so blandly for a good reason.

I can’t wait for our house sale to go through. When it does I’ll finally be able to afford this genetic test, which will shed a lot of light on the situation. I’m expecting to hit the jackpot with it and I think I’ll have at least three polymorphisms in the wrong places. I suspect I’ll have something like MAO and/or COMT on my Mum’s side, and something like MTHFR and/or COMT on my Dad’s side, also a CBS and/or SUOX polymorphism from one or both. I’m expecting to be homozygotic in at least one important polymorphism.

Unfortunately all but one of my grandparents are dead so I can’t trace it back that far, but I’d like to be able to afford to get the test for my sister and parents. THEN, with hard, physical laboratory-style proof, maybe the family will start listening!

A couple of weeks ago I came across an online asperger’s test. I’d hitherto regarded taking the tests as pointless, as your preconceived opinion influences how you perceive yourself and answer the questions. But I thought what the hell. It was a bit of a bombshell to get the results. After I got the results I got into a glitch of having to try every different online test. Here they all are:

AQ Test

Example scores:

I got 38. I panicked and took the test again trying to water down my results. I managed to revise it down to 35.

Aspie Quiz

Your Aspie score: 184 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 18 of 200
You are very likely an Aspie.

The Geek Test

Your score suggests possible Asperger’s syndrome. You scored 35.

Empathy versus systemizing (Baron Cohen’s tests)

Systemizing quotient test

Example scores:

0 – 19 = low
20 – 39 = average (most women score about 24 and most men score about 30)
40 – 50 = above average (most people with Asperger Syndrome or high-functioning autism score in this range)
51 – 80 is very high (three times as many people with Asperger Syndrome score in this range, compared to typical men, and almost no women score in this range)
80 is maximum

Your score: 60. I took the test again trying to tone it down and scored 67. Doh.

Empathy quotient test

Example scores:

0 – 32 = low (most people with Asperger Syndrome or high-functioning autism score about 20)
33 – 52 = average (most women score about 47 and most men score about 42)
53 – 63 is above average
64 – 80 is very high
80 is maximum

Your score: 20. I took this again trying to tone down some of my answers and somehow failed to do that and scored a 12. Doh. Maybe it’s broken or something, or I was being careless… I wonder whether my self perception has been warped over this aspect of my personality in the last year. I can’t be neutral in answering these questions. My confidence about my social skills took a knock last year when I discovered my one/only close friend was on a totally different wavelength to the one I thought she was on and we fell out.

Autism Spectrum quotient test

Example scores:

0 – 10 = low
11 – 22 = average (most women score about 15 and most men score about 17)
23 – 31 = above average
32 – 50 is very high (most people with Asperger Syndrome or high-functioning autism score about 35)
50 is maximum

Your score: 42. On revision: 39

Mind in the eyes test

Example scores:

A typical score is in the range 22-30. If you scored over 30,
you are very accurate at decoding a person’s facial expressions
around their eyes. A score under 22 indicates you find this quite difficult.

Your score: 29. After doing so badly on the other tests, I was pleasantly surprised to do so well on this test. I felt I was guessing on a few of the images!

Even though I’m skeptical of this kind of testing, getting these test scores made it all real. Should I get a proper diagnosis, speak to a doctor? I really feel it would help my parents to understand me, and perhaps help to repair the poor relationship I have with my mother. It would help several other members of my family, particularly an uncle. It would give me the authority to speak out. Maybe.

But I’m afraid too. I’ve heard many stories of people with asperger’s syndrome having their babies taken away from them, for the most outrageous reasons – one merely because social workers argued the woman in question was “more likely to get post natal depression” than a neurotypical. That’s the level of prejudice that exists. Never mind that the best parent an aspie child can have is an aspie parent. I decided a long time ago that if one day I should have children like myself, I would not send them to school to be bullied like I was – yet I know of a case of an Asperger’s child being forcibly adopted because his parents refused to send him to state school because the poor child couldn’t cope there. Social workers are generally patronising, arrogant and dangerous to autistics. I’m not sure I want anyone in a position of power to know anything about me.

Asperger Syndrome or (Asperger’s Disorder) is a neurobiological disorder named for a Viennese physician, Hans Asperger, who in 1944 published a paper which described a pattern of behaviors in several young boys who had normal intelligence and language development, but who also exhibited autistic-like behaviors and marked deficiencies in social and communication skills. In spite of the publication of his paper in the 1940′s, it wasn’t until 1994 that Asperger Syndrome was added to the DSM IV and only in the past few years has AS been recognized by professionals and parents.

Individuals with AS can exhibit a variety of characteristics and the disorder can range from mild to severe. Persons with AS show marked deficiencies in social skills,
Yep. I don’t know how to make friends with people. I don’t know how to keep friends. I don’t know how to answer emails from friends. I have to work hard at social niceties. If a friend hurts me, I am like the elephant that never forgets (bitter, twisted).

have difficulties with transitions or changes and prefer sameness.
Not exactly. I get bored by sameness. I have to move house every couple of years. I have to change my specialist subject/career every few years. This is supposed to be an ADD/ADHD trait. However, I feel really “put out” and panicky when people change things at short notice, for example, if I am given some new work to do, it will take me a day to get used to the idea of doing it. My maternal grandmother was an absolute slave of routine. Nothing would alter her plans, come hell or high water. She would complain about not seeing her grandchildren, but she wouldn’t go out of her way and delay her Saturday shopping trip for a couple of hours to see us!

They often have obsessive routines and may be preoccupied with a particular subject of interest.
Yep. The food/nutrition obsession is justified, but yep. I’ve always been obsessive, and as a teenager had seriously obsessive crushes on some unlikely people. I had a lot of OCD traits: hand washing, also, washing new things I bought from shops. Strange teenage obsession with stationery. When I was a kid I used to climb one side of the climbing frame, and have to climb the other side. I had to do everything ten times. I had to jump ten times, and if one hand touched the floor, the other hand had to touch the floor, then I used to have to touch the floor ten times to make it even… My sister had this trait too, but to a much lesser extent. She was the hyperactive one.

They have a great deal of difficulty reading nonverbal cues (body language) and very often the individual with AS has difficulty determining proper body space.
I think I’m actually good at this, but the result is it makes me paranoid because I can tell when people are taking the piss or being fake. I don’t have any problems with body space, but I get very put out when someone enters my space.

Often overly sensitive to sounds, tastes, smells, and sights, the person with AS may prefer soft clothing, certain foods, and be bothered by sounds or lights no one else seems to hear or see.
This makes me laugh, because it’s so “me” it’s untrue. I’m like “turn the radio DOWN!!!!” or “what is that annoying noise?!” all the time, and like Captain Hook, I can’t stand ticking clocks. Or dripping taps, or high-pitched almost inaudible whining from electrical equipment. I was a very picky eater as a child. This was trained out of me, but now I understand why I need to be on a bland food diet. I’m ultra-sensitive to labels in clothing, scratchy seams, anything stiff, tight, or made of wool. I hold my breath all the time when I smell something nasty. I hate it when the room is too dark or too light. I am always complaining it’s too hot or too cold.

It’s important to remember that the person with AS perceives the world very differently.
I suppose since I’m a subjective observer, I can’t really comment on what is a normal way to perceive the world, but I’d rather be me than most of the other people I meet.

Therefore, many behaviors that seem odd or unusual are due to those neurological differences and not the result of intentional rudeness or bad behavior, and most certainly not the result of “improper parenting”.

By definition, those with AS have a normal IQ and many individuals (although not all), exhibit exceptional skill or talent in a specific area.
Of course!

Because of their high degree of functionality and their naiveté, those with AS are often viewed as eccentric or odd and can easily become victims of teasing and bullying.
That would be an accurate description of my miserable life as a child and a teenager. I was very naive. I was badly bullied.

While language development seems, on the surface, normal, individuals with AS often have deficits in pragmatics and prosody. Vocabularies may be extraordinarily rich and some children sound like “little professors.” However, persons with AS can be extremely literal and have difficulty using language in a social context.
I do have a big vocabularly, I do a lot of reading and always have. I was an annoying smart-arse who used long words when I was a kid. My dad has this habit too, and it’s really embarrassing to watch when he does it when he’s talking to a builder or a labourer. I muddle up the words in clichés all the time or word-substitute by mistake. I’m not sure what specifically is meant by a social context. The definitions of pragmatics and prosody are:

Pragmatics:
Linguistics. the analysis of language in terms of the situational context within which utterances are made, including the knowledge and beliefs of the speaker and the relation between speaker and listener.

Prosody:
1. the science or study of poetic meters and versification.
2. a particular or distinctive system of metrics and versification: Milton’s prosody.
3. Linguistics. the stress and intonation patterns of an utterance.

Pragmatics: you’re not kidding. I have a habit of assuming that people think the same way as me about the world, i.e. I might offend someone religious by assuming they are an atheist like me, or end up in a misunderstanding because I assume someone knows more about something than they actually do.

Prosody: I have a postgrad degree in writing, but I am absolutely useless at rhyming, structured verse. I don’t think my language is repetitive. I do often exaggerate or get the emphasis wrong when I say things. Sometimes I sound stilted. I am not very good at speaking out loud and have problems completing sentences, I tend to let them trail off into a “…” assuming that people get the meaning. This is probably very irritating.

At this time there is a great deal of debate as to exactly where AS fits. It is presently described as an autism spectrum disorder and Uta Frith, in her book AUTISM AND ASPERGER’S SYNDROME, described AS individuals as “having a dash of Autism”. Some professionals feel that AS is the same as High Functioning Autism, while others feel that it is better described as a Nonverbal Learning Disability. AS shares many of the characteristics of PDD-NOS (Pervasive Developmental Disorder; Not otherwise specified), HFA, and NLD and because it was virtually unknown until a few years ago, many individuals either received an incorrect diagnosis or remained undiagnosed. For example, it is not at all uncommon for a child who was initially diagnosed with ADD or ADHD be re-diagnosed with AS. In addition, some individuals who were originally diagnosed with HFA or PDD-NOS are now being given the AS diagnosis and many individuals have a dual diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome and High Functioning Autism.

I guess I could rediagnose myself.

Asperger’s definition from OASIS: What is Asperger Syndrome?

Whatever the case, Asperger’s syndrome is a good thing for the human race.

She displays extraordinary mastery of computer hardware and software but has horrible social skills, displaying symptoms consistent with Asperger syndrome.

Everyone hates Chloe because she’s so annoying and always says the wrong thing and is embarrassing, as well as being more intelligent than everyone else in the office. Everyone hates intelligent people, especially when they know it. I actually relate to Chloe and I find her very amusing.

Of course I’m nowhere near as weird or as intelligent as Chloe, but I still always say things that I shouldn’t and freak people out, or find myself slapping my head in annoyance when people don’t “get” it, then wondering “why do I do that? I hate myself!” I spend a lot of time feeling guilty about it. Yes, I do sneer internally when people are stupid. This is partly because I feel like other people are sneering at me. I just have to go about my normal life in an office and within a couple of weeks I’ve been labelled as the Chloe who doesn’t talk to anyone and only ever speaks to make some sort of frustrated, sarcastic outburst that I always regret. I can be hostile. I try very hard to be nice. I relate to animals much better than humans. Animals always put a smile on my face. Sometimes I make nasty remarks about people walking down the street, usually if they’re wearing ridiculous clothes. I seem to generate some sort of repulsion field that stops me making friends. I never learned the niceties of conversation like “how are you?” or “how is your job going?”, which always felt fake to say. I still struggle to spit them out today. I do not “do” offices well. I used to be much worse than I am.

I’m not a nasty person. I often think about ways I can try and help people, whether that’s because they’re sick, or because they have social problems of their own. I feel really sorry for people who are ill or who don’t fit in. The rest of the time my thoughts are focussed on something more abstract, such as biochemistry, nutrition, politics, or the design of society.

I’ve always joked to myself that I’m a bit of a social autistic. I always had to put a phenomenal amount of work into figuring out what was going on in other people’s heads. I always used to either over-think or under-think things. When people say or do things I just don’t understand I’m always really shocked by it. As a teenager I was such a social retard that I literally couldn’t even look people in the eyes. I was defined as “shy” by my family and “a snob” by my classmates. “Shy” really isn’t the word for it as it was far more extreme than shyness. Being defined as “a snob” really hurt me, because I wasn’t. I regarded myself as lower on the social ladder than everyone else. If anyone suggests that I’m a snob or says something like “you think you are more intelligent than everyone else,” then even today I am totally crushed and hurt by it and I simply can’t forgive them. Even now I don’t like putting my friends out by even emailing them about my life.

Because my level of social weirdness is relatively mild, I doubt I’d qualify as having Asperger’s on the tests. Besides, I know how to cheat those kinds of tests anyway.

Autism and Asperger’s are food chemical related.

Someone with Asperger’s left a message on my blog a few weeks ago. He had diagnosed himself with Asperger’s as an adult. Typical of someone with Asperger’s to diagnose themselves!

I’ve highlighted with italics the ones my sister suffered from as a child, and bolded the ones I suffered from during childhood, teenage years, or still suffer from. If an area was particularly bad, I’ve marked the title too.

Marked hyperactivity:
Constant motion
Running instead of walking
Inability to sit still
Inappropriate wiggling of legs/hands

Impulsive Actions:
Disruptive behavior / disturbs others
Unresponsiveness to discipline
Unkindness to pets
Poor self-control
Destructive behaviors: throws, breaks things
Little or no recognition of danger to self
Inappropriate noises
Excessive talking
Loud talking
Interrupts often
Abusive behavior
Unpredictable behavior

Compulsive Actions:
Aggression
Perseveration/repeating of an activity
Touching things or people excessively
Workaholic habits
Chewing on clothing, other objects
Scratching, biting & picking at skin

Emotional Concerns:
Low frustration tolerance
Depression
Frequent crying
Demands immediate attention
Irritability
Overreaction to touch, pain, sound, lights
Panics easily
Nervousness
Low self-esteem
Mood swings
Suicidal thoughts

Learning Problems:
Short Attention Span
Impatience
Distraction
Failure to complete projects
Inability to listen to whole story
Inability to follow directions

Neuro-Muscular Involvement:
Accident prone
Poor muscle coordination
Difficulty writing, drawing
Dyslexia/reading problems
Speech difficulties/delays
Difficulty with playground activities, sports
Eye muscle disorder (nystagmus, strabismus)
Tics (unusual or uncontrollable movements)
Seizures (some forms)

Cognitive and Perceptual Disturbances:
Auditory memory deficits (difficulty remembering what is heard)
Visual memory deficits (difficulty remembering what is seen)
Difficulty in comprehension and short term memory
Disturbance in spatial orientation (up-down, right-left)
Difficulties in reasoning (simple math problems, meaning in words)

Frequent Physical Complaints:
Ear infections
Asthma
Bedwetting (enuresis)
Daytime wetting
Stomachaches
Headaches, migraines
Hives, rashes (urticaria)
Eczema
Leg aches
Constipation, diarrhea
Congestion
Seizures (some types, especially if combined with migraine or hyperactivity)

Sleep Problems:
Resistance to going to bed
Difficulty falling asleep
Restless / erratic sleep
Nightmares, bad dreams

When my sister and I were growing up, there was no such thing as “ADD” or “ADHD”. My sister was apologetically labelled “hyperactive” by our stressed-out mother, who frequently complained to her “you’re like a bull at a gate, you are!”. She was very noisy, and as a baby cried so much at night that her cot had to be moved downstairs into the dining room.

By contrast I had been a “good” baby, and was a “good” child – I was very quiet, off in my own world all the time, extremely shy, and had real trouble fitting in at school. Like my sister, I was oversensitive and very easily hurt by other’s actions. I don’t think my parents realised at the time – the disease had yet to be labelled – that these are the symptoms of ADD.

Stupidly, it only struck me about a month ago when I read Sue Dengate’s “Fed Up with ADHD”, that I have all the symptoms of ADD. I have been describing my symptoms to bored friends for two or three years now as being “like ADD”, with phrases like “I get these brain fogs and I can’t concentrate on anything”. When I read “Fed Up with ADHD” I ended up in tears, because it was explaining exactly who I was, and all of the negative character traits I have felt guilty about since childhood. My partner read the symptoms of Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD) over my shoulder, and without prompting – he meant it in humour – said to me “that’s just like you!”. Which it was. It’s strange how for six months I’ve known this condition causes ADD/ADHD in children, that I’ve described my condition as “like ADD” for years, but it still took me a full six months to put two and two together: I have adult ADD.

My paternal cousins were similarly affected by a great many of these symptoms. One was troubled by dyslexia. Another had life-threatening asthma and was a decidedly moody teenager. I have a number of character traits which make my mum compare me to my paternal uncle, who suffers some very similar problems to me. Is it just a coincidence that he independently discovered Atkins a couple of years ago and started feeling much better on it?

I have a strange perceptual disorder. I have always jokingly referred to a problem I have as “aural dyslexia”. When people speak, I can’t always process what they say. I can hear them just fine (in fact, I have perfect pitch). The problem is I can’t make out what they are saying – the meaning eludes me and the noise of the words doesn’t turn into words. I would also not be able to lip read to save my life. Quite often I find myself in shops saying “pardon?” to the checkout assistant if she says something unexpected, or apologetically lying, “I’m sorry I’m slightly deaf” after she has to repeat something for the third time.

When I start having a reaction, one of the first things to go is my ability to make sentences and recall words. For example, if I need to do something in the car, like open the window or turn off the fan, it is easier for me to reach across and do it myself than be able to ask my partner to do it for me. I forget the word for “fan” or “window”, and it might take me a couple of stammers to get the right word out – usually I end up saying something like: “Can you turn of the thing – the wotsit – the air blower?”. I associate this disorder with my maternal grandmother (mamma), who had this trait, and a related one. In our family we call malapropisms – the misuse of words – mammaisms, because mamma did this so often. Both my sister and I have this trait too. My sister once famously talked about the “directions” (decorations) on the ceiling. I suppose you had to be there.

Another disorder associated with ADD, which isn’t listed here is mixed laterality.

Laterality is left or right handedness. If you are right handed, you should also be right footed, and have a dominant right eye when looking at things. Laterality is also the way your brain is wired. One side is wired for language and the minutiae, the other side is wired for spacial ability, and an ability to make abstract connections such as jokes and eureka moments, as in “lateral thinking”. People often oversimplify brain laterality and talk about themselves as being left-brained (logical, critical, analytical and accurate) or right-brained (creative, illogical, spiritual and emotional).

ADD/ADHD children often have mixed laterality, and as in the above study, adults with ADHD have been found to use the “wrong” parts of their brain to do tasks. ADD/ADHD children are often specialists – idiot savantes – as in the autism related condition Asperger’s syndrome. Some are extremely good at maths but weak on language, others are extremely good at language but weak on maths.

I am strongly right-handed. I don’t appear to have a dominant foot (ambipedarous?). I have a very dominant left eye. I am decidedly left-brained to the point where I am weak on the ability to think laterally and cryptically (something I am trying to train out of myself). Something interesting is though I have always had problems with speech, I have no problems with writing. In fact my chosen career was to be a writer. My spelling is unusually good. However, ask me to add up a double digit number in my head and I will find myself using my fingers. My school marks reflected this, ranging from A through to E. The subjects I really focussed on I always got an A. But I didn’t have the stamina to focus on them all!

I don’t want to get into a great discussion about left and right handedness here. In a nutshell: though 10% of the population are left handed, it doesn’t appear to be clearly genetic and instead appears to be congenital (running in families but not genetic, rather passed down neural tube/methylation style like Pottenger’s cats) or developmental. There is a growing mass of evidence to suggest that left handedness was in fact extremely rare before the last century, that this is not because left handedness was culturally suppressed (though it was when it appeared), but that it simply didn’t happen that often. And it appears that left handedness is increasing in the current population.

The point here? My mother and my sister are both left handed. How does this connect to the mixed laterality of ADD/ADHD?

Hyperactivity: my maternal grandfather is eighty years old and he still can’t sit still for more than five minutes. He is always on the go, to the extent where it has to be characterised as a disorder.

Obsessiveness, and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) are another aspect of ADD/ADHD. In some, particularly autistics, this shows as a desire for rigid routines. My maternal grandmother stuck to her routines to the point of insanity. In others, OCD manifests as workaholism – like my paternal uncle. Personally, I use the computer obsessively, I research my disorder obsessively, I wash my hands far too frequently, and as a child I had very odd obsessive routines and had to do everything “evenly” – that is, If I touched the ground with my left hand, I then had to touch it with my right hand.

At school, I ate my lunch very slowly, and I hated the taste of most food. It turns out that I’m a supertaster, and it’s really not my fault: food really does taste bad. Joan Breakey’s research into food chemical intolerance suggests some sort of connection with supertasting.