Posted by dj on June 18, 2000, at 21:38:07
In reply to Re: Little Professor Syndrome - Asperger's - long... » dj, posted by Sara T on June 18, 2000, at 17:25:38
> But to put it in perspective, I think that there simply aren't places in our society for those who function on the margin, or are a bit strange. ADDer's have the same problem, read Thom Hartman's HUNTERS IN A FARMERS WORLD. There may have been in the past actually more ways for those people to be absorbed into society. In Uta Frith's book, THE ENIGMA OF AUTISM, she has a chapter on the history of autism and cites characters in literature back to the middle ages whose behavior was very bizarre and autistic-like.
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> I do think, however, it isn't as simple as saying, well, these people are just different. There are serious impairments to their functioning and because of that they are more suseptible to comorbid mental illnesses. They are also more suseptible to Tourette's Syndrome, and Seizure disorders because of the neurological damage.
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Sara,Thanks for your very thougtful, insightful and informative comments on your son's condition, aspergers and autism. It helped me get a better
sense of what it is about.A very erudite writer who has helped appreciate the gift in some of the very different and unique human conditions and their consequences is
Dr. Oliver Sacks who wrote "An Anthropologist on Mars : Seven Paradoxical Tales" about: "...autistic Temple Grandin, whose own book "Thinking in Pictures" gives her version of how she feels--as unlike other humans as a cow or a Martian. The other minds Sacks describes are equally remarkable: a surgeon with Tourette's syndrome, a painter who loses color vision, a blind man given the ambiguous gift of sight, artists with memories that overwhelm "real life," the autistic artist Stephen Wiltshire, and a man with memory damage for whom it is always 1968." - courtesy of Amazon.comThough I haven't read this book I've read "The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat" from which I learned a lot about Tourette's Syndrome which like him I am more aware of when I see someone with it 'acting out' their verbal tics. I have read excerpts from the above including the tale of the sugeonn with Tourette's who lives in a small town here in British Columbia and flys a small plane, which like surgery is pretty amazing if you know anything about the syndrome.
The key point Sacks makes very eloquently in his books and interviews I've read is that we all have our unique challenges and our unique gifts and finding the balance is the key. For some of this, this is more of a challenge than others and perhaps there is more of a gift there as well...in the long run. We all have to figure that out for ourselves in our own unique ways with whatever help we can garner.
Whether our society is becoming more supportive or less for individual idiosyncrocies is something for the historians to grapple with... I believe there are signs that some segments of our society are becoming more tolerant of a broader range of differences, though there are a vocal lot who resist their more compassionate selves.
I believe that it is an important and integral role to help foster those compassionate tendencies in our society, by speaking out and making sure that the voices of those who aren't easily heard above the din, are noted and their needs looked after...Marianne Williamson writes quite movingly about this in her book: "Healing the Soul of America" and it is the core principal behind all religions. We are indeed, our brothers' and sisters' keepers and it is only by truly helping others that we help ourselves, I believe, while making sure that our own needs are looked after. Otherwise we abuse aka sin against our own individual and societal core beings.
Sante!
dj
poster:dj
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URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000610/msgs/37753.html