General Autism Discussion

Well, its a testimony to the truly incredible complexity of human interpersonal communication. Our facial expression is wired directly to the brain's emotional centers, and we telegraph emotional nuances to others before we consciously experienced them ourselves. One school of thought holds that neurologically, most emotion is simply "excitation", and that we read our own physiological responses, in light of whatever is happening at the time out in the environment, in order to categorize what we are feeling.

The irony is that asking a neurotypical person to explain what they do during a conversation is futile. Its exactly like asking someone to explain how they walk.

Alcohol is indeed an acquired taste ! The first times I drank alcoholic drinks (mostly beer, wine and champagne on special occasions), they tasted bad, with a burning sensation. Then during some months (of 2016 probably) I drank a glass of wine before every night to help me sleep, then stopped.

Now those same drinks are tastier and they almost don't burn, and it's pretty scary: soon I may be so desensitized I may confuse them with soft drinks.

Weird, my post didn't post properly yesterday , oh well.

Getting back to the article , I guess the "I and you" pronouns are more difficult because of autism' main symptom, solipsism: using a third party may reduce the confusion. The two shes test too, as I can imagine the testee not having "seeking someone else for disambiguation" on her mind.

Maybe it's just me...but hassling someone to try something even after they have said they don't like it seems like an asshole move.

Solipsism is autism's main symptom?

Tomorrow movie for the movie group is my pick. It's Please Stand By. Dakota Fanning plays the role of an autistic Trekkie who travels across California to hand-deliver her fan script to Paramount Pictures.

If anyone here would like to watch it, it's at 8pm US Eastern time, tomorrow (Saturday US time).

It'll be showing at https://cytu.be/r/TroperCoven

Sorry for the short notice, but I didn't realize it would be chosen for tomorrow's movie until today!

You know that article about how autistics are more likely to screw up language or something? Did it say if autistics are less likely to notice errors in language by others?

Article is here.

Anyway, it didn't say anything about autistics noticing errors in language, but I do remember reading there was a study that showed both autistics and non-autistics rated autistic people's voices as "fake" when they showed emotion.

The research summarized in the article found that people with autism express problems with prosody, facial expression and word choice. Counter-intuitively, autistic people sometimes demonstrate more emotional content in their expressions, not less.

Particularly problematic is that these problems fail to meet the cutoff values for diagnostic criteria, so they tend to be missed.

edited 29th Apr '18 9:38:59 AM by DeMarquis

I have a friend who greatly suspects he has borderline personality disorder, although he hasn't been formally diagnosed. I myself have high-functioning autism, and having known him for years, suspect he has the same. Research into the topic led me to find that autism is a common comorbid condition with BPD, and that many people are misdiagnosed with BPD before being correctly diagnosed with autism. I was wondering if anyone knows why this is - especially the latter, as I fail to see how the symptoms of high-functioning autism could be mistaken for BPD?

Apparently there an overlap in the symptoms.

For the second time, I encountered someone online who thought they had autism, but now thinks they actually do not.

In a chat during a Twitch livestream, people were talking about life things like getting a job, and a high school student in the UK brought up having autism somehow. I said that I was on the spectrum and had a job (one my dad got for me by asking if they'd hire me as a favor for him).

I forget exactly what was said, but somehow, it came out that this teen doesn't have any of the autism symptoms. Like, he doesn't have any sensitivity to noise or light that's unusual. He said he doesn't notice small details like autistics tend to do. Eye contact never bothering him, etc.

I said "There are people who are socially behind, and there are those who have a disability making it difficult to learn social skills even when they're surrounded by people and very extroverted." He said "Yeah, I think I'm the first and not the second."

He also said that the only thing being diagnosed with autism did for him was create a stigma - now people who know his (possibly false) diagnosis assume he's stupid.

I've heard many horror stories of people who grew up not knowing they had autism, and not knowing why they couldn't handle parties, why certain social situations kept tripping them up again and again, why looking people in the eye felt so weird and unnatural, why they seemed to have to take longer to process and understand what people were saying, etc. But I don't want people to be falsely diagnosed with autism on little more than being socially behind. Because that's not autism. People who don't have autism but are socially behind will eventually catch up, and won't have the disabling aspects of autism itself. And we don't need people who do have the disability being unfairly compared people who were just a little behind, and be told "That person has autism. Why can't you just act normal like that person?!" when "that person" doesn't even have to "act" "normal" at all.

The thing is, it’s hard to generalise and say that a person has to have a particular set of specific symptoms to be autistic. I mean, I’m autistic and I don’t really seem to have the ‘small-detail noticing’ thing, and my hypersensitivity is pretty much limited to being a picky eater and having a low pain threshold. But I’ve got plenty of other symptoms. I suspect my friend is autistic namely because of his literal-mindedness, extreme social anxiety and awkwardness, inability to understand when he might be offending someone or committing a faux pas, and tendency to develop obsessive interests in particular things where he learns *everything* about that topic and will only talk about that topic for months on end.

True. The things you listed are indeed autism symptoms. I should have given a bigger list of examples of symptoms for that person to see if he had any of them.

With the other person who thought she had autism but didn't, in her case, she had none of the symptoms you or I listed. I even listed more; none applied to her. She was even socially very big and popular and charming.

Why did she think she had autism in the first place? Because she went through an awkward period in school where she was socially behind. Then she caught up. As she did more research, she realized that's not autism at all.

edited 3rd May '18 8:57:22 AM by BonsaiForest

"social anesthetic". An autistic's story about learning the social rules, through mere mimicry.

Ohhhh, yeah. You're not kidding.

Poor guy. Maybe waiting for someone else to say hello and elaborating on the response would have been better ! For me at the same age, it was the conversational subjects that were lacking the most: initiating a conversation is really hard unless you prepare it (eventually with parents' help).

Somehow now talking about the latest interesting thing is more natural but it's probably because I have less people to talk to, when more people enter the room I go back to observing and eventually saying things (which is much better than ignoring and focusing out of conversations).

The most important barrier is natural curiosity towards others, what an autistic lacks enough of to not be bothered enough to ask. That curiosity gets triggered by cooperative efforts requiring opening to others to make. Those were really rare at my college (there were cooperative tasks but not requiring much "opening") but are probably even rarer abroad .

At school, there is a lot of people per class, so memorizing the likes and dislikes of everyone is nigh-on impossible. I dislike saying things like that, but autistics should focus on the special ones, the ones who actually welcome or are curious about them (because they are the most likely to notice the lack of curiosity and talkativeness). Then finding a close circle of friends becomes more natural. Each time a conversation gets satisfying, others get more interesting, it'll need less effort to have another, or even to initiate another.

In the case of not being welcomed or talked to, it's better to observe and try singling out the loneliest one in the class (the misunderstood one), the one who's visibly miffed at not being near a friend (the one who wanted to communicate), the one that lends his eraser/sharpener to his comrade-in-need (the helpful one) or, in absence of such special occurences, the nicest-looking or nearest neighbor. At least, that's what I could try to do at the time.

Alternatively, if students could change places, trying to get near talkative ones (being the fourth near a talking trio) may provide some opportunities to inch in a conversation.

Dont overlook the usefulness of those people who are so outgoing they act as the social hubs of the grade. Such people collect acquaintences like business cards, and are typically relatively approachable.

Said in the comments section of an article from 2014 about an autistic boy who was mistreated horribly by two girls who pretended to be his friends. By "mistreated horribly", I'm talking things like having a knife pulled on him (which he took as just a joke), being locked in the trunk of their car, being made to walk on thin ice and then not helped up when he fell in the water, and being pressured into having sex with his family dog - all while it was filmed on the cellphone of one of these evil girls.

Some of the commenters were of the "he's smart, so he's not that disabled" variety. Then again, this is 2014; nowadays, thanks to shows like The Good Doctor, more people are realizing that intelligence and disability can exist in the same person, so if such an article were posted today, we'd get less ignorant comments. (Fortunately, the ignorant comments get far fewer "likes" than the intelligent ones.)

It's quite a conundrum. Those with less obvious disabilities tend to get their struggles invalidated, while those with more obvious disabilities tend to get their capabilities invalidated.

Use of certain social strategies linked to anxiety in autism

In short, camouflaging - pretending to be normal by mimicking other people's behaviors - causes anxiety and stress.

What's more, the better their social mimicry, the higher their IQ, the better their executive function, and the higher their anxiety levels. This seems to indicate that the anxiety is coming from the social mimicry, whereas the ability to engage in high quality social mimicry comes from greater intelligence. At least, that's how I interpret this data.

And now there's an article saying that autistic people are bad at detecting hints of lying. Like shiftiness or inexact answers. You know, like autistics themselves exhibit naturally.

For goodness sakes, we're the kind of people who look at evidence instead of body language and language hints, but this is meant to be a bad thing.

Not a bad thing, but a disadvantage in social discourse.

Pretending to be something you're not 24-7? Of course that's going to cause stress and anxiety. But it's nice to get some data backing it up.

Well, looking at evidence instead of body language and language hints is not particularly horrible but it definitely causes problems with the ambient societal hypocrisy . Good thing I'm surrounded by more or less honest people, though I had two quite annoying dishonest people in my association.

One of them was someone who told me he and his (supposed?) girlfriend had somehow bought an abandoned house in the Brocéliande Forest. The pill was hard to swallow (you had to be quite the dragon to eat such a lie *Rimshot*) and well, in the next three months or so he came to the association with all the stuff from his old bedroom because his mother wanted to get rid of em now that he had a place to live (but he couldn't make the trip in one go). So I guess he was lying about the whole "buying somehow cheap estate" matter, and probably the "girlfriend" too .

Next time I heard from him, he broke up with his girlfriend in Brittany and found another, but she was apparently an immigrant who came back to her homeland so he was following her... to some African country I don't remember, and he said he had contacts there (in the entourage of their state leader) to do it and live with her. That seemed an even bigger lie so I just told him that I didn't understand why he's always lying to us .

The other was the association's treasurer and said he made all the administrative work in 2016. It was totally untrue, leaving the association in cold relations with its grantmakers once we had to submit results to them. Not only that, but as I went to be the interim treasurer during his vacancy (and I even made a study to evaluate what activities andirregularities happened in 2016), I noticed someone took a thousand euros off its account. He confessed it was him because he and the other liar had money problems - cue Facepalm. The "and the other liar" was another lie, and we got back the money in mensualities by threatening legal action.

Fortunately one of the association's educators went to restore 2016's accountability, tickets and estimates in hand.

The only defense against lies for us is to find and live with honest and helpful people that would protect us from them, detect or piece together lying motives ("do it benefit him if he lies ?"), being really observant to at least find Bad Liars and "stock lies", and hoping to not ever trust too much in a recent or unsure "friend".

Though, the reverse is also true. Since we do not have much body language, often have tics and do not make eye contact, we actually are constantly shifty so there is no way of detecting if we lie, at least by body language. Desiring to be an honest but happy child, I sometimes cringed at how much I had to lie to my parents about little unimportant but annoying things, and how successful I was to it. Even apologized once in a while .

The current president of my association has the same light autism problem as me, but is much worse in terms of intellect and awareness, so much that he believes that politicians are exemplary and honourable because they have been given the honor of having the stature they currently have, so for him the President must be the most honest man of the country ! Of course I lampshade the hell out of it for him, and it's only very recently taking effect, blessed be Akari .

edited 24th May '18 1:04:53 AM by acuddle

A comic book store hires three employees with autism, and didn't do it to intentionally be inclusive. Instead, they did it looking for employees who would be good for the store - and it worked out great.

One of the autistic employees now creates comics as well!!

That title sounds very much like the sort of thing I associate with comics - very grimdark, and not something I'd seek out. (I read very few comics, and I doubt anyone here has heard of the ones I do read. :P ) But good for her!

Research Discovers Drug That May Help Children With Autism

This looks like it could be a legit breakthrough.

They went from low functioning to Aspie level? That sounds amazing. It makes me wonder if autism is something that is essentially always there, and additional factors affect severity level. I could be wrong, though.

The article also states that it'll take three years for them to be able to begin the final trials. (Currently, they're planning to test for safety.)