Discussion History WMG / FriendsAndTheHighCouncil

Deleted by the author as inappropriate.

Deleted entry, as it was probably inappropriate, and very relative. There is always Wikipedia for anybody who is genuinely interested.

Autism, and (the sub-category of higher verbal capability, but otherwise largely the same, formerly classified as) \\\"Asperger\\\'s Syndrome\\\" are neurological disorders that cause the subject to process information and impressions in highly diverging manners. Symptoms include:

* Social Issues
** [[IDoNotSpeakNonverbal Limited ability to process social cues]]
** Problems intuitively noticing the way they affect others, or appropriately gauging reactions, resulting in often feeling uncomfortable due to unnerving suspicion and guilt that they have done something wrong but not knowing quite what and when, or if they can in fact do anything at all naturally without someone around misunderstanding and getting upset. Sometimes resulting in cases of saying or expressively reacting as little as possible, thinking that they have done something wrong mostly in cases when they haven\\\'t, or subdued melancholia.
** Difficulty/uncomfortable with with eye contact, staring, or awkward mutual focusing between people.
** Sexually passive, and somewhat oblivious/dependent on advances and very explicit signals from the other party, as well as being used to and comfortable with her/him.
** Expressions inconsistent with what they feel or is expected. Hence can sometimes be misinterpreted as happy when sad, flippant when shocked, and such.
* Repetitive Behavior
** Ritualistic behavior
** Limited focuses and interests. \\\"Interests\\\" here used in a very loose definition, as autistic people will frequently compulsively continue doing whatever they have imprinted on no matter how much they hate and are sick to death of it, as removing it would only result in staring at a wall instead.
** Severe difficulties processing/understanding or acclimatising to change beyond surface-level, despite frequent non-stop mental efforts and exercises.
** Limited intuitive awareness or understanding of normal-paced linear timeflow.
** Repetitive movement
** Unconscious limited self-injury (ex: finger-gnawing until noticing due to blood)
** Extreme confusion and rootlessness if put in a situation wherein most routine is lost
** Very limited ability to self-structure more beneficial complex behaviour patterns without competent outside assistance/Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, regardless of personal motivation, drive, will, exertion, and desperation, especially in cases of overlap with ADD/ADHD or gradually progressing schizophrenia
* Atypical Speech
** Use of AntiquatedLinguistics
** SesquipedalianLoquaciousness
** Trouble with AmbiguousSyntax
** Monotone speech OR unusual fluctuations in pitch and volume
* Sensory Issues
** Limited information filters. Can be both inward and outward.
** {{Literal Minded}}ness
*** At its most basic simply about the necessity for clear communication, and internal consistency, but often has a much wider scope regarding the whole perception of reality. This includes finding deceit, insincerity, and manipulation thoroughly alien and offensive; difficulties understanding distinctions for social or ideological MoralDissonance that other people take for granted; and combined with the very limited filters, taking the intents of media creators exactly as presented, not as toned down in the slightest. (This is commonly misportrayed as an inability to understand allegories and symbolism, but this is not correct. Autistic people are commonly very good at finding logical structures, including layered undertones, once the language of symbolism is reasonably understood.) Regardless of personal efforts for distance and sense of humour, or attempting to process \\\"people don\\\'t mean everything they say\\\" through objective observation, the intuitive understanding often remains missing.
** Lessened distinction between real experience and fictional input.
** Limited emotional filters.
** High empathy in the areas of compassion, affection, distress at seeing other people in pain, awkward need to be helpful, active conscience, genuine loyalty, etc. Low empathy in the sense of finding most normal people weird and hard to relate to, inconsistent detachment, or sometimes strong \\\"does not compute\\\" reactions to strongly contradictory or purely emotive thought and value structures. In this respect at the complete opposite end of the spectra to a traditional \\\"media version psychopath\\\".
** Difficulties processing/understanding own emotional reactions. Nonetheless often put severe literally painful effort into doing so, but it can take ongoing extreme amounts of time depending on how many, incoherent, extreme, and/or destructive impressions there are to process.
** Emotional retardation, unless given thorough training and socialisation during the upbringing.
** Often misgauging when assistance is or isn\\\'t needed, but asking to be sure.
** Limited fundamental \\\"feeling\\\" of connection to/conscious presence and awareness in present surroundings. Without competent help and training recurrently to degrees literally best likened to a \\\"lifetime imprisonment since birth in a mental isolation cell\\\".
** Common straymindedness, including easily losing track and jumping between different topics without noticing.
** Often very limited depth of learning for practical application through simple observation-imitation, requiring more thorough instruction, theory, and personal training.
** Lessened ability to experience joyful states such as enthusiasm, happiness, satisfaction, fulfilment, etc. Can be at least partially remedied through meaningful, constructive training
** When lacking any guidance, recurrently compensate through strong extremely exhausting manic blindly overachieving tendencies without any true understanding of how to focus the effort for personal satisfaction (especially in cases of overlap with [[MoodSwinger bipolar disorder]]), or the lack of emotional development and experience through an automaton worker-bee detachment as a necessity to \\\"keep up and get the necessary work done\\\", sometimes with extreme acclimatised mental pressure due to an \\\"emotional 5-years-old\\\" suddenly thrown naked into a foreign country with thoroughly alien people to somehow figure out and shoulder adult life responsibilities.
** Hypersensitivity to touch or texture.
** Hypersensitivity to light or sound.
** Heightened OR lowered sensitivity to pain. Sometimes shifting from day to day.
** \\\"Patchwork-pattern\\\" attention to visual images, including increased difficulties quickly remembering faces/finding it much easier sorting people out combined with other impressions of them, but also includes selective attention when drawing objects from memory (used as part of evaluating the diagnosis), and more severe difficulties making multi-faceted realistic movement for people in the head/indistinct generic-looking people in dreams, but it can be improved through effort, and it is sometimes easier to visualise \\\"drawn\\\" animations.
** Common with assorted food anxieties, mainly serious difficulties keeping a consistent eating schedule, but can also involve disinterest/boredom in eating and having to actively exert oneself to make and inhale it, obsessions about keeping the food nutritious, etc.
** Clumsy movements
*** Examples: Less awareness, unregulated force, or less fine-tuning, and adapting by keeping an extra distance of movement in fear of unconsciously causing damage, or contributing to turning nervous when others come within close personal space, especially in unregulated situations with potentially hazardous multiple impressions
** Constant sleep-disorders and high sensitivity to disturbances such as sounds, but these can usually be mostly treated with the hormone Melatonin and earplugs without negative effects
* Highly uneven intelligence-curve, depending on area, shifting between extremely bright to mental retardation. Very different from case to case.
** Frequent necessary compensation by using the \\\"wrong\\\" area to approximate what it feels like understanding another, sometimes resulting in what others label an extreme talent in \\\"thinking outside of the box\\\" (read: simply trying to process and figure out confusing impressions), or rather offer an unusual, less \\\"conveniently\\\" labelled, self-processed perspective or path to reaching an analysis in various areas.
** Dumbfounded \\\"unintentional DeadpanSnarker\\\" sense of humour/attempting to laugh off situations and social issues that don\\\'t make any sense to self to release some tension (DailyShow and ColbertReport are a fairly close approximation)
* Relatively common with overloaded/inability to process the situation \\\"freakout\\\" episodes/uncontrollable passenger-in-one\\\'s-own-body seizures when under extreme amounts of accumulated stress, at least during the upbringing, although extremely rarely in a dangerous manner, as it is unfocused confused pain overload rather than intent to do harm, and far more likely to get muscle spasms, scream uncontrollably, or accidentally tip over furniture. As usual autistic are far more likely to be abused than be abusive, and calculated cruelty is virtually nonexistent. The exception can be if first physically attacked. A purely emotional-response panic attack in this type of situation could theorethically have dangerous consequences for either the attacker or the autistic, and given the overactive conscience, recurrent extreme fear of accidentally harming any living beings during this state is likevise very common, and many autistic go to extremes in attempting to avoid the types of situations when it could potentially happen.
* Often react quite differently and much more negatively (sometimes with permanent hazardous effects such as add or adhd) to brain-affecting medication developed for \\\"normal\\\" people, and/or used as \\\"test subjects\\\" even with proven high-risk examples.
* Can most effectively be treated through extreme levels of filtered control, scheduling, and in very strong cases competent extreme \\\"40-hours/week boot-camp\\\" levels of outward assistance in order to structure and understand relation to the surrounding world. Scientifically proven that anything below 35-40 hours/week has very limited positive effect, and mostly simply slows down the deterioration. The earlier efficient training is set in the more effect it has, and the less hollow spaces of social development will exist due to timely integration into society for personal experience. Certain forms of neurofeedback, or extremely healthy food and exercise, including regular intake of omega-3/omega-6/omega-9 fish-oil and vitamins, have also reported some positive results.
* Autism was formerly thought to be around four times as common among males as females. This is due to that the women usually suffer less from the social difficulties or have less visible handicaps, commonly assumed to be because of different interaction structures/women commonly being more intimate, less rough, and not as required to take internal initiative to gain acquaintances. It is also most visible amongst the first children in a family, whereas those growing up with older siblings often gain required social instruction from having someone more experienced closeby to observe. Autistic children are generally also much more sensitive to stable and stimulating upbringing conditions than most individuals, and as they will almost always strongly imprint on whatever is made available, which combined with being less able to protect themselves from, or relate to and understand, destructive and confusing media, and much less ability to take flexible personal initiative, makes heavy filtering of utmost importance. Someone raised with nature and other children closeby, whose family doesn\\\'t move around a lot, is kept away from incoherent negativity, nihilism, or hate-filled mind-poison, is rather introduced to theoretical or practical science to obsess about, stimulating games, etc, will generally turn out an awful lot healthier and possibly develop genius intelligence in the areas due to sheer intensity of the fixation, than those with mostly awful loose-handed impressions, or worse left to vegetate with no mental stimulation whatsoever. It may not fit with popular ideologies, but from a matter-of-fact standpoint truly autistic people are much more dependent on outward direction and circumstances, which is the reason why some end up as nursery-song mumbling or screaming vegetables, and others as revolutionary scientists, inventors, and financial theorists. In essense, the principles for a constructive upbringing and education are somewhat divergent from the commonly preferred standards, and need a stricter (and more competent) hand than certain ideologues may be comfortable with.
* High suicide-rate due to thoroughly horrible \\\"mental isolation cell since birth\\\" living conditions, often worsened by inaccurately applied overmedication and non-stimulating, very badly adapted lack of external training.
* Internal conflicting schisms due to highly divergent or mild, extreme, and mixed cases being lumped together. Hence, the people who might not even qualify for the diagnosies find it cumbersome to be assumed to have severe disabilities, even though they do not; and thus can give a public impression that those who truly need structuring and training do not; or the mixed low-/high-functioning cases are associated with more convenient either/or categorisation depending on the area someone encounters them in. It is not uncommon that cases who could have turned much better with enough stimuli are left to rot, and only gain true awareness, or even start to speak, much later in life. All of this is especially troublesome given that available scientific evidence suggest that the symtoms can be extremely mitigated given intense socialised (preceding natural social integration) cognitive behaviour training before the age of 3, and still much lessened applied later in life.

An AmbiguouslyAutistic character does not need to show all of these symptoms. In fact, in real life, most people on the spectrum do not. However, for a character to be more than just a TVGenius or TheSpock, the character must exhibit symptoms from multiple categories.

Autism, and (the sub-category of higher verbal capability, but otherwise largely the same, formerly classified as) \\\"Asperger\\\'s Syndrome\\\" are neurological disorders that cause the subject to process information and impressions in highly diverging manners. Symptoms include:

* Social Issues
** [[IDoNotSpeakNonverbal Limited ability to process social cues]]
** Problems intuitively noticing the way they affect others, or appropriately gauging reactions, resulting in often feeling uncomfortable due to unnerving suspicion and guilt that they have done something wrong but not knowing quite what and when, or if they can in fact do anything at all naturally without someone around misunderstanding and getting upset. Sometimes resulting in cases of saying or expressively reacting as little as possible, thinking that they have done something wrong mostly in cases when they haven\\\'t, or subdued melancholia.
** Difficulty/uncomfortable with with eye contact, staring, or awkward mutual focusing between people.
** Sexually passive, and somewhat oblivious/dependent on advances and very explicit signals from the other party, as well as being used to and comfortable with her/him.
** Expressions inconsistent with what they feel or is expected. Hence can sometimes be misinterpreted as happy when sad, flippant when shocked, and such.
* Repetitive Behavior
** Ritualistic behavior
** Limited focuses and interests. \\\"Interests\\\" here used in a very loose definition, as autistic people will frequently compulsively continue doing whatever they have imprinted on no matter how much they hate and are sick to death of it, as removing it would only result in staring at a wall instead.
** Severe difficulties processing/understanding or acclimatising to change beyond surface-level, despite frequent non-stop mental efforts and exercises.
** Limited intuitive awareness or understanding of normal-paced linear timeflow.
** Repetitive movement
** Unconscious limited self-injury (ex: finger-gnawing until noticing due to blood)
** Extreme confusion and rootlessness if put in a situation wherein most routine is lost
** Very limited ability to self-structure more beneficial complex behaviour patterns without competent outside assistance/Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, regardless of personal motivation, drive, will, exertion, and desperation, especially in cases of overlap with ADD/ADHD or gradually progressing schizophrenia
* Atypical Speech
** Use of AntiquatedLinguistics
** SesquipedalianLoquaciousness
** Trouble with AmbiguousSyntax
** Monotone speech OR unusual fluctuations in pitch and volume
* Sensory Issues
** Limited information filters. Can be both inward and outward.
** {{Literal Minded}}ness
*** At its most basic simply about the necessity for clear communication, and internal consistency, but often has a much wider scope regarding the whole perception of reality. This includes finding deceit, insincerity, and manipulation thoroughly alien and offensive; difficulties understanding distinctions for social or ideological MoralDissonance that other people take for granted; and combined with the very limited filters, taking the intents of media creators exactly as presented, not as toned down in the slightest. (This is commonly misportrayed as an inability to understand allegories and symbolism, but this is not correct. Autistic people are commonly very good at finding logical structures, including layered undertones, once the language of symbolism is reasonably understood.) Regardless of personal efforts for distance and sense of humour, or attempting to process \\\"people don\\\'t mean everything they say\\\" through objective observation, the intuitive understanding often remains missing.
** Lessened distinction between real experience and fictional input.
** Limited emotional filters.
** High empathy in the areas of compassion, affection, distress at seeing other people in pain, awkward need to be helpful, active conscience, genuine loyalty, etc. Low empathy in the sense of finding most normal people weird and hard to relate to, inconsistent detachment, or sometimes strong \\\"does not compute\\\" reactions to strongly contradictory or purely emotive thought and value structures. In this respect at the complete opposite end of the spectra to a traditional \\\"media version psychopath\\\".
** Difficulties processing/understanding own emotional reactions. Nonetheless often put severe literally painful effort into doing so, but it can take ongoing extreme amounts of time depending on how many, incoherent, extreme, and/or destructive impressions there are to process.
** Emotional retardation, unless given thorough training and socialisation during the upbringing.
** Often misgauging when assistance is or isn\\\'t needed, but asking to be sure.
** Limited fundamental \\\"feeling\\\" of connection to/conscious presence and awareness in present surroundings. Without competent help and training recurrently to degrees literally best likened to a \\\"lifetime imprisonment since birth in a mental isolation cell\\\".
** Common straymindedness, including easily losing track and jumping between different topics without noticing.
** Often very limited depth of learning for practical application through simple observation-imitation, requiring more thorough instruction, theory, and personal training.
** Lessened ability to experience joyful states such as enthusiasm, happiness, satisfaction, fulfilment, etc. Can be at least partially remedied through meaningful, constructive training
** When lacking any guidance, recurrently compensate through strong extremely exhausting manic blindly overachieving tendencies without any true understanding of how to focus the effort for personal satisfaction (especially in cases of overlap with [[MoodSwinger bipolar disorder]]), or the lack of emotional development and experience through an automaton worker-bee detachment as a necessity to \\\"keep up and get the necessary work done\\\", sometimes with extreme acclimatised mental pressure due to an \\\"emotional 5-years-old\\\" suddenly thrown naked into a foreign country with thoroughly alien people to somehow figure out and shoulder adult life responsibilities.
** Hypersensitivity to touch or texture.
** Hypersensitivity to light or sound.
** Heightened OR lowered sensitivity to pain. Sometimes shifting from day to day.
** \\\"Patchwork-pattern\\\" attention to visual images, including increased difficulties quickly remembering faces/finding it much easier sorting people out combined with other impressions of them, but also includes selective attention when drawing objects from memory (used as part of evaluating the diagnosis), and more severe difficulties making multi-faceted realistic movement for people in the head/indistinct generic-looking people in dreams, but it can be improved through effort, and it is sometimes easier to visualise \\\"drawn\\\" animations.
** Common with assorted food anxieties, mainly serious difficulties keeping a consistent eating schedule, but can also involve disinterest/boredom in eating and having to actively exert oneself to make and inhale it, obsessions about keeping the food nutritious, etc.
** Clumsy movements
*** Examples: Less awareness, unregulated force, or less fine-tuning, and adapting by keeping an extra distance of movement in fear of unconsciously causing damage, or contributing to turning nervous when others come within close personal space, especially in unregulated situations with potentially hazardous multiple impressions
** Constant sleep-disorders and high sensitivity to disturbances such as sounds, but these can usually be mostly treated with the hormone Melatonin and earplugs without negative effects
* Highly uneven intelligence-curve, depending on area, shifting between extremely bright to mental retardation. Very different from case to case.
** Frequent necessary compensation by using the \\\"wrong\\\" area to approximate what it feels like understanding another, sometimes resulting in what others label an extreme talent in \\\"thinking outside of the box\\\" (read: simply trying to process and figure out confusing impressions), or rather offer an unusual, less \\\"conveniently\\\" labelled, self-processed perspective or path to reaching an analysis in various areas.
** Dumbfounded \\\"unintentional DeadpanSnarker\\\" sense of humour/attempting to laugh off situations and social issues that don\\\'t make any sense to self to release some tension (DailyShow and ColbertReport are a fairly close approximation)
* Relatively common with overloaded/inability to process the situation \\\"freakout\\\" episodes/uncontrollable passenger-in-one\\\'s-own-body seizures when under extreme amounts of accumulated stress, at least during the upbringing, although extremely rarely in a dangerous manner, as it is unfocused confused pain overload rather than intent to do harm, and far more likely to get muscle spasms, scream uncontrollably, or accidentally tip over furniture. As usual autistic are far more likely to be abused than be abusive, and calculated cruelty is virtually nonexistent. The exception can be if first physically attacked. A purely emotional-response panic attack in this type of situation could theorethically have dangerous consequences for either the attacker or the autistic, and given the overactive conscience, recurrent extreme fear of accidentally harming any living beings during this state is likevise very common, and many autistic go to extremes in attempting to avoid the types of situations when it could potentially happen.
* Often react quite differently and much more negatively (sometimes with permanent hazardous effects such as add or adhd) to brain-affecting medication developed for \\\"normal\\\" people, and/or used as \\\"test subjects\\\" even with proven high-risk examples.
* Can most effectively be treated through extreme levels of filtered control, scheduling, and in very strong cases competent extreme \\\"40-hours/week boot-camp\\\" levels of outward assistance in order to structure and understand relation to the surrounding world. Scientifically proven that anything below 35-40 hours/week has very limited positive effect, and mostly simply slows down the deterioration. The earlier efficient training is set in the more effect it has, and the less hollow spaces of social development will exist due to timely integration into society for personal experience. Certain forms of neurofeedback, or extremely healthy food and exercise, including regular intake of omega-3/omega-6/omega-9 fish-oil and vitamins, have also reported some positive results.
* Autism was formerly thought to be around four times as common among males as females. This is due to that the women usually suffer less from the social difficulties or have less visible handicaps, commonly assumed to be because of different interaction structures/women commonly being more intimate, less rough, and not as required to take internal initiative to gain acquaintances. It is also most visible amongst the first children in a family, whereas those growing up with older siblings often gain required social instruction from having someone more experienced closeby to observe. Autistic children are generally also much more sensitive to stable and stimulating upbringing conditions than most individuals, and as they will almost always strongly imprint on whatever is made available, which combined with being less able to protect themselves from, or relate to and understand, destructive and confusing media, and much less ability to take flexible personal initiative, makes heavy filtering of utmost importance. Someone raised with nature and other children closeby, whose family doesn\\\'t move around a lot, is kept away from incoherent negativity, nihilism, or hate-filled mind-poison, is rather introduced to theoretical or practical science to obsess about, stimulating games, etc, will generally turn out an awful lot healthier and possibly develop genius intelligence in the areas due to sheer intensity of the fixation, than those with mostly awful loose-handed impressions, or worse left to vegetate with no mental stimulation whatsoever. It may not fit with popular ideologies, but from a matter-of-fact standpoint truly autistic people are much more dependent on outward direction and circumstances, which is the reason why some end up as nursery-song mumbling or screaming vegetables, and others as revolutionary scientists, inventors, and financial theorists. In essense, the principles for a constructive upbringing and education are somewhat divergent from the commonly preferred standards, and need a stricter (and more competent) hand than certain ideologues may be comfortable with.
* High suicide-rate due to thoroughly horrible \\\"mental isolation cell since birth\\\" living conditions, often worsened by inaccurately applied overmedication and non-stimulating, very badly adapted lack of external training.
* Internal conflicting schisms due to highly divergent or mild, extreme, and mixed cases being lumped together. Hence, the people who might not even qualify for the diagnosies find it cumbersome to be assumed to have severe disabilities, even though they do not; and thus can give a public impression that those who truly need structuring and training do not; or the mixed low-/high-functioning cases are associated with more convenient either/or categorisation depending on the area someone encounters them in. It is not uncommon that cases who could have turned much better with enough stimuli are left to rot, and only gain true awareness, or even start to speak, much later in life. All of this is especially troublesome given that available scientific evidence suggest that the symtoms can be extremely mitigated given intense socialised (preceding natural social integration) cognitive behaviour training before the age of 3, and still much lessened applied later in life.

An AmbiguouslyAutistic character does not need to show all of these symptoms. In fact, in real life, most people on the spectrum do not. However, for a character to be more than just a TVGenius or TheSpock, the character must exhibit symptoms from multiple categories.An Ambiguously Autistic character does not need to show all of these symptoms. In fact, in real life, most people on the spectrum do not. However, for a character to be more than just a TVGenius or TheSpock, the character must exhibit symptoms from multiple categories.

Autism, and (the sub-category of higher verbal capability, but otherwise largely the same, formerly classified as) \\\"Asperger\\\'s Syndrome\\\" are neurological disorders that cause the subject to process information and impressions in highly diverging manners. Symptoms include:

* Social Issues
** [[IDoNotSpeakNonverbal Limited ability to process social cues]]
** Problems intuitively noticing the way they affect others, or appropriately gauging reactions, resulting in often feeling uncomfortable due to unnerving suspicion and guilt that they have done something wrong but not knowing quite what and when, or if they can in fact do anything at all naturally without someone around misunderstanding and getting upset. Sometimes resulting in cases of saying or expressively reacting as little as possible, thinking that they have done something wrong mostly in cases when they haven\\\'t, or subdued melancholia.
** Difficulty/uncomfortable with with eye contact, staring, or awkward mutual focusing between people.
** Sexually passive, and somewhat oblivious/dependent on advances and very explicit signals from the other party, as well as being used to and comfortable with her/him.
** Expressions inconsistent with what they feel or is expected. Hence can sometimes be misinterpreted as happy when sad, flippant when shocked, and such.
* Repetitive Behavior
** Ritualistic behavior
** Limited focuses and interests. \\\"Interests\\\" here used in a very loose definition, as autistic people will frequently compulsively continue doing whatever they have imprinted on no matter how much they hate and are sick to death of it, as removing it would only result in staring at a wall instead.
** Severe difficulties processing/understanding or acclimatising to change beyond surface-level, despite frequent non-stop mental efforts and exercises.
** Limited intuitive awareness or understanding of normal-paced linear timeflow.
** Repetitive movement
** Unconscious limited self-injury (ex: finger-gnawing until noticing due to blood)
** Extreme confusion and rootlessness if put in a situation wherein most routine is lost
** Very limited ability to self-structure more beneficial complex behaviour patterns without competent outside assistance/Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, regardless of personal motivation, drive, will, exertion, and desperation, especially in cases of overlap with ADD/ADHD or gradually progressing schizophrenia
* Atypical Speech
** Use of AntiquatedLinguistics
** SesquipedalianLoquaciousness
** Trouble with AmbiguousSyntax
** Monotone speech OR unusual fluctuations in pitch and volume
* Sensory Issues
** Limited information filters. Can be both inward and outward.
** {{Literal Minded}}ness
*** At its most basic simply about the necessity for clear communication, and internal consistency, but often has a much wider scope regarding the whole perception of reality. This includes finding deceit, insincerity, and manipulation thoroughly alien and offensive; difficulties understanding distinctions for social or ideological MoralDissonance that other people take for granted; and combined with the very limited filters, taking the intents of media creators exactly as presented, not as toned down in the slightest. (This is commonly misportrayed as an inability to understand allegories and symbolism, but this is not correct. Autistic people are commonly very good at finding logical structures, including layered undertones, once the language of symbolism is reasonably understood.) Regardless of personal efforts for distance and sense of humour, or attempting to process \\\"people don\\\'t mean everything they say\\\" through objective observation, the intuitive understanding often remains missing.
** Lessened distinction between real experience and fictional input.
** Limited emotional filters.
** High empathy in the areas of compassion, affection, distress at seeing other people in pain, awkward need to be helpful, active conscience, genuine loyalty, etc. Low empathy in the sense of finding most normal people weird and hard to relate to, inconsistent detachment, or sometimes strong \\\"does not compute\\\" reactions to strongly contradictory or purely emotive thought and value structures. This is one of the respects in which they are virtually at the opposite end of the spectra to a traditional \\\"media version psychopath\\\".
** Difficulties processing/understanding own emotional reactions. Nonetheless often put severe literally painful effort into doing so, but it can take ongoing extreme amounts of time depending on how many, incoherent, extreme, and/or destructive impressions there are to process.
** Emotional retardation, unless given thorough training and socialisation during the upbringing.
** Often misgauging when assistance is or isn\\\'t needed, but asking to be sure.
** Limited fundamental \\\"feeling\\\" of connection to/conscious presence and awareness in present surroundings. Without competent help and training recurrently to degrees literally best likened to a \\\"lifetime imprisonment since birth in a mental isolation cell\\\".
** Common straymindedness, including easily losing track and jumping between different topics without noticing.
** Often very limited depth of learning for practical application through simple observation-imitation, requiring more thorough instruction, theory, and personal training.
** Lessened ability to experience joyful states such as enthusiasm, happiness, satisfaction, fulfilment, etc. Can be at least partially remedied through meaningful, constructive training
** When lacking any guidance, recurrently compensate through strong extremely exhausting manic blindly overachieving tendencies without any true understanding of how to focus the effort for personal satisfaction (especially in cases of overlap with [[MoodSwinger bipolar disorder]]), or the lack of emotional development and experience through an automaton worker-bee detachment as a necessity to \\\"keep up and get the necessary work done\\\", sometimes with extreme acclimatised mental pressure due to an \\\"emotional 5-years-old\\\" suddenly thrown naked into a foreign country with thoroughly alien people to somehow figure out and shoulder adult life responsibilities.
** Hypersensitivity to touch or texture.
** Hypersensitivity to light or sound.
** Heightened OR lowered sensitivity to pain. Sometimes shifting from day to day.
** \\\"Patchwork-pattern\\\" attention to visual images, including increased difficulties quickly remembering faces/finding it much easier sorting people out combined with other impressions of them, but also includes selective attention when drawing objects from memory (used as part of evaluating the diagnosis), and more severe difficulties making multi-faceted realistic movement for people in the head/indistinct generic-looking people in dreams, but it can be improved through effort, and it is sometimes easier to visualise \\\"drawn\\\" animations.
** Common with assorted food anxieties, mainly serious difficulties keeping a consistent eating schedule, but can also involve disinterest/boredom in eating and having to actively exert oneself to make and inhale it, obsessions about keeping the food nutritious, etc.
** Clumsy movements
*** Examples: Less awareness, unregulated force, or less fine-tuning, and adapting by keeping an extra distance of movement in fear of unconsciously causing damage, or contributing to turning nervous when others come within close personal space, especially in unregulated situations with potentially hazardous multiple impressions
** Constant sleep-disorders and high sensitivity to disturbances such as sounds, but these can usually be mostly treated with the hormone Melatonine and earplugs without negative effects
* Highly uneven intelligence-curve, depending on area, shifting between extremely bright to mental retardation. Very different from case to case.
** Frequent necessary compensation by using the \\\"wrong\\\" area to approximate what it feels like understanding another, sometimes resulting in what others label an extreme talent in \\\"thinking outside of the box\\\" (read: simply trying to process and figure out confusing impressions), or rather offer an unusual, less \\\"conveniently\\\" labelled, self-processed perspective or path to reaching an analysis in various areas.
** Dumbfounded \\\"unintentional DeadpanSnarker\\\" sense of humour/attempting to laugh off situations and social issues that don\\\'t make any sense to self to release some tension (DailyShow and ColbertReport are a fairly close approximation)
** Often react quite differently and much more negatively (sometimes with permanent hazardous effects such as add or adhd) to brain-affecting medication developed for \\\"normal\\\" people, and/or used as \\\"test subjects\\\" even with proven high-risk examples.
* Can most effectively be treated through extreme levels of filtered control, scheduling, and in very strong cases competent extreme \\\"40-hours/week boot-camp\\\" levels of outward assistance in order to structure and understand relation to the surrounding world. Scientifically proven that anything below 35-40 hours/week has very limited positive effect, and mostly simply slows down the deterioration. The earlier efficient training is set in the more effect it has, and the less hollow spaces of social development will exist due to timely integration into society for personal experience. Certain forms of neurofeedback, or extremely healthy food and exercise, including regular intake of omega-3/omega-6/omega-9 fish-oil and vitamins, have also reported some positive results.
* Autism is around five times as common among males as females, and the women usually also suffer less from the social difficulties, commonly assumed to be because of different social structures/women commonly being more intimate, less rough, and not as required to take internal initiative to gain acquaintances. It is also most visible amongst the first children in a family, whereas those growing up with older siblings often gain required social instruction from having someone more experienced closeby to observe. Autistic children are generally also much more sensitive to stable and stimulating upbringing conditions than most individuals, and as they will almost always strongly imprint on whatever is made available, which combined with being less able to protect themselves from, or relate to and understand, destructive and confusing media, and much less ability to take flexible personal initiative, makes heavy filtering of utmost importance. Someone raised with nature and other children closeby, whose family doesn\\\'t move around a lot, is kept away from incoherent negativity, nihilism, or hate-filled mind-poison, is rather introduced to theoretical or practical science to obsess about, stimulating games, etc, will generally turn out an awful lot healthier and possibly develop genius intelligence in the areas due to sheer intensity of the fixation, than those with mostly awful loose-handed impressions, or worse left to vegetate with no mental stimulation whatsoever. It may not fit with popular ideologies, but from a matter-of-fact standpoint truly autistic people are much more dependent on outward direction and circumstances, which is the reason why some end up as nursery-song mumbling or screaming vegetables, and others as revolutionary scientists, inventors, and financial theorists. In essense, the principles for a constructive upbringing and education are somewhat divergent from the commonly preferred standards, and need a stricter (and more competent) hand than certain ideologues may be comfortable with.
* High suicide-rate due to thoroughly horrible \\\"mental isolation cell since birth\\\" living conditions, often worsened by inaccurately applied overmedication and non-stimulating, very badly adapted lack of external training.
* Internal conflicting schisms due to highly divergent or mild, extreme, and mixed cases being lumped together. Hence, the people who might not even qualify for the diagnosies find it cumbersome to be assumed to have severe disabilities, even though they do not; and thus can give a public impression that those who truly need structuring and training do not; or the mixed low-/high-functioning cases are associated with more convenient either/or categorisation depending on the area someone encounters them in. It is not uncommon that cases who could have turned much better with enough stimuli are left to rot, and only gain true awareness, or even start to speak, much later in life. All of this is especially troublesome given that available scientific evidence suggest that the symtoms can be extremely mitigated given intense socialised (preceding natural social integration) cognitive behaviour therapy before the age of 3, and still much lessened applied later in life.

An Ambiguously Autistic character does not need to show all of these symptoms. In fact, in real life, most people on the spectrum do not. However, for a character to be more than just a TVGenius or TheSpock, the character must exhibit symptoms from multiple categories.

A little while ago I attempted to clear up the (rather misleading) AmbiguouslyAutistic descriptions, but it turned too long, so we decided to cut it all away and simply link to Wikipedia instead.