Hi tjr100,
This comes from a book called "The Essential Difference, The Truth About the Male and Female Brain" by Simon Baron-Cohen. My father bought this book for himself near the end of his life, probably because of the title as he liked comparing intelligence. He was reading through and got to the Asperger's Syndrome article and recognized himself. He was so excited to have a name for what he was like. This is what it says:
"In the 1990s clinicians and scientists also started talking about a group of children who were just a small step away from high-functioning autism. They diagnosed these children as suffering from a condition called Asperger Syndrome (AS), which was proposed as a variant of autism. A child with AS has the same difficulties in social and communication skills and has the same obsessional interests. However, such children not only have normal or high IQ (like those with high-functioning autism) but they also start speaking on time. And their problems are not all that rare.
"Today, approximately one in 200 children has one of the autism spectrum conditions, which includes AS, and many of them are in mainstream schools. We now have to radically reconceptualize autism. The number of cases has risen from four in 10,000 in the 1970s, to one in 200 at the start of this millennium. That's almost a ten-fold increase in prevalence. This is most likely a reflection of better awareness and broader diagnosis, to include AS.
"People with AS do not suffer from problems as obviously severe as are seen in the mute or learning-disabled child with autism. But most children with AS are nevertheless often miserable at school because they can't make friends. It is hard to imagine what this must be like. Most of us just take it for granted that we will fit in well enough to have a mix of friends. But sadly, people with AS are surrounded by acquaintances, or stangers, and often not by friends, as we understand the word. Many of them are teased and bullied becasue they do not manage to fit in, or have no interest in fitting in. Their lack of social awareness may even result in their not even trying to camouflouge their oddities."
Some of the characteristics listed in this book:
socially odd
odd in their communication
unusually obsessional
usually males
evidence of brain dysfunction such as epilepsy (my father had seizures as an infant)
major difficulties putting themselves into someone else's shoes
"People with AS have their greatest difficulties on the playground, in friendship, in intimate relationships, and at work. It is here, where the situation is unstructured and unpredictable, and where relationships, social sensitivity, and reciprocity matter, that people with AS struggle."
"one can think of people with autism and AS as people who are driven by a need to control their environment. Being in a relationship with someone with AS is to have a relationship on their terms only...."
Adults with Asperger Syndrome: "In most cases these patients also suffer from clinical depression, as they have not found an environment, in terms of a job and a partner, that accepts them as different. They long to be themselves, but instead feel forced to act a role, desperately trying not to cause offense by saying or doing the wrong thing, and yet never knowing when someone else is going to react negatively or judge them as odd.
"Many of them struggle to work out a huge set of rules concerning how to behave in each and every situation, and they expend enormous effort in consulting a sort of mental table of how to behave and what to say, from minute to minute. It is as if they are trying to write a manual for social interaction based on if-then rules, or as if they are trying to systematize social behavior when the natural approach to socializing should be via empathizing." [My father underlined that last part in the book. He was so relieved to discover this syndrome.]
My father did have friends but had trouble maintaining contact with them. Often they were also socially awkward people, or outsiders, or underdogs. He just didn't understand people. I remember once asking what he remembered about one of his grandmothers who died when he was old enough to well remember her. He told me about the car they drove in to visit her, the arrow heads that her son collected and had on display, and going out for an ice cream cone afterwards. Since he wasn't much of a talker, I was surprised to get that much information. But I was also quite surprised that his memories of his grandmother only involved concrete objects and favorite activities rather than what she was like or things she might have said to him.
Do you think any of this fits your father, tjr100?
Pennyplant
