Subject: RE: musicians with Asperger's Syndrome
From:
Jim Dixon
Date: 08 Mar 10 - 02:34 PM
While I was in St. Louis recently, I had some long conversations with an old friend about her son, age around 25, who was recently diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome.
That diagnosis was added to other diagnoses. He was already taking antipsychotic and antidepressant medications, and they seem to be working—he has been restored to the condition he was in before his psychotic episode began, a year or so ago. But the Asperger's symptoms remain. He probably always had them; it's probably just that, before he became psychotic, they went unrecognized, because he had never seen a psychiatrist.
This will give you some idea of the difficulties this young man is having:
He is taking some college classes, and one of them makes heavy use of an educational software package called Blackboard. It works something like a discussion forum. The teacher posts a question and the students post answers. The students can read one another's answers and comment on them.
The teacher deleted his first post and then commented: "Please read my policy on insulting, abusive, and demeaning language…." (my paraphrase). His second post resulted in his being banned from the forum altogether, and his mother promptly had him withdraw from the course. (That was in part a financial decision; it was nearing the deadline for getting a partial refund of tuition.)
His mother showed me the answers he had written. Frankly, they didn't seem THAT bad to me. I thought the teacher had overreacted. But I could also see what the teacher found objectionable. The subject was rhetoric, and he had said something like, "If I were arguing with a neo-Nazi, or a person who believed the earth was created in seven days…."
His mother speculated that the teacher was a Creationist. Maybe so, or maybe she was just concerned that some other students might be Creationists, and she was trying to prevent the whole discussion from being sidetracked.
Certainly he didn't NEED to bring Creationism into the discussion—or neo-Nazism either, for that matter. He could have made his point about rhetoric equally well, or better, by saying, "If I were arguing with someone who believes the earth is flat…."
I didn't read the policy on objectionable language; perhaps it makes that very point. Certainly it's a point that ought to be made somewhere along the line in a class about rhetoric: if you're trying to make a logical argument, you don't want to be pushing your audience's emotional buttons.
What it boils down to is this: This kid repeatedly gets in trouble because he doesn't know how to be polite. (He also has some other, more benign characteristics: obsessive interest in certain hobbies, high intelligence, and a very good memory for details.)
FINALLY, I HAVE A QUESTION: How do support groups work, for people with Asperger's? I suggested a support group to my friend, the young man's mother, and she was skeptical. She thought it wouldn't work, because if you got a group of similar people together, none of them would be interested in helping the others, or would know how. I hope she's wrong.
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sj
