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Autism Spectrum Disorder

In order to be diagnosed with a mental disorder, the patient must be tested by a qualified psychological examiner. A family doctor might suspect a mental disorder, but cannot give a legal diagnosis of a mental disorder. Also, one symptom included in a mental disorder cannot be used to make a diagnosis as there are a number of qualifiers (symptoms) required before a diagnosis can be given.

People are different. We can say “most” people react “this way” to “x” but we can’t say a person who doesn’t act that way, is defective (however some are labeled anyway). Some people are outside that norm, and highly intelligent people is one group who frequently are outside the norm. These people tend to have an IQ of over 130. They are usually in the 99 percentile which would be in the area of 140 IQ and up. That means they are smarter than 99 people out of 100. That means one person out of 100 would be able to well follow and understand that brilliant person. As a result, people would tend to not include that brilliant person in their group of friends – and that tends to isolate the brilliant person. If we slapped a label on this brilliant person due to “his/her” lack of social interaction, we would be wrong. The group of people are the ones who isolated the brilliant person, the brilliant person did not intentionally isolate him/herself.

Why a brilliant person sometimes, or most of the time, intentionally socially isolates him/herself:

This person thinks at a very high level and his/her brain likely is always working on problems and solutions to problems, creating diagrams, building objects, working on changing how something works, creating poetry, developing and studying intense math problems, figuring out how one chemical reacts with another chemical, etc.. This interests this person so much, they keep working mentally and physically most of the time. This work is not work to them – it is their relaxation and their joy to create. They are marvelously different than others. We have a tendency to label someone as “weird” if he/she doesn’t fit into the mainstream. So, we develop a label and stick it on that person for being different. These different people have enriched our world with great accomplishments.

Here is a list of some people suspected to have Asperger’s (Asperger’s no longer exists in the DSM V, so these people would now be suspected of having the new label of Autism Spectrum Disorder). As you read these names, consider what they have in common: Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Benjamin Franklin, Carl Jung, Emily Dickinson, George Bernard Shaw, George Washington, Henry Ford, Henry Thoreau, Isaac Newton, Jane Austen, Ludwig van Beethoven, Mark Twain, Michelangelo, Richard Strauss, Thomas Edison, Thomas Jefferson, Vincent Van Gogh, Alfred Hitchcock, Hans Asperger (Austrian pediatric doctor after whom Asperger’s Syndrome is named), Isaac Asimov.

These brilliant people were intensely concentrating on solving problems and creating, and how they did create! But, hey, they were different and missed social gatherings, likely had few friends except those who understood what they were doing. They could not relate to the vast group of “normal” people because they were different. I suspect normal people stayed away from them on purpose, too. If all they were going to talk about was some weird thing like a light in a bulb instead of an oil lamp or gas light, who would want to be around that? And, what about why something falls down instead of going up – stay away from that nut case, Isaac Newton.

Who wants to visit that nut case woman who constantly write words that rhyme – I’m not having tea with Jane Austen, ‘cause she is touched in the head. There is a guy who lives in the next block, and all he does is write math numbers and weird signs on the wall – Albert Einstein needs to be put in a mental hospital and I’m staying away from him.

I know a few brilliant people who are different and at least one has been suspected of having Asperger’s. He doesn’t.

I’ll post this and post more, zeroing in specifically on what it takes to get an Autism Spectrum Disorder “label”. We’ll look at the actual symptoms a person must have before getting that label.

Just remember, because some people are different does not mean they are defective.