Is Asperger’s The Same As “High Functioning Pathology?”
Cripes, I am so sick of people arguing from the viewpoint of the damn medical model, wherein only majority personalities are seen as healthy (normal). “Pathos” is Greek for suffering. Psycho-pathic Autism means mental suffering stemming from a profound sense of aloneness. So-called normal people can at times fall into this category as well, albeit far less often. Durkheim wrote about this condition a century ago in his work on suicide.
Now please repeat after me if you have the courage: Asperger’s IS NOT brokenness. Rather, it is a minority personality, one wherein people use the same dictionary as people with majority personalities, but in a complementary opposite manner. Here I’m referring to the pair of complementary opposites I call “fussy” language (the idea that words have one context-independent meaning) and “fuzzy” language (the idea that words have multiple, context-dependent meanings).
People with Asperger’s speak fussy.
People with ADD speak fuzzy.
People with majority personalities speak a context-based combination of both.
More important still is the idea that the psycho-pathologically autistic aspects present in people with Asperger’s are NOT inherent in these people. They are not due to vaccinations. They are not due to brain defects. They are not due to bad parenting.
Mainly, they are due to the efforts of well-intended, but horribly misguided, professionals who try to “normalize” these people. Think conversion therapies for gay people. Think children born with physically ambiguous genders.
In effect, all manner of professionals repeatedly and constantly pressure children with Asperger’s (and those with the other three minority personalities as well) to “imitate normal.” Very quickly, these children then learn to completely disregard their own minds and to feel they are “good” only when they successfully imitate, and please, their helpers.
Want to see what this is like? Do you have the guts?
Go to a foreign country where you do not understand the language or customs. Then constantly compare your every mannerism to the mannerisms of the natives. Try speaking their language. Try walking and eating and acting in every way like them.
In effect, put your every behavior under the painful microscope of constant self-examination in the service of imitating the natives. After all, they are good and normal; you are not.
And when you constantly do it wrong?
Beat yourself up mercilessly and treat yourself like you are the broken one. Then ask professionals to diagnose you; to tell you why you feel so bad and what is wrong with you. Seek everyone’s opinion, even people passing in the street. Especially seek the opinions of professionals who claim to know how and why you are broken.
How quickly would you want to kill yourself?
I tried five times before I was twenty.
In truth, most of the social isolation people with minority personalities feel comes from society treating them like they are broken. Including most of what has been written here.
If this was you and you had Asperger’s, would you want to mingle with these folks?
Duh. Grow up and get a heart, people.