Autism awareness month

[Scuba_Steve]

Another from that Autistic Guy [Dan Bull]

[Oscar]

should it still be called mental illness?

No.

I have an autistic son and I would say he was different.

It's not an illness, and as there are several aspects or symptoms that are not mental, I wouldn't describe it that way either.
He just comes at life from a different angle than most.

He can tell you how many Tax Inspectors were employed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1913, but won't notice that you're very happy, angry or sad.

[awa355]

A hundred years ago, my grandson would have been taken away from his family and stuck in a place like Seacliff Lunatic Asylym. In fact an ancestor spent over 30 years in a CHCH asylum untill someone twigged, she was stone deaf.

Now they have picked up another disorder with Cam. He needs special headphones in school so he can hear the teacher and cut out the noise from the other kids.

[Oscar]

A hundred years ago, my grandson would have been taken away from his family and stuck in a place like Seacliff Lunatic Asylym. In fact an ancestor spent over 30 years in a CHCH asylum untill someone twigged, she was stone deaf.

Now they have picked up another disorder with Cam. He needs special headphones in school so he can hear the teacher and cut out the noise from the other kids.

That's interesting. Autistic spectrum disorders are often picked up by Audiologists.
My boy was somewhat deaf from a bout of chickenpox as a baby, and when he was about 8 years old, he got some hearing aids.
Bad idea.
He could now hear the cacophony in the classroom and it drove him wild.
It was his reaction to his new noisy world that allowed him to be diagnosed.
The problem was that if he could hear the teacher to learn, the ambient sound was a problem.
In the end, he was home schooled

[Akzle]

Now they have picked up another disorder with Cam. He needs special headphones in school so he can hear the teacher and cut out the noise from the other kids.

at least they can do something about it now eh.

i'm continually amazed at human hearing. the physical design of the ear to isolate direction and maxamise frequency capture, the inner mechanics, the nuero-electrical wizardry that get that to the brain... and the brain's ability to interpret and disregard. ie, having a conversation in a busy place.. (or listening at school) the mind has to "drown out" or turn down all the "background noise"

[HenryDorsetCase]

So in may it is New Zealand music month, and autism month.

it is also apparently national masturbation month.

so there's that.

is there any way of combining all three?

[HenryDorsetCase]

[
i'm continually amazed at human hearing. the physical design of the ear to isolate direction and maxamise frequency capture, the inner mechanics, the nuero-electrical wizardry that get that to the brain... and the brain's ability to interpret and disregard. ie, having a conversation in a busy place.. (or listening at school) the mind has to "drown out" or turn down all the "background noise"[/COLOR]

As someone who has had two months of reduced hearing due to ear infections (currently on third course of antibiotics, plus the antibiotic eardrops) I cannot tell you how debilitating hearing loss is. But you probably know already. I didnt.

[scissorhands]

http://www.engineeringhumor.com/jokes01.html

A joke that women who date engineers would get

An ambitious engineer decided to take a vacation. He booked himself on a Caribbean cruise and proceeded to have the time of his life. Until the boat sank! Then the man found himself swept up on the shore of an island with no other people, no supplies.. Nothing. Only bananas and coconuts!

After about four months, he is lying on the beach one day when the most gorgeous woman he has ever seen rows up to the island. In disbelief, he asks her, "Where did you come from? How did you get here?" "I rowed from the other side of the island," she says. "I landed here when my cruise ship sank." "Amazing," he says. "You were really lucky to have a rowboat wash up with you." "Oh, this?" replies the woman. "I made the rowboat out of raw material I found on the island; the oars were whittled from gum tree branches; I wove the bottom from palm branches; and the sides and stern came from a Eucalyptus tree."

"But-but, that's impossible," stutters the man. "You had no tools or hardware. How did you manage?" "Oh, that was no problem," replies the woman. "On the South side of the island, there is a very unusual strata of alluvial rock exposed. I found if I fired it to a certain temperature in my kiln, it melted into forgeable ductile iron. I used that for tools and used the tools to make the hardware." The guy is stunned. "Let's row over to my place, " she says.

After a few minutes of rowing, she docks the boat at a small wharf. As the man looks onto shore, he nearly falls out of the boat. Before him is a stone walk leading to an exquisite bungalow painted in blue and white. While the woman ties up the rowboat with an expertly woven hemp rope, the man can only stare ahead, dumbstruck. As they walk into the house, she says casually, "It's not much, but I call it home. Sit down please; would you like to have a drink?" "No, no thank you," he says, still dazed. "Can't take any more coconut juice." "It's not coconut juice," the woman replies. "I have a still. How about a Pina Colada?"

Trying to hide his continued amazement, the man accepts, and they sit down on her couch to talk. After they have exchanged their stories, the woman announces, "I'm going to slip into something more comfortable. "Would you like to take a shower and shave? There is a razor upstairs in the bathroom cabinet." No longer questioning anything, the man goes into the bathroom.

There, in the cabinet, is a razor made from a bone handle. Two shells honed to a hollow ground edge are fastened on to its end inside of a swivel mechanism. "This woman is amazing," he muses. "What next?"

When he returns, she greets him wearing nothing but vines, strategically positioned, and smelling faintly of gardenias. She beckons for him to sit down next to her. "Tell me," she begins, suggestively, slithering closer to him, "We've been out here for a really long time. You've been lonely. There's something I'm sure you really feel like doing right now, something you've been longing for all these months". She peers deeply into his eyes, "You know. . ." He can't believe what he's hearing and his joy mounts. "You mean...?

He swallows excitedly. "Can I check my email from here?





Engineer vs. Manager

A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts: "Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?"
The man below says: "Yes, you're in a hot air balloon, hovering 30 feet above this field."
You must be an engineer" says the balloonist.
"I am" replies the man. "How did you know."
"Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but it's no use to anyone."
The man below says "you must be in management."
"I am" replies the balloonist, "but how did you know?"
"Well," says the man, "you don't know where you are, or where you're going, but you expect me to be able to help. You're in the same position you were before we met, but now it's my fault."

[Akzle]

As someone who has had two months of reduced hearing due to ear infections (currently on third course of antibiotics, plus the antibiotic eardrops) I cannot tell you how debilitating hearing loss is. But you probably know already. I didnt.

me? no i can hear fucking superbly. better than most people. and i'm worse now than i was. i used ot be over-tuned to electricity, so i could hear the wires in a building. not fun.

plus modern science and medicine is bad for you. i suggest your lifestyle needs revamping, then you'd be healthy.

but yeah nah, being deaf, even on certain frequencies (which is usually how it happens) is debilitating. especially as it's usually the conversational bits that go first.

[F5 Dave]

I work with engineers, some have been downright fish out of water in social situations, but I'm starting to understand there may be other reasons. But of course it is way too easy to become a lay psychiatrist & diagnose every 2nd person.

That list of people on the other page, can that be right? John Britten (sp not Briton) for example sounded fairly charismatic. Is that likely? (not that I've met many adults that I've known are ASD)

[scissorhands]

I think he was dyslexic which is different. Henry Ford was somewhere on the spectrum, all sorts really.

But mostly never as politicians or actors, socially aspies are pretty useless, they call it the engineers desease. My dad and grandfather were both engineers, it is second nature to me, but I were putting lawn mower engines on trolleys around 9 or 10 years old, because of our engineer parents. Many of my mates had engineer dads, many more goods were made in NZ then.

Today, the media emphasis is on networking and social skills, in fact the market place has been short of engineers for a long time. Nerds aint the same as autistic, though the spectrum begins somewhere near.

A bit like panda bears, every opportunity to breed should be cherished, otherwise all the salesmen will breed instead. But they can be too nerdy.....

[scissorhands]

many aspies look very normal

[scissorhands]

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/direct...iagnosis.shtml


Transforming Diagnosis

By Thomas Insel on April 29, 2013

In a few weeks, the American Psychiatric Association will release its new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). This volume will tweak several current diagnostic categories, from autism spectrum disorders to mood disorders. While many of these changes have been contentious, the final product involves mostly modest alterations of the previous edition, based on new insights emerging from research since 1990 when DSM-IV was published. Sometimes this research recommended new categories (e.g., mood dysregulation disorder) or that previous categories could be dropped (e.g., Asperger’s syndrome).1

The goal of this new manual, as with all previous editions, is to provide a common language for describing psychopathology. While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity. Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment.

Patients with mental disorders deserve better. NIMH has launched the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project to transform diagnosis by incorporating genetics, imaging, cognitive science, and other levels of information to lay the foundation for a new classification system. Through a series of workshops over the past 18 months, we have tried to define several major categories for a new nosology (see below). This approach began with several assumptions:

A diagnostic approach based on the biology as well as the symptoms must not be constrained by the current DSM categories,
Mental disorders are biological disorders involving brain circuits that implicate specific domains of cognition, emotion, or behavior,
Each level of analysis needs to be understood across a dimension of function,
Mapping the cognitive, circuit, and genetic aspects of mental disorders will yield new and better targets for treatment.

It became immediately clear that we cannot design a system based on biomarkers or cognitive performance because we lack the data. In this sense, RDoC is a framework for collecting the data needed for a new nosology. But it is critical to realize that we cannot succeed if we use DSM categories as the “gold standard.”2 The diagnostic system has to be based on the emerging research data, not on the current symptom-based categories. Imagine deciding that EKGs were not useful because many patients with chest pain did not have EKG changes. That is what we have been doing for decades when we reject a biomarker because it does not detect a DSM category. We need to begin collecting the genetic, imaging, physiologic, and cognitive data to see how all the data – not just the symptoms – cluster and how these clusters relate to treatment response.

That is why NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories. Going forward, we will be supporting research projects that look across current categories – or sub-divide current categories – to begin to develop a better system. What does this mean for applicants? Clinical trials might study all patients in a mood clinic rather than those meeting strict major depressive disorder criteria. Studies of biomarkers for “depression” might begin by looking across many disorders with anhedonia or emotional appraisal bias or psychomotor retardation to understand the circuitry underlying these symptoms. What does this mean for patients? We are committed to new and better treatments, but we feel this will only happen by developing a more precise diagnostic system. The best reason to develop RDoC is to seek better outcomes.

RDoC, for now, is a research framework, not a clinical tool. This is a decade-long project that is just beginning. Many NIMH researchers, already stressed by budget cuts and tough competition for research funding, will not welcome this change. Some will see RDoC as an academic exercise divorced from clinical practice. But patients and families should welcome this change as a first step towards "precision medicine,” the movement that has transformed cancer diagnosis and treatment. RDoC is nothing less than a plan to transform clinical practice by bringing a new generation of research to inform how we diagnose and treat mental disorders. As two eminent psychiatric geneticists recently concluded, “At the end of the 19th century, it was logical to use a simple diagnostic approach that offered reasonable prognostic validity. At the beginning of the 21st century, we must set our sights higher.”

[Edbear]

A hundred years ago, my grandson would have been taken away from his family and stuck in a place like Seacliff Lunatic Asylym. In fact an ancestor spent over 30 years in a CHCH asylum untill someone twigged, she was stone deaf.

Now they have picked up another disorder with Cam. He needs special headphones in school so he can hear the teacher and cut out the noise from the other kids.

So often a child is pigeon-holed and it is a long time before a proper diagnosis is found and then treatment can start. A school mate was considered dumb until it was found he needed glasses, he couldn't read the blackboard.

My son was considered a violent and disruptive "naughty child" until in 1981 they discovered hyperactivity disorder and he was tested and treated. By then he was 6 years old.

Another mate of mine suffers ADHD but is holding down a good job and coping with life at 47. These people simply need more one-on-one attention until they "get it" and then do a usually better job than others. It is a matter of finding out how a person's brain works and fitting in with that. I don't consider it an intelligence issue as some of the most unlikely people can do amazing things, it is a matter of how a person learns and we are all different to some degree.

Scissorhands, how do you see yourself, as it appears that you are good at expressing yourself and in researching the condition?

[Banditbandit]

I'm not so sure about the treatment ... There's strong threads of both ADHD and Aspergers in my famly - with many mixes and variants ...

What I see is that the ones who were diagnosed and "treated" are worse off than the ones who were dagnosed and not treated ...

I have two nephews .. one diagnosed ADHD/Aspergers ... he's a bloody mess because his parents treated him differently .. don't believe he can function by himself, and consequently don't let him .. don't let him out of their sight .. don't let him do anything (he's 21 years old ...) he's been treated differently all his life ... it has not been good for him ...

And another nephew (different parents) is is clearly on the autistic spectrum .. has had tests done .. but has never been told what the ressits of the tests were ... and is doing extremely well - if a little dreamy and odd at times ...

Sure, one of my sisters and her husband have done pretty badly by their son ... the other sister and her husband have been pretty good ... but this is just one example I've seen of "treated" Aspergers people being worse than none treated .. I had to deal with an Aspergers student who used to play up al the time ... her standard response "It's not my fault - you can't blame me, I'm Aspergers" .. my internal response (never vocalized) was "Yeah Right ..." but that was the ultimate cop-out of personal responsibility ...