Article about AS Aggression towards others by Digby Tantam

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Tantum is right. We CAN be aggressive. Its not unreasoning aggression, or violence for the sake of it, but we can definitely lose it quite badly. Go read some locked threads, or the arguments in the PPR section...

That line stood out as a prime motivator in my life. Damn right I want answers and justice, and nothing makes me happier than to get them.

Tantum is, btw, a rather nice chap, and really does seem to know what hes talking about.

That happened often. At school when kids made fun of me I'd just feel like murdering them then and there (I wouldn't do it of course, I just felt it!) but whenever my brother made fun of me I got into this blind rage and bit down hard and often went to fighting him. The consequences of it sometimes were kinda bad, and at the time I could care less but after it I'd feel really sorry.

Long article..

I don't think "most" Aspies are aggressive. I think most are the opposite, and use excesive caution around others. Anyone who thinks all aspies are agressive needs to spend more time around us. It angers me that some people think frustration equals violent behavior. My parents seem to think so to. I always get judged for feeling emotion. To not look "aggresive/angry" these days means I have to feel no emotions. Won't happen.

If a child grows up learning agression far more often than everything else, of course they will be agressive. It can happen to anyone, and not just us.

I'm one temperamental and due to that explosive aggressive autistic person.

I even had tantrums as a small baby, <1 years. My parents love to tell stories of that time.

So it's not like I started throwing tantrums and hitting people because of anxiety or rejection or anything.

Actually, that was the very reason to get a sense of what aggression meant. That it hurt people and all that jazz. By suddenly being the receiver from aggression in form of bullying at 10+ years, it lead to me trying to learn how to control my temper.

Definitely born with an explosive and short temper. "My way or no way".

But I dare say I'm old enough to keep some control over the explosive part. Usually.

Which paper? Do you have a link?




So, 'lack of aggressive behaviour' is a cause of what? Not getting noticed as troublesome? So the children that get noticed and finally 'end up' in Tantam's (and Atwood's) clinical practice would be the children that got noticed. Wouldn't that make his 'sample' somewhat filtered and not entirely representative of the ASD population in the wild?

I've seen his writing before, he's seemed determined to prove a link between AS and various negative behavior. Including, IIRC, describing things that looked like public meltdowns from overload etc., as if their intent was to harm or manipulate people, or keep people occupied when they shouldn't have to be, or something weird like that. He's taken Asperger's (probably false) inference that autistic people seemed cruel at times, and run with it as if it actually meant something.

Skipped the first few pages (of the 30+ in the original post) that just described the dx, did read the majority of it though.

Have also read Tantam's chapters in a couple books: "Adolescence and Adulthood of Individuals with Asperger Syndrome" in "Asperger Syndrome" edited by Klin, Volkmar, and Sparrow (2000) and "Assessment and Treatment of Comorbid Emotional and Behavior Problems" in "Learning and Behavior Problems in Asperger Syndrome" edited by Margot Prior (2003).

Think author (of article) is saying this about a subgroup-category within a category of people with AS, just like one would say about a subgroup of NT people. Not that all people with ASD's nor all people that get called NT are aggressive (nor the opposite). Some people are aggressive, some aren't. Anyone with a grievance (marginalized compared to the perceived majority) is considered more likely to "act out"/behave "badly" (destructively) than those who are going along happily in life.

All sorts of diagnoses-heart disease, alcoholism, bipolar, migraine headaches sufferers-could lead or trigger a person to behave in a certain way, but it's not necessarily dependent upon acronym applied to individuals within that selected group. It's just that "random" aggressive actions amongst all humans can't be accounted for with a single analytical theory, so people study & write about "easier-to-explain" subdivisions of people they think are already predisposed to this behavior.

There's much less incentive in studying & pathologizing those who have lots of power & influence-tyrants & dictators, the monied upper class-and the violence they do to the whole of society by their policies. They don't get a diagnosis because they're obviously functioning quite well (according to their own desires), and political/economic systems reward these individuals highly. What about those who deny assistance, services, and legitimacy to those who are in a tough spot ? Instead the victim (who usually lacks power or resources) often gets blamed.

Know my comment is a mishmash-was trying to improve it but got bogged down in all the things I wanted to address. Can't put together a comment that feels sufficiently comprehensive, so am posting this flawed & not quite right mess anyway because otherwise I'll get so discouraged that I won't post a comment at all. So please judge my post not so harshly, because I'm stating at outset that it's best I could manage & not exactly how I meant to say it.

Have too many ideas to fit them properly into words. Am not defending nor justifying violence-only that it gets looked at closely in certain quarters & is ignored or accepted in other areas-such as mass executions & "civilized" torture tactics (which people don't hear about because it's rarely noted/covered, or else isn't taken seriously enough). Conflation, availability heuristic, etc. can explain a lot about what is measured & the conclusions drawn, correlation isn't causation but can seem darned convincing...

That's the sense I get from reading his material as well. I'm in a grad program that requires reading and analyzing professional health papers, and I can tell you that for challenge 8 he is making stuff up and/or generalizing from a very small sample - there are no citations - which is a bad thing.

People OTS are more gullible than most and we can tend to believe everything we read, which is why it's doubly important that "experts" get their facts straight. The fact that he has limited experience, limited citations, troubles me, but the most troubling thing is that people will start getting the wrong idea about us. Of course we're all different, and to categorize us as violent fire-starters is upsetting and irresponsible.

I wrote him a letter, and he responded but I haven't read his reply yet. I'll post it when I get home from work.

To those of you who responded very honestly about your histories of violence, I commend you for your honesty. But we see acts of aggression committed by people in the news every day. From the almost three years I've been on this forum, I've gotten the sense that the level of violence and aggression was much less than in the NT community. I could be wrong, but Digby sure hasn't convinced me that I am.

This is very curious; I've no memory of general aggressiveness, predominately the opposite. I can recall loosing my temper once in high-school study hall when someone was harassing toward me because he thought I was trying to annoy him and his girl; I've always had bad congestion which gave me breathing problems and couldn't "spit up" to clear my breathing surrounded by others, and the gurgling noises my breathing made he took for deliberately "making noises" toward him. I recall getting up and yelling "I'm going to smash you" but he was the only one who physically did anything; he knocked me on the floor and pinned me down. I didn't initiate any actual violent act, but he probably thought I was trying to.

I know that it took a lot of pushing to get me to loose my temper when I was younger, and nowadays, being a senior citizen, it would be exceptionally so, and it always has felt like other's were quicker to anger and lose it.

I've always thought we had inherently lower natural levels of aggressiveness, which is why the overall tone of this article sounds strange to me. Have I misunderstood something fundamental? I f so, it undermines parts of my own hypothesis about us.

This guy, seems to be quite bad at redacting articles for a phd, those paragraphs are huge, so much that I think reading it completely would be too annoying, so I pass.

I am very seldom agressive with others and not all as I grew up and matured. But even when I was young I would usually turn my aggression in on myself in the form of head banging or something and not others. I would only get agressive with others when say I was hit, cornered or taunted, but some one else would have to initiate the aggression first before I got agressive with them. BTW My old NT school bullies were by far the most aggressive in my experience

Digby's response to an email I sent:

Thank you for your email. I do not think that I said that aggression was typical, but that there were typical features of aggression when it occurred. It is true, as I have said every time that I have raised the issue of AS and aggression, that most people with AS are not aggressive, but when a person with AS uses aggression it can be especially problematic. It is however a very difficult subject to research. A colleague has just given up trying to do so because of participants unwillingness to come forward. We do have some research evidence though. There is a higher than expected number of people with Asperger syndrome in special hospitals in the UK, and the main route for getting there is through a violent act; in a community sample, a substantial minority of our respondents with AS said that they had been aggressive; and in my own clinic sample, there was a higher than expected proportion of patients who had committed crimes against the person. There are many possible criticisms of these data, not least that it is selective, and I am trying to get together a larger study at the moment. So my position currently is that when aggressions is a problem in a person with AS it can be a big problem, and that this problem occurs, even if it only involves a minority, and should not be ignored.
Yours sincerely
Digby Tantam

Zwerfbeertje,

No link, but it shouldn't be too hard to find.

The lack of aggressive behaviour is in relation to why there's 5 males to every female diagnosed; he speculates that the lack of overt aggression and disruptive behaviour is the reason for this ratio. Less aggressive and disruptive behaviour, less chances of being brought to the attention of mental health professionals. I don't agree with him as if his logic of AS equating to Autism with a normal of above IQ, the ratio of males to females should be similar to Autism, which is 5 to 1 (similar to Asperger's). The latter view of mine is beside the point of this thread, however.

Daniel, how can you state what's in a paper if you don't have access to that paper? I don't feel like searchin for your paper right now, so as far as I am concerned he wrote the part that's in his book.

Anyway, the sample he sees, and Tantam, isn't representative then but pre-selected on their haviour. That simply can't give any reliable indication of the incidence of aggression in AS/ASD's.

yes but I think that to write about extreme cases in a general article is a bit misleading of the "condition".

However I thought much of the article was good.

I completely agree. It's like the first part of the article was pretty well done, then he ruins it at the end by focusing on a small sample of people.