Rain Man movie good or bad for us?

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Joined: 27 Aug 2012
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09 Sep 2012, 11:47 pm

To skip ahead of the developments of the thread and answer the thread's question;

Yes, as recently in the Netherlands there was a mass shooting involving a man who had a gun license "even though he had autism the media cried".
And now instead of thinking autistic people are "ret*d by being so extremely smart", are now "crazy lunatics that can snap at any moment after trying so hard to be normal" We are now the child molesters, the psychopaths, and all the crazy people in youtube/"dumpert" videos to all the "less educated" people in the Netherlands.

Surfman
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10 Sep 2012, 4:45 am

Autinger wrote:

Hmmm.... I want to say any publicity is good publicity.... But a [mass] shooting is not what I would wish on anyone

I guess if the controllers keep ignoring the effects of bullying on the autistic community, and the ongoing aspergian dilemma, more bad things will probably happen....

In NZ around 5 farmers die every year at the hands/horns of their bulls... we have a saying on the farm: 'never trust anything with testicles'

Repression and overly secretive domestication have a price. Just like a ticket to the movies

Dillogic
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10 Sep 2012, 6:15 am

Kurgan wrote:

I already have adressed it. High-funtioning autism today implies some basic self-help skills, language skills that extends beyond "uh oh" and echolalia as well as an IQ above 75.

You got a quote from a renowned autistic specialist that states Rain Man isn't "high functioning"?

Wing's book was from 1992 (High Functioning Individuals with Autism).

Asperger Syndrome or High-Functioning Autism? written in 1998, and it has Wing saying the same thing.

(Also, I don't know why you say he doesn't have basic self-help skills. He can feed himself, dress himself, and take care of many other day to day activities. He has a lot of verbal ability, it's just that he lacks "social talk" and is of the aloof kind. He speaks all throughout the movie about logical matters. Clothes from a certain shop, incidence of car accidents, plane accidents -- it's just not "social", and that's the whole point of autism. You don't know if he has an IQ below 75. If his verbal IQ is say..., 60, and his spatial IQ is 140, what does that equal?)

I've been scouring GoogleBooks and PubMed (got an account on PubMed), and I can't seem to find anything saying Rain Man in the film is anything but HFA or AS.

Feel free to search too, because it interests me, especially when you have the person who "invented" Asperger's as it's defined today calls him HFA.

You could try e-mailing Attwood, but he doesn't respond. Uta, Gillberg and Cohen are the other big names.

At Attwood's a psycho there told me that Temple is an example of AS (Gillberg's Criteria); she seemed like a female Rain Man to me in the movie about her.

Regarding Hans and having various IQs; these are his words:

Quote:

In children of a wide variety of character, and along the entire spectrum of intelligence, from apparently highly able with an originality bordering on genius, to deeply ret*d and severely socially handicapped, mechanical and robot-like.

Raziel
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10 Sep 2012, 6:19 am

I would say that Rain man is MFA.

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Dillogic
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10 Sep 2012, 6:34 am

There is no such thing as "MFA".

I'm just going to post this quote again, which is the modern term of high functioning; not the one from the fifties, sixties and seventies. Read it. Read it. Read it. It's as solid as stone. This is the person who introduced AS to the modern world. If you have a diagnosis of Asperger's, it's because of her. Read it again.

Quote:

Aloof

Most high-functioning in this group are a mixture of aloof and passive. Limited language use. Copes with life using autistic routines. Most are recognised in childhood. Independence is difficult to achieve. There may be loneliness and sadness beneath the aloofness. Rain Man is an excellent example of this subgroup.

I'll also post the other subgroups of high-functioning individuals:

Quote:

Passive

Often amiable, gentle, and easily led. Those passive rather than aloof from infancy may fit AS. More likely than the aloof to have had a mainstream education, and their psych skill profiles are less uneven. Social approaches passively accepted (little response or show of feelings). Characteristic autistic egocentricity less obvious in this group than in others. Activities are limitied and repetitive, but less so than other autistics. Can react with unexpected anger or distress. Recognition of their autism depends more on observing the absence of the social and creative aspects of normal development than the presence of positive abnormalities. The general amenability is an advantage in work, and they are reliable, but sometimes their passivity and naivete can cause great problems. If undiagnosed, parents and teachers may be disappointed they cannot keep a job at the level predicted from their schoolwork.

Active-but-odd

Can fall in any of the other groups in early childhood. Some show early developmental course of Kanner's, some show AS. Some have the characteristic picture of higher visuospatial abilities, others have better verbal scores (mainly due to wide vocabulary and memory for facts). May be specific learning disorders (e.g., numerical). School placement often difficult. They show social naivete, odd, persistent approaches to others, and are uncooperative in uninteresting tasks. Diagnosis often missed. Tend to look at people too long and hard. Circumscribed interests in subjects are common.

Stilted

Few, if any clues to the underlying subtle handicap upon first meeting. The features of AS are particularly frequent. Early histories vary. Normal range of ability with some peaks of performance. Polite and conventional. Manage well at work. Sometimes pompous and long-winded style of speech. Problems arise in family relationships, where spontaneity and empathy are required. Poor judgement as to the relative importance of different demands on their time. Characteristically pursue interests to the exclusion of everything and everyone else. May have temper tantrums or aggression if routine broken at home, but are polite at work. Diagnosis very often missed. Most attend mainstream schools. Independence achieved in most cases. This group shades into the eccentric end of normality.

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10 Sep 2012, 6:52 am

Dillogic wrote:

There is no such thing as "MFA".

Some experts just devide between HFA and LFA and some between HFA, MFA and LFA.
All of those are very informal terms and none of those is in the ICD or DSM.

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10 Sep 2012, 4:10 pm

legomyego wrote:

Pyrite wrote:

I didn't get why his brother's girlfriend kissed him.

That struck me as very odd when I watched it, especially since if I remember right it doesn't have any subsequent relevance to the plot.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUwa6ZkHtnY[/youtube]

haha ya i was going to post about that >< confused me as well.

Could be that she figured it doesn't count because he's not an "adult"?

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Dillogic
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10 Sep 2012, 5:34 pm

I always thought she kissed him because she knew he never experienced it before (how many adults do you see in the L&D forum who haven't been kissed?), and she also "liked" many things about him (she did like things about him that his brother didn't posses), so she wanted to too.

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10 Sep 2012, 6:00 pm

To Spectrum Warrior: I really enjoyed your post on Rain Man. Very interesting.

beachcomber
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25 Oct 2012, 9:17 am

There's a story I've heard, and it goes like this:

There was a reclusive man with grand mal temporal lobe epilepsy. His next door neighbour also had an epileptic son, and another son who was trained by Yehudi Menuhin in the cello. The neighbour told anyone who would listen that the recluse was a musical genius, but this wasn't the case. Nevertheless, some word percolated through the musical community of this prodigy. People tried to figure out why the recluse acted the way he did, and some peculiar notions were put together -- an observation that he had been seen outside in the rain, that he liked to sing la la la to himself, that he had turned inside out, that his family never owned a car and never travelled by plane, that he watched tv at odd hours. Some of that probably sounds crazy, but this was a very backward part of the world. These observations got woven into some song lyrics. A musician heard of them and wove them into a book called Rain Man.

The book's author was a friend of Kim Peek, but in the book the descriptions of Raymond Babbitt are sneering and condescending. You don't talk that way about friends.

The way I see it, the rain man story is really about temporal lobe epilepsy imitating a variety of conditions. That's why professional psychiatrists find it so is irritating and false. That's why Raymond Babbitt's behavior matches so badly with true autism.

FWIW

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25 Oct 2012, 4:13 pm

Kurgan wrote:

*snip* The difference between Asperger's and HFA isn't that big, but the difference between autism with retardation and autism without is huge. A problem is that the distinction between AS and HFA is exclusively based on whether they spoke before the age of 3 or not. *snip*

I agree with everything you said except for this statement. Asperger Syndrome is a variant of classical autism where pragmatic language is delayed, but without the expressive and receptive delays. If you have mental retardation, you are technically disqualified from having Asperger Syndrome. Classical autism, on the other hand, requires at least a mild delay in all three, and can be diagnosed alongside an IQ below 70.

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chssmstrjk
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25 Oct 2012, 4:16 pm

I think Rain Man, in general, is a good movie. Although it might have not 100% accurately portrayed someone on the autism spectrum, it was still an interesting movie to watch IMO.

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25 Oct 2012, 4:47 pm

I've never actually seen the movie, but yesterday someone who knows I have ASD had the nerve to ask me if I had any "special skills related to gambling." I thought it was such an odd thing to ask someone, until I realized it was probably a reference to the film.

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25 Oct 2012, 6:35 pm

It's dated now. Irrelevant. It's as bad to us as, I don't know, the Wizard of Oz is to Kansas in 2012.

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25 Oct 2012, 8:02 pm

It's an okayish movie. Raymond Babbit is a composite character, and of course, they probably didn't consult people with autism about autism. :roll: The ending is downright predictably boring, though.

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25 Oct 2012, 9:41 pm

emimeni wrote:

Kurgan wrote:

You're missing my point here. Two people with AS and Kanner's autism with IQ's in the normal range will have more in common with each other than the latter will with someone with Kanner's autism or AS and an IQ of 60.

Many modern psycho,ogists believe that mentally challenged people can have AS as well and in exceptional cases, a diagnosis may be given to mentally challenged people in some countries. If you think about it, a child with Asperger's who is deprived of oxygen at birth and is impaired intellectually should still have Asperger's.

Mild difficulties with other aspects of language may be present in Asperger's as well, though, albeit in a less severe form than high-functioning autism.

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