Article-Undiagnosing Einstein, Gates, Jefferson by J Mitchel

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I'm not talking about suffering inflicted by society, as you quite clearly are.

I'm talking about the internal nightmare that autistics have to endure every minute of their lives.

Autistics don't need an NT bullying them to suffer.
Oh that things were so easy.

You appear to regard the humane wish to eradicate Autism as an extension of NT bullying - presumably because your life experiences have made you extremely partisan.

That's what I mean about letting warped sentiments get in the way of the genuine desire to preclude suffering.

Let's not cloud matters with the abortion debate, either.
Let's stick to the eradication of Autism from the gene pool issue.
It's taboo to discuss sex, religion and politics - although some manage to combine all three in their private leisure activities.

Does the term "c**t" apply here? Perhaps you'd feel more at home posting your modest turds of wisdom on the Faas forum?

You seem upset.

Un-D-Where? Why? topic

I hope my computer lasts this post. Lately it had been closing without my permission. Ah, the need for control!

I am one who does not see control as something necessarily negative and freaky. I see it as a measure of stability.

Control--for those with AS, there is definitely a need for stability, sameness, for integrity--yes, for control.

The three gentlemen written up by Mitchel are/were very much in need of this. They were also surrounded by those who saw their genius and helped them maintain this need. their spouses/girlfriends presumably saw this as well. these three guys saw being with NTs as being beneficial--as did Gould, Grandin, Williams, and any other Aspie/Autie who may or may not be of world renown. I hope to avail myself of this benefit in the form of a Job Coach, to enable me to succeed in employment.

That these historical figures succeeded in their fields does not negate their Autism. It is to their credit that they maximized their potential, as I hope to do.

This is the most vile sentiment I've heard expressed in a while. You, sir, should be ashamed of advocating genocide.

But I don't.
So stop melodramaticizing.

Genocide is the systematic destruction of a race of living human beings.

Given the choice of conceiving an Autistic or non-Autistic child, only a monster would choose to conceive the former.

Probably best to stave the Troll, people.

I assume you mean starve, stave would be good too.

2)stave
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): staved or stove \ˈstōv\; stav·ing
Date: circa 1595

transitive verb 1): to break in the staves of (a cask)2: to smash a hole in <stove in the boat>; also : to crush or break inward <staved in several ribs>3: to drive or thrust away

intransitive verb 1)archaic : to become stove in —used of a boat or ship2: to walk or move rapidly

genocide = literally the destruction of a certain ethnicity or gene

destruction of autism = genocide

Last edited by corroonb on 25 Aug 2008, 12:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I have a very very large group of friends that does not mean I don't have AS.

Nobody mentions Einstein's extreme sense of moral duty commonly found in people on the spectrum.

Gates' too
He recently rote a very good article on creative capitalism and claims the world needs a "kinder form of capitalism"

Also an artist who tended to have a public image of 'weird' he had to keep up at all costs, so it's hard to predict whether he meant anything at all seriously, or as a joke, or as a publicity thing, etc. (He used to also talk about seriously wanting to throw his wife off a cliff, but never did.)

cor., Freudian Slip perhaps?

Wish I knew that before I read the entire thing



I can remember when I was two (maybe three, but that's pushing the timeframe), I had no friends to play with and asked my parents if I could have a brother.

Of course, by the time he was born, I realized he was too young to play with, so my request was rather pointless =/

Late talking with otherwise normal communication is not autistic. Einstein was a late talker. This does not mean he was autistic. He is actually given as an example of a non-autistic late talker with characteristicly high analytical skills in a book on late talkers. (Can't remember the reference off hand - it's in my blog somewhere.)



Einstein was not normal, he was exceptionally gifted. No one is claiming that any of these people were normal. They obviously were not. And it is quite normal for gifted kids to be alert and rational from birth. What's more, even though it is also normal for gifted kids to be early talkers and walkers, some are actually late talkers who still go on to develop average to above average social skills as adults.

There is an example of an exceptionally gifted child who could remember back to the womb in the book Nature's Gambit, which is about prodigies. And no, this child was not autistic.

Regardless of Mitchel's political persuasions, he has a point. Calling Einstein autistic because he was a late talker is like calling someone a dwarf because their growth spurt comes much later than normal. If you end up catching up with everyone else at some point, it's not autism (or dwarfism). And what's more, if you pay attention, you may be able to tell the difference all along.

How many of the people arguing against Mitchel have a science background? Any of you? Three science degrees for me. And a lot of reading - hundreds of biographies. Extensive reading on giftedness. And I disagree with many of the 'famous auties' diagnoses. Often they are obviously not impaired (and yes, you need to be) or there simply isn't enough information, or there's a better explanation (e.g. Van Gogh and bipolar.) What's wrong with having objective criteria? I didn't see any holes in Mitchel's argument when I read it.

But then I'm probably biased because I'm unemployable.

It's possible for people with serious impairments to hold down jobs and participate in society. I have no problems with role models who are actually impaired and succeed anyways. But I'm never going to be ok with hijaking the term autistic (or Asperger syndrome, for those who think it's something different) and using it for people who aren't particularly impaired. That's bad science, not to mention harmful to people with serious impairments. Why would you define autism in such a way that people with serious impairments become invisible? I don't get it.

I have ONE confirmed memory from that early in life, and it was nothing traumatic. It took me over 20 years to convince my mom though. I had to give her visual/environmental information and then she had to rectify it against her beliefs. I was alone so the experience cannot have been related to me second hand. Unlikely considering the view point anyway.

It was me being in my bed for a nap, but not being sleepy. What finally convinced her was my description of the light coming in the window. The only point in my life that was possible(at an age that I took naps) was when I was too young to walk and talk. Ergo, I remember when I was younger than 3.

Sorry in advance if this is tl;dr for anyone.

Is the book "Late-Talking Children"? If so, the author has a bias against considering even most autistic people, to be autistic.



I think it's impossible to tell on most dead famous people, whether they're autistic. Because historical records do not show one way or the other, whether someone was an autistic person passing for non-autistic, or a non-autistic person. There is a big difference between the two. You could say they seemed to have traits, or seemed not to, but that's all.

People who seriously believe Einstein was autistic, tend to include traits other than being a late talker. It is not really fair to characterize most of them as only believing it based on that one trait alone. Generally they have amassed a great deal of information, some probably accurate and some probably inaccurate.

People who argue against him being autistic, tend to bring up things that could really occur in some autistic people, but that are more common in non-autistic people, but they bring them up as if they are absolutely an indicator of not being autistic, thereby applying many stereotypes in the process. These are things that even some diagnosed autistic people do, but are just less common.

Telling whether someone is autistic or not, should not be left up to the historical record. Nor can even just talking to someone who knew someone socially really say a whole lot: Most people don't know what autism looks like in an adult or even in many older children, and know even less about the nuances of an autistic person passing for normal.

Also, people can shove an experience into a particular slot that makes them think of that experience so differently as to be useless when trying to recall autistic traits.

Just to give an example out of my own life, there have been times when I could sometimes speak, but other times during the same time periods, I have been unable to speak due to the usual autism-related trouble with finding words or getting them out of my mouth, combined with overload. But when people did not know I was autistic, they "explained it away" as any or all of the following:

* Not feeling like talking
* Shyness
* Severe emotional distress (including both times when I was under no emotional distress, and times when I was, but the distress was the result of not being able to speak, not the cause of it)
* Seizures
* Being 'crazy' in one form or another
* Being on drugs (almost always when this assumption was made, I was not on drugs and had never at that point tried them)
* Having a migraine
* Being willfully difficult
* Being 'spaced out' and unaware of my surroundings
* Not needing to talk
* Demonic possession (no, I did not have fun with the people who assumed that)

So if someone who explained it away in any of those manners were to try and remember autistic traits, they would have an extremely high chance of not even recalling speech difficulties, because they either did not process them as speech difficulties in their minds, or else viewed them as speech difficulties but attributed them to other things. If someone said "Did this person have difficulty speaking?" they then might or might not be able to even remember it (they'd have processed those times as no different than when anyone else isn't talking, or as shyness, and not have realized there was a speech impairment involved even if the impairment was significant), and if they did they'd give some other (false) explanation that they believed caused those traits. Even the person themselves could give that false information if they either believed it or just repeated it because other people said it.

So this is one example of how if one of these people did have a difficulty, we might have no way of knowing it.

Also, the dwarfism thing you bring up is interesting, because I have a friend who had a very odd experience of which he still has no medical explanation.

Basically, he did not just "not have a growth spurt at the right time". He had close to no growth and was dragged to specialist after specialist and almost definitely considered to have a form of dwarfism: By the age of twelve or thirteen, he was no taller than the average three-year-old. Nobody could ever figure out what was causing it, but it was considered to be quite severe.

Then during puberty he grew to be a tall person, not even normal height, but tall.

I can say with a lot of certainty that there was no difference that you could see between him and people with many forms of dwarfism, and there was no expectation that he would reach even average height, let alone above-average, by adulthood. But he did and now he is tall.

Oh and also, some conditions that are considered forms of dwarfism, have an average height that is quite low, but at the very far ends of the statistics for those conditions, have heights that would be considered within the normal range. As in, it's rare, but people have them, and are not considered to have those conditions any less than shorter people have those conditions. They just for some reason are not as short.



I don't think there's anything wrong with having objective criteria, but I do think there is something wrong with setting an arbitrary limit on how impaired a person is, rather than looking at the entire underlying neurological/cognitive/perceptual pattern. It is possible that the autistic cognitive/perceptual pattern never results in anyone who isn't significantly impaired in unusual areas, but it's also possible that it does. And so far there is no way of knowing one or the other, although there's some evidence it's probably the latter rather than the former.

I also think such criteria should be aimed at underlying traits rather than the outward expression for the most part (acknowledging the limits of that of course).

I don't have a huge science background but I keep up with as much research as I can, have also read a lot about autism from a variety of perspectives, and have had several researchers seek out my opinions on various things related to autism.

As far as unemployment... I'm unemployed, and have a lot of problems with things most people on these boards here don't seem to, but I'm not at all bothered by the idea of autistic people who have less trouble with certain things than I do, or have found environments that mask their difficulties well.

I only have a problem with the people who claim that "autism doesn't ever result in these problems because look at me I don't have them so nobody else does." But I have an equal problem with people who claim "autism always results in these problems and those who don't have them aren't autistic and are hurting those of us who are".



It really depends on what autism is.

I don't agree with diagnosing dead celebrities any more than you do, but there is a good chance that there are at least some people who are autistic (have the set of perceptual and cognitive traits that define autism) and who don't have serious difficulties getting along in the world, or who only have those difficulties in childhood and outgrow them or learn to compensate for them when older.

I know a scientist (one who is actively involved in autism cognitive-science research and making a lot of headway in that realm) who tells me that one of the big problems is we don't know yet what the trait defining autism is. It might, for all we know, be a certain strength that also results in difficulties in other areas due to the nature of how thinking happens for a person with that particular strength.

After all, even 'typical' development involves serious difficulties in other areas, they're just heavily compensated for by the societies we live in, and/or accepted as inevitable and universal human weaknesses (when there are actually people, including some autistic people, who do not have some of those weaknesses).)

So, it is quite possible that whatever underlying cognitive traits cause autism, can in some people, for some reasons, and in some quantities (we don't even know whether it would be "a little" or "a lot" of those traits that looks like this, since we don't know the full idea of what the underlying traits are), not mean that the person is severely impaired in day to day life.

And the point to that would be understanding how our brains work: A person with an autistic brain structure and no significant impairments (in areas that non-autistic people are not significantly impaired by at least), ought to be regarded as having the same general category of brain in that regard as someone who has severe impairments in areas that ordinary people are okay or good at.

Just as I, as a person with mild, infrequent, complex-partial seizures that are well-controlled on medication, am in the same general category (epileptic) as someone I used to know who had constant seizures and a moderate intellectual disability resulting from the fact that they were interrupting her ability to learn and take in information. A seizure is a seizure, it's a quantifiable brain event, and it does not have to significantly impair someone in order to be a seizure. Someone can even have recurrent simple-partial epileptic seizures that only result in them hearing a buzzing sound in one ear or something. They fit the neurological pattern of seizures, therefore they are just as much a seizure as a generalized tonic-clonic seizure that runs into status epilepticus and kills someone. It does not belittle the horrible situation of the person who dies from epilepsy, to say that there are people who are not significantly impaired by their epilepsy. It just shows that epilepsy is a very broad category of conditions.

I could run off a whole list of medical conditions that work the same way, but I won't. Suffice to say there are a huge number of them.

Personally, I don't think that the existence of autistic people who do better at a lot of things or even just seem to do better at them than I do, in any way detracts from my own difficulties (often extreme ones) in certain areas. If it did, I'd have to "undiagnose" most of the people who post here, and I am totally uninterested in doing that.

I mean, a friend of mine knows a guy who has Williams syndrome -- the genes, the physical features, and everything -- but who is also classified as gifted and has a degree in astrophyiscs. Most people with Williams syndrome are terrible with both numbers and spatial relations to the point it pulls their ability to score on IQ tests way down below average. And they can't even do average on those things, let alone get a college degree in the area he's gotten one in.

He does have Williams syndrome, there is no question about it. But he had to leave the entire Williams syndrome community because of the hostility he received from parents who believed that someone like him had no business saying he had it. Even though he had the genetic test sitting right in front of him saying that he absolutely had it, as well as having the obvious physical characteristics of someone who has it. He was treated with complete hostility though by a community that should have welcomed him.

I don't like trends towards doing the same thing to high-achieving autistic people who either have, or seem to have, fewer problems than other people.

Also, I don't like trends towards assuming that someone has no problems if they don't seem to, to other people. I know people who have significant problems, but hide them very well from others, or are in environments that totally compensate for them.

An example of this: I know someone who is in reality very similar to me in terms of innate abilities and difficulties, to the point her boyfriend asked me once if we were twins separated at birth.

However, she (a) hides it a little better in public than I do (but it's just the thinnest veneer of disguise) and has a little more physical energy to work with than I do, (b) has no mental institutions in her past (although she came close and also had to take psych drugs for a shorter period than I did), and (c) has an incredible and complex set of unpaid supports in place so that she never has to use paid supports the way I do. If that set of supports went away, though, she would need the kind of services I receive in order to survive.

Yes, you could say, objectively, she's clearly got severe impairments. But hang on a minute.

What if neither she nor anyone around her knew what autism was? And what if she became, say, a famous inventor (possible, in her field of work)? What if she then died and books were written about her based on various accounts of her?

I think you would find it very difficult to discern, from second- and third-hand accounts of her, what her difficulties were, and what supports she received. To most people, those supports, and therefore the need for them, would be invisible. So it doesn't matter if she'd starve to death without them, those severe impairments would not be recognized by history and she'd just look a little quirky and eccentric.

So she could then be put in the position some of these dead famous people are in: Nobody would know the right things to tell anyone, what her difficulties were, so people might assume she didn't even have them. There would be anecdotes here and there supporting one "side" or the other, but they would be like the tips of an iceberg where nobody would be capable of uncovering the entire iceberg again after her death. Nobody would address the core difficulties as severe as they were, so nobody would know she had severe impairments in so many areas.

So even though you could say "she has severe difficulties so she's not who I'm talking about," she could still end up in the position of Einstein historically where nobody could decades after her death confirm anything one way or the other about severe difficulties, and there would be conflicting accounts, or even entirely accounts that sesemed to support her not being autistic.

Which is one among many reasons I personally believe, that nobody should be either diagnosing, or undiagnosing, people in history like this. What we know about them is shaped by a huge amount of situational factors, so many that few people remember to imagine them. It is usually impossible to tell one way or the other whether someone would in modern days be called autistic or not.

I think it's sort of fine to say "this person had such-and-such a trait," and then provide arguments for or against, but not to say they were autistic or that they weren't autistic. All we can say is that we don't know.

And I don't think it's okay to define a condition just by whether it causes trouble or not, because even that is heavily affected by situational factors. For instance, what if someone was the kind of royalty that normally has people doing things up to the point of even dressing them? How would you be able to tell that they really could dress themselves if they had to? Most could, but maybe some couldn't, and they'd blend in totally with those who could, because all of them had people doing that for them as part of the sort of environment they lived in. That's an extreme example but hopefully it shows this is a lot more complicated than some people make it look, and that in historical examples you can't rule out that there is a lot you don't know about a person. Considering this is true even of living people who are around today, it's even harder to know about historical people.

And I don't think that people with severe impairments become invisible just because people with milder impairments exist. Nor do I think it is at all "scientific" to define a general set of neurological traits by degree of difficulty they create rather than the form they take. The underlying form is more important -- which is why simple-partial seizures are in the same category ("seizure") as severe and intractible tonic-clonic seizures, without anyone saying it's "unscientific" or taking something away from people with the severe kind.