Sameness/ behaviours/interests - are they really a disorder?

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I have been trying to find starting points to build a critique of many of the aspects of research into us . This is with a view to developing a pluralistic set of models which will hopefully incorporate our perspectives on AS. This is one example of the kind of ground we need to be challenging.

It's taken from the work of :

Soo-Jeong Kim1*, Raquel M Silva1, Cindi G Flores1, Suma Jacob2, Stephen Guter2, Gregory Valcante1, Annette M Zaytoun1, Edwin H Cook2 and Judith A Badner3

http://www.molecularautism.com/content/2/1/8

RRB assessment

The conclsuion is :





This means they are begining trace our behaviours to specific gentic markers. Which all sounds very scientific and plausible. No doubt in our genomes there is a sequence that predisposes people like ourselves to sameness behavior and special interests.

It's not the science I have an issue with here, I have a serious an issue with the premise that there is actually anything wrong with sameness and intense interest. None of my family have a problem with me watching the same film a couple of hundred times. It saves money on videos and frees up the TV. My interests are currently limited to helping developed a pluaralistic model of AS - this is not a problem for anyone I know. My sameness behavior allows me to do a job others find boring and repetative, it pays the bills an puts food on the table. No one minds this in the slightest.

So my question here is why is my behavior being labelled deviant/undersirable to the extent it is being included in a survey like this? Does anyone else have sameness behaviors and interests they actually like and prefer to NT normative behaviors?

Why are these even being subject to research and classification as a disorder in the first place?


Meme

Isn't it assumed that we like our sameness behaviors as opposed to NT behaviors?

I don't know that there is any way to answer your question. It's a question about what this culture values and there is no objective measure for a thing. Even within the autistic community there are divisions about what is and isn't of value. The short answer is that enough people see enough problems caused by autistic behaviors that they believe a net positive will result from research devoted to identifying the underlying causes. This does not address the meaning of "net positive" but this is actually irrelevant as only the belief in a net positive outcome is sufficient to motivate the research.

By net positive you mean our operating system , or something more abstact that term is derived from? Please excuse the basic question, I am not familiar with the term as used in this context.

Meme

Last edited by memesplice on 20 Jul 2011, 12:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I have intense interests but not a preference for sameness. I have the opposite, intense novelty-seeking, in almost all areas.

Anyway yeah I agree there's no impairment inherent in either intensity of interest or preference for sameness. that's how people get REALLY GOOD at certain things.

Thank you Purchase. The question I'm trying to ask I guess is : if I start to deconstruct part of an existing model of AS by looking at the assumptions made within initial premise by those researchers, does anyone have concerns about this.

So does anyone have any objections to me doing this. ?

I mean we might end up altering some basic thories about us, and before we do that , I think it wise to ask others if we want to do that.

So I think its worth seeking a varied opinion first to check if most of us are reasonably content with our behaviors before setting about the deconstruction ToM.

This is one way to ask the question, or at least a part of the question.

This is my special interest.

Meme

Last edited by memesplice on 20 Jul 2011, 1:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.

i will try to limit my overall critique of assigning cause to untestable sources, in short genetics has become psychologies new "black box", just as ideas of humaculi and waring ego/id ect were used in the past.
Now there may be a genetic predisposition to have a greater or lesser need for certain types of stimulation, (i have always seemed to think more than my peers, who prefered to talk to each other, instead of themselves) Mind you is this a genetic predetermined trait, or is it the result of having very limited access to others who share my interests, paired with enough experince in boreing the hell out of people when I bring them up.

mind you being very specifically focused on a singular interest lends itself to success, it is from that singlemindedness that I taught myself to play guitar, as well as to do some programming, and raise a generation of seahorses and pipefish from birth.
If you haven't gotten to read John Robisnson's newer book (free range aspergian) I think he makes this a fundamental point, that services typically revolve around focusing on your weeknesses and ignoring your strenghths. The new model needs to become focusing on and developing those strengths so as to force the weeknesses into the background. ie people see you 1st as being a guru who is a bit quircky, as opposed to someone who can't hack being normal.

Sorry ,I'm just going to pause with the reasoning here one moment- YOU RAISED SEA HORSES! - that is
so great. I love sea horses. That is wonderful.

Bak in a moment I 'm taking a reason brak an dthink about sea horses. Than kyou.

I see my autism as a disorder, but not something that needs to be eradicated from the planet. I think when a lot of people hear the word disorder, they think of something inferior to the norm, something that is abnormal and doesn't really have the same right to exist as so-called normal behaviour does. To me, my autism is a disorder in this "normal" world I am supposed to call home. It limits me in my interactions with the majority of people. My insistance on sameness, my behaviours, these are all things that are not easily meshed into the wider world, and as a result, it limits me. Because the world (or society rather) is not an autistic one, my functioning level is different from most people, and that is a disorder. I think the label just carries negative connotations with it.

If it doesn't cause a problem, then it isn't a problem. I don't necessarily think they are saying that sameness and intense interest are themselves problems that need to be wiped out. But rather that they are things that coincide with other things that actually are a problem (like self injurious behaviour, which can cause permanent physical damage if severe) and if you see the one, you are likely to see the other. It looks like they are trying to figure out if and how these things are genetically tied together. If they could figure out a way to let people keep the focus while losing the self-injury, that would be considered a positive.

I think it's a great idea. Many basic assumptions about autism are wrong in my experience and many others on this site have posted similar sentiments.

By the way I'm VERY interested in genetics but lack a fundamental education in its basics. Had it but forgot.

Hope your seahorse-pondering break was a delight!

I've already been doing this for a little bit now. The main problem your going to find is that 1) Everything that causes autistic spectrum is at best, an outdated guess. 2) no one has a solution, because 3) they don't understand how, or why we are the way we are, and finally 4) there are quite a few cases of people falsifying study's on autism and aspergers for grant money. The more famous one is recently a doctor got his lisence pulled after starting a lawsuit against vacine company's when his research suddenly showed that vacines where the cause of all autism. *cough* conflict of interest *cough*

yale did a study on the human brain and autism. It showed that one of our neuro pathways was unresponsive and possibly not even there. that would be a good place to start looking. Another is the fact that its a neurological disorder and they don't even consider stress as a factor, when every other neurological disorder (terrets, schitzophrenia etc) define stress as either a primary or underline factor in the disorders.

The real question isn't how can we remove autism, its how can we remove the negative attributes. Me for one, i'd love to have my precieved heightened senses without being overstimulated. That would give me a well known super power. All i gotta do from there is learn to climb buildings, or graft some adamantium claws to my skeleton. Btw do you know a good doctor for that?

Janissy- thank you, that is a very salient point, we should not assume they regard these behaviours with the same level of deviance from NT norms. Perhaps the most appropriate question to ask is how they rate each of these behaviors. I'm not for a moment suggesting we interfere in anyway with work to stop (our) people self harming, especially if it isn't their choice to self harm. It does seem to suggest two catagories of behavior- voluntary and non voluntary- maybe we need a definition and a statement of their attitude towards each set of behavior?

I certainly think some of the opposition, from the more radically minded memebrs of the AS community arises , perhaps as a result of the rather clinical , negative terminology used here to describe what to us is normative , as well as the probably unintentional almost casual porosity implied between the two cataogies of non voluntary.voluntary behaviours. Maybe if this were clarified and more thought given to the potential response from AS guys taking issue with this ?

I think some of the language like "pathology / disorder/etc" does need to be modified with respect to voluntary behaviour and I am suggesting this as one area we perhaps would benifit from constructively challenging without destroying the whole model, which is not my intention.

Meme

Little lill: This is exactly the point so many of us are trying to make- again it's down to what we have the fundemental right to do and be in our everyday lives . I find it frustrating and sometimes it seems unfair, completely unfair, that we are back in the position of the kid in the playground now with with a bunch of grown up guys with a sheldoad of unelected power telling us we are deviant, weird and Kooky. When the hell did we elect them to do this to us? I never asked them, anyone else here ever do that?I guess not.

What we got to do is separate out the good work they are doing from the unintentional harm. They lack empathy towards us in the way we lack emapthy to certain aspects of their behavior- forgiveness is required not anger- they can't help it any more than we can. It probably has never occured to them the effect their description of us have on us.

They are about to be told.

Meme

[/quote]

No , but I cn't resist telling you I have climbed buildings/structures when I was younger as part of my day job. It was flippin' amazing. We used ropes. Man somedays you can rest into the the wind hold your arms out and just hang their weightless over a city listening to all the noise and inhaling the perfume and diesil.

To use metal claws would require some kind of hydraulic system or regulated explosive blast to force the claws into concrete. Concrete nibbling mandibles are real tools and they are seriosuly poweful pieces of kit very heavy still. Regarding steel framed structures , sharp things get stick in the steel they pierce and don't always retract this would be embarassing if you were dressed as a supehero at the time, even if you weren't dressed as a SH you would get severley teased..

Oh, the thrust of this here is to simply start to test apriori assumptions which get worked in at the premise forming stage, prior to all the complex reseacrh being carried out. It's the magicians slipping something in then going through a large act and pulling it out at the end, kind of thing.

Meme

The new model needs to become focusing on and developing those strengths so as to force the weeknesses into the background. ie people see you 1st as being a guru who is a bit quircky, as opposed to someone who can't hack being normal.[/quote][quote]

I'm not sure I or anyone else I know could hack the guru thing. But the point you make above is spot on and that's going in somewher eintot he critique.

seahorses....brilliant.
Meme

To the point:

First, I feel strongly you are talking about at least a couple of different things.

!) Insistence on Sameness and...

2) Special Interests

There's a big difference between the two IMHO, and to me, the first is a very real disability, while the second is highly debatable, but I agree it's anything BUT a weakness.

As to the first, the universe itself is in constant flux. Things change all around us, most of which we can't control. The weather changes, time passes, life happens. Other people all around us affect change over which we have no control. Neighborhoods change, people move in and out. Shopping centers are built while others are torn down. People get sick, change careers, we all grown up, grow older and die, while change happens all around us and to us. It's THE most common human experience there is, and it affects everyone, no matter who they are or whether or not they have Autism.

Change is something we ALL have to deal with because their simply is NO other choice.

Insistence on Sameness inhibits the ability to adapt to change. Calling it a disability has nothing to do with a comparison to NT's ability to change. It has everything to do with how the Insistence of Sameness inhibits the individual who has it. What makes it a disability is the simple fact that it has a negative effect on the very person who has it, not just because it's hard to deal with for others.

I really don't believe there is any way of getting around these facts.

Sameness just plain doesn't work.

The entire Universe and Life itself operates on what DOES work. It's that simple.

Now when it comes to Special Interests, I do think we're talking about something entirely different. And here's why:

Read ANY self-help or success strategy book. Pretty much all of them agree the worst think anyone can do is NOT focus on one specialty, and become as good, and preferably better than anyone else at it.

Almost all of them downplay the popular notion that we should all be "well-rounded" in our education, exposed to as many different things as possible, and the idea that one should never "put all one's eggs in one basket." Very few highly successful people specialize in more than a few fields.

But, the argument is often made, "Yes, but spreading oneself wide and exposing oneself to as many different things as possible is how one learns what one is good at, and what one likes."

Maybe so. For most NT's maybe that is true. But what if an individual already KNOWS what he/she likes and is good at, and isn't interested in pursuing anything else. Why on EARTH fight that? Why not, instead, WORK WITH IT, and LET the poor kid pursue what he already knows he wants to?

I think it does a lot of damage to high functioning Autistics to insist they do and try a bunch of things they have no interest in. Much of what is pushed on Autistics are the things they are not so good at, because everyone believes that's what they should to, so they can improve on those "lackings."

I disagree! I think the far better approach is to leave them alone about whatever they are not good at, and help them pursue only that which they do love, are motivated to do, and ARE good at. Leave them alone about the rest of it! Over time, if they really want to continue pursuing their special interest, they will learn that in order to do so they might need to improve some of the things they aren't so good at, and they WILL, because they'll be internally motivated to do so by virtue of the fact that now they know they need to, to continue doing that which they are good at and love.

The only reason "Special Interests" are viewed by NT's as "disabling" is because they think if you don't focus on what your not great at, you will never improve those things. Well that's just hogwash.

So to answer your question...

...I guess I already did?