I based my idea mostly off of this.
Mariah Carey:
Yes, I do think that Asperger's is Mariah's problem. It's also likely a part of her strength. What happened in 2001 was not a breakdown from completely normal behavior but rather a pattern of increasingly strange behavior that led to a relapse into hardcore Asperger's Syndrome. The mental (and physical, after all the two are always connected) exhaustion, the plate-throwing tantrum at the hotel, the desperate messages on her web site--all classic Asperger's behavior if you know how to recognize it. Since most people don't, her frequent rationales of growing up multiracial (a "handicapped childhood," as she once put it) and dealing with low blood sugar satisfy many as to explanations for her behavior. However, if you look under the surface, you will find an enormous body of evidence suggesting Mariah's having some form of AS.
1) There [is[/i] a precedent for neurological disorders in her family, since her biological brother has cerebral palsy
2) When she was growing up, instead of responding to hostility towards multiracial people by working hard to make friends at school, she retreated to her home and avoided social interaction, with only an occasional break to jam with others who shared her interest in music, and even that only happening in her teen years; I myself remember that my only real friends in high school were those in my scholastic bowl team and drama club. Her sister Allison, on the other hand, was quite the social butterfly and got beat up and involved in drug abuse and prostitution for her trouble; social skills aren't always what they're cracked up to be, and Mariah's difficulties with them may have protected her in this case. Mariah would watch large amounts of television, practice scales for hours on end, and viewed the radio as a comforting refuge she could turn in hours of need, almost as much as her strong Christian beliefs, if not regular church attendance, since it was very hard to find congregations accepting of her mixed family.
3) She manifested her exceptional, almost superhuman vocal and songwriting talent (she co-writes much of her material, lyrics, music, and all) at an early age, displaying pitch perfection at the age of two. In addition, she needs to have song ideas transcribed because they come to her so fast that, as she revealed in her 2003 Larry King interview, she can't even write them down properly. A musical genius if ever there was one.
4) Besides being relatively isolated from friendships in school and failing to communicate with people about her dreams of musical stardom in a way that didn't make her seem odd and delusional, she perseverated on music so much that the obsession hampered her ability to perform academically; she simply could not concentrate on her schoolwork and always seemed unfocused and "somewhere else" in school, which along with her absenteeism (due to said Manhattan jam sessions), hampered her academic performance enough to indicate that her exit from high school at seventeen was most likely a withdrawal rather than an early graduation.
5) She was quite unconcerned with her appearance to others as a child, and gained a better but still ersatz image during 500 hours of beauty school and hair salon apprenticeship, which was threatened as a career by her habit of singing at work rather than chatting up customers, lending her the nickname "Echo." Around 1993, her handlers, including husband and Sony Records executive Tommy Mottola, gave her a more conventional hair and look, but she has never had astute fashion sense, as the many fashion critics of our society know so well. She essentially wears whatever she pleases, valuing personal qualities such as not being tight around the mid-section, which she claims has a serious impact on her vocals.
6) She has a tendency to "give people the wrong impression" and be "a flirt," without really intending to, having little concept of entering and exiting relationships carefully. She headed somewhat naïvely into her relationship with Tommy, failing to anticipate the corporate jealousy she would endure and not taking some of the cues that might have alerted her to the fact that Tommy treated her like a child, perhaps because of her sometimes immature and inappropriate behavior. Speaking of which, have you ever watched her on camera? Who is she making eye contact with? It is not always very clear, and this has perhaps led to awkward outcomes for many relationships. The very nature of love itself confuses her, and despite having been in several relationships, she insisted in said Larry King interview that she hasn't "ever really been in love." It's a handy word to put in a song and a key concept of popular music lyrics, but she expressed confusion over the basic nature of this complex, intuitive, and social emotion.
7) Mariah has had difficulties in the past in communicating with people, even in work settings. Although some behavioral quirks may have been ironed out by the charm-school-style work training that served as kind of therapy for the previously concert-shy entertainer, she still had trouble making her needs and feelings understood to her superiors at Columbia and Virgin Records. She was a wallflower at the party at which she was discovered, leading to the oft-cited "Cinderella story" of her discovery by Tommy through Brenda K. Starr, the entertainer who helped get her discover in her quest to socialize Mariah by dragging the latter to parties. Part of the reason she had her problems in 2001 was that she had never been good at conveying her wishes about choices for album singles, and more importantly her need for an occasional break from work, to her label and publicist. Many other entertainers face the pressures that led drove to her exhaustion, either resolve the issues successfully or devolve into substance abuse. Mariah did neither, and her hospitalization in a mental ward should be a sobering reminder of how this case was more than ordinary fatigue. It may have been preventable had she been able to make her needs and problems known to people. She might have done well to be more assertive, and perhaps not reject the lawsuit options that might have been available to her in compensation for her troubles.
8 ) She is also hypersensitive. Early in her career, she was actually spooked by the crowd noise at her first live concert, and only gradually got accustomed to louder sounds, as I myself have in spite of my Asperger's. She still cannot tolerate intense smells; hence, her efforts to design an extremely subtle fragrance for her Automatic Princess line. Tactile sensations are also important to her, as she prefers certain fabrics and places a lot of emphasis on comfortableness in her apparel choices.
When she was sent to the mental hospital, she soon got referred to a therapist, with whom she worked out some strategies for dealing with people that sound very Asperger's-oriented to me. First of all, she needs to learn to set boundaries and assert herself more when necessary, and get better at saying no. Second, she needs to arrange with employers, and has done so in actual contracts for what you and I would call the accommodation of having her "own private time and space," reducing the necessary amount of social negotiation to achieve such a thing, haggling that other artists could more easily conduct on a case-by-case basis. Finally, she works to set up a good schedule with her employers that gives her time to decompress and time to do her best. All in all, she needed to do some self-advocacy. Fortunately for her, she has reached a level of prestige in her industry that allows her to request these things, and I hope I someday reach that point in whatever field I choose to enter (I'm young, you see). In any case, these approaches have worked well, and she has not only made a spectacular career comeback but is also dealing better than ever with some aspects of her personality that may stem from Asperger's. As a fan and possible fellow Aspie, I wish her the best. Was she eventually diagnosed with the condition by this therapist? Perhaps only two people really know.
It's not really any of our business whether any of these four people, or any other celebrity, is diagnosed with Asperger's; it ought to be between patient and psychiatrist or therapist, unless both parties agree that revealing the diagnosis is the right thing to do. One thing's for sure, we could use a celebrity self-advocate, and it would help immeasurably in increasing people's understanding and acceptance of the condition if a superstar was honest and forthright with people about their Asperger's, making us all accept it as a part of who that celebrity is and perhaps as much a factor in his or her talents as it is in his or her shortcomings. Celebrity publicists sometimes try to explain away all sorts of health perturbations in celebrities, fostering the confusion that fuels tabloid headlines and other media circuses; when a celebrity has an issue, they need help and not skepticism or denial from people whose jobs depend on the star, because unless the entertainer's physical and mental health can be attended to, there is no entertainment coming from them. It's that simple, and the luxury rehabs, exploitative talk shows, and what have you are not the answer. The more people exploit or deny celebrities' problems, the more it encourages them to be in denial, and sometimes those problems are not as simple as Dr. Drew Pinsky's alleged diagnosis of "Narcisstic Personality Disorder," itself a lightning rod for misdiagnoses of a cornucopia of other mental health conditions, including Asperger's Syndrome. Entertainment may set some fashions for neurotypical society, but it is also an environment in which different and eccentric people can flourish and find a way of making their identity accepted, and it would be a shame if publicists would support the idea that celebrities couldn't possible have my condition because of its social skill aspects. I would love to hear your feedback about my ideas
24 Nov 2007, 11:10 pm
