Aren't We Forgetting What it Really Means to be Autistic?

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https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=etymology+of+autism

The word itself comes from the Greek autos, which means "self" - and that's the part I think a lot of us are forgetting. The reason so many autistic people (low or high-functioning, doesn't really matter) struggle with relationships is because they are trapped within themselves. Indeed, my mother often tells me "You should get out of your head more." Forget all this BS about depression, anxiety, intellectual disability, psychosis, psychopathy, dyslexia, dyspraxia, and dyscalculia - those are just conditions that can exist (to different extents) alongside autism within people.

Take myself, for example:

I'm depressed, anxious, and nervous. I'm a bit of a "hurt sociopath" who hates society and always has something bitter and pessimistic to say about it. And I also have some psychotic delusions and fantasies (such as a really good one a few years ago where I thought I was a metaphysical god ). But none of that relates to me as an autistic individual. It's my ability to sit there and let a person ramble on in my face for half-an-hour while I don't listen to a damn word they're saying that makes me autistic (my mind drifts to other places in those moments, because I'm trapped within myself). It's my less-than-talkative nature that makes me autistic; my reclusivity and self-isolation; my inability to relate to others on their level, to be "on the same page" as them. Everything else is just the other problems that I have in life.

Phew, glad I got all that off my chest. What do you guys think? Are we adding too much to the definition of the autistic condition until it becomes muddled and inaccurate? Is it really just as simple as a person who's less aware of others and trapped within themselves?

Trouble is most of us are not entirely trapped within ourselves....I think catatonia is more akin to actually being trapped inside yourself. I mean I sort of see what you are getting at but we do express ourselves, even non-verbal autistics express themselves. But there is a sense of detachment from people, not that you cannot relate at all ever...or find anyone whatsoever you find yourself on the same page with but there is always the feeling of something setting you apart to an extent. I mean at times I would say there is a feeling of being rather trapped....like when I can't go approach someone I don't know and start a conversation or when an aspect of the autism prevents me doing other things. But its not an over all feeling all the time I certainly do not feel like an entirely detatched entity just floating through the world without interacting with it. Of course this is only my personal experience, I don't intend to suggest everyone experiences it exactly like me.

IDK I guess in my opinion its far to complex to describe as simply being trapped within ourselves, not to mention it is a spectrum so there can be varying degrees of said feelings/perceptions.

Yes you are right. there are an awful lot of traits that you can go on and on and on with but at the end of the day we are in our own world and the more autistic a person is the farther into that own little world they become.

I get what you are saying completely.

When I got my diagnosis about 10 years ago. It didn't list a host of traits. he wrote a report on how he viewed me as a person at that meeting.

He also disputed a lot of what other psychiatrists had diagnosed me with.

The idea that autism = trapped in self, or even self-absorbed, was stumbled upon by non-Autistic people seeking to label that which they've never experienced. It's as true and meaningful as a WASP trying to describe what it's like living as a Black person in America - which is to say, any semblance of truth is strictly coincidental.

True, it is a spectrum indeed. And I didn't intend to make it seem like all autistic people are practically catatonic (even the most extreme cases probably wouldn't be), it just seems like we're in our own world and everything else is a mist or haze: so transparent - almost not even there; as an aside, sometimes I'll be so lost in thought when walking my dog, that I won't even realize that I've walked the full path I take to walk him and am heading home already, and I won't know if he's done his business - I'm just completely oblivious to it. If you've watched Watchmen or read the graphic novel, it's like Laurie's description of John/Doctor Manhattan: "It's like we're all shadows in a fog to him." That's the best way I can think of it.

I was going to use this in another post, but I suppose in order to illustrate my point a bit better, I shall do it here.

Basically, I think of personality as a triangle, with psychopathy at the top vertex, and autism and psychosis on the bottom left or right, doesn't really matter. Neurotypicals would be in the middle of the triangle, the mean between extremes.

I even placed myself where I think I might reside within this spectrum: somewhere between psychosis, autism, and NT, leaning mostly towards autism.

I would rate them on the following criteria as such:
Psychopaths
Awareness: good balance of self and others
Empathy: high cognitive empathy (they understand others' feelings), low emotional empathy (they genuinely don't care or exploit those feelings for their own benefit)
Ethics: Hedonism (promote pleasure while avoiding pain)

Psychotic Individuals
Awareness: normal self-awareness, high awareness of others, to the point of hallucination ("hyper-awareness")
Empathy: relatively low cognitive, relatively high emotional, almost balanced
Ethics: Consequentialism (basing immediate actions on their foreseeable consequences)

Autists
Awareness: high self-awareness, hypo-awareness of others
Empathy: low cognitive, high emotional
Ethics: Altruism (just do the right thing for it's own sake)

As for mood and learning disorders, those just reflect imbalances of neurotransmitters in the brain and learning styles respectively, nothing more - I wouldn't consider them to be a part of this spectrum of personality.

Sorry if this seems very unscientific to a lot of you more scientifically-inclined folks - I'm not one of you. These are just some basic ideas about personality that I have, so forgive me if there's no evidence to support any of it.

good points here.

If it is like a triangle it's possible to bound around inside and to the extremes, but there is a equilibrium of personality that always will be snapped back to. All depends on the years of experience and maturity, becoming more self aware and perhaps shedding more of the sociopathic, hedonistic tendencies.

. I've always been in my own world and struggled to communicate with others. Most people are sheep. Most people I cannot relate to whatsoever. I'll have spells of euphoric transcendence hammered down into extreme depression. I am no stranger to melancholia.

. I'll never understand how I can read or write endlessly but can't engage most people in a simple conversation, unless I know them really well or they also are kind of like me.

. Am I straying from the topic? Been posting too much maybe, like venting out after so many years

. Yet it is possible to walk a calmer path, and have good conversation, even rile up the folk with out-of-the-box thinking. One's potential is never perfectly defined, hope and possibilities exist beyond our immediate knowledge.
It's probably more like the uncertainty principle, where you pin down one aspect at the expense of another.
makes it sort of fun, I guess?

Bleuler invented the word to describe extreme withdrawal in one of his young psychiatric patients. I have met many people on the spectrum, including autistic children during one phase of my career, and none of them were characterised by the extreme withdrawal into themselves - possibly Bleuler was looking at trauma induced catatonia in that patient. Shcizophrenia was "all the rage" in Blueler's time, a reigning fashion..

The most common feature of the ASD friends I know is the opposite: an intensification of/ hypersensitivity to/overengagement with the environment. The periods of 'retreat into self' are time outs for self-restorative respite from the hypersensitivity overload, to allow the stress to calibrate back to manageable levels.

I think autism as a literal word is less accurate than other terms might have been, though we are stuck with it now. Unlike you OP, I don't think the word 'autism' is a very accurate descriptor at all. A great variety of talents and challenges feature in ASDs in different ways in different people, and the word 'autism' when taken literally distorts the reality balance of positives and negatives to a singular over-simplification which historically set a pattern in place for ASD people to be seen only through the lens of deficit - and that indirectly hurts everyone on the spectrum in some way, at every stage of their lives.

I certainly do feel like I'm way too much in my own head all the time.

I agree, if I had to choose one word that summarized my ASD symptoms, it would be 'hypersensitivity'. Too bad it's seen as a character flaw, not a physical and neurological condition we're born with, and didn't choose to have.

...I used to sputter things around , it was hard to communicate...less so now .

For me it means that I will never really amount to very much because my capabilities wont let me.

Also, it means that I always feel as though I'm starting again.

It means that I have seen friends come and go because I didn't mature at the proper rate as everyone else.

It means that I miss an awful lot of what is going on around me.

It means that at 42 I still haven't conquered self awareness although I do slip in and out of it from time to time and appearance wise I do pass. However recently I have experienced a set back there which is another thing that has f****d my head up.

It means that I am probably scared quite a lot even though I appear to try to be brave.

It means that I f*****g STRUGGLE! but I can't appear to be struggling because who gives two shiny shites at the end of the day?

It means nothing to anyone else.

That is where I feel that ''Autism'' does not describe me at all, because I am not self-absorbed. I know I may look it on these forums but that's because I mostly come here to vent my feelings. But in real life and on Facebook, I'm more interested in other people than anything. I'm too caring for others often, and I've been told I need to think of myself and not always others. I even forget about myself sometimes. And I'm good with recognising body language and all of that, and understanding other's feelings, etc, so why the hell am I ''Autistic''? I've known selfish NTs, very selfish NTs actually, who still somehow seem to succeed socially.

And I'm in my first true relationship and I know I'm doing brilliantly. Well, I'm best at the emotional side of the relationship, where I can communicate my feelings and he can tell me anything he feels, and we just work things out maturely as a couple. I feel there's a true connection between us, and so does he.

This is really why I wish my diagnosis of Asperger's could be an abbreviated term, like ''social and emotional disorder'' or something like that, abbreviated as SED. Just like ADHD is ''attention deficit hyperactivity disorder'', and not named after a stupid weird name of some twat who discovered it years ago. I hate Hans Asperger for having a last name ''Asperger'', what gets pronounced differently in every region. Why couldn't his last name be a more pronounceable and less cringing name, like ''Smith''. But I suppose this Hans twat who discovered it was German or something. Why couldn't it be an English guy with a better name, like ''Smith''? Then it would just be called ''Smith's Syndrome''. Smith is such a common name that saying it wouldn't feel so weird.

Then it's a misnomer. All the hypersensitivity stuff (which I never really understood myself) doesn't seem to have anything to do with being "trapped within oneself," as autism would. So why not call it Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD), instead of autism? I don't feel like I'm over or under sensitive to certain stimuli, yet I can get very disconnected from others and the world sometimes (and trapped in my head), so I feel like I'm truly autistic as a result. I feel like we should either assign a new, more verbally accurate name to what we "term" Autism/Asperger's, and/or correctly identify autistic people based on the etymology of that word.



I actually couldn't agree with you more there, again I just thought it would be nice to change our perception of people to better match the word, and get a different term to describe the people traditionally thought of as "autistic," because they really might not be. I've always found "autistic" people and "Aspies" to be a bit foreign, and couldn't quite relate to them on the same level (especially because of the weird ways in which they process sensory information which I just cannot relate to). Also, a monotonous voice or a voice with weird inflections always threw me off as well, because that just never seemed to be a thing for me (although I might have a somewhat weird gait and physical posture, but probably only slightly).

I agree it is being trapped within your own mind and we should just accept that we live naturally within ourselves instead of though others. But the thing with a trap is it is human nature to want to the escape trap.

Is the living in oneself due to the autism or endless bad experiences with socializing or sensory overload or a bit of it all. Thinking has changed since the word autism was coined and Autism was first recognized as a thing. Sensory sensitivities are specifically listed as a diagnostic criteria in the DSM 5 and Dr. Tony Attwood says Aspies do not suffer from Aspergers but suffer from people.

IMHO it is a combinination of all and as a spectrum condition the dominint reason will differ depending on the person.