Among the uninformed, autism is often associated with savant syndrome. You know--Rain Man, counting cards. Or calendar calculation, or memorizing books, or drawing something with photographic accuracy after having seen it once. It's always flashy and exotic-seeming, like savant syndrome is so hugely outside everyday experience that autistic people ( Read more... )

(This is a follow-up to a previous post, The Cat and the Mirror.)

You may have heard of the mirror test. It's an experiment designed to find out if an animal has an idea of what "me" is, by using the animal's ability to identify its own image in a mirror.( How to test your cat's mirror savvy )

In my psychology classes, I learned about something called the "Mirror test", which is designed to determine if an animal has a sense of self. Human infants can pass this test at 18 months ( Read more... )

This might be a little bit odd to say, but, if given the choice, I don't think I would choose not to have major depression ( Read more... )

I ended up writing an essay in response to this blog post. I'm re-posting it here on my own blog.
Mad Pride Movement Meets in Toronto

The sensationalistic approach to covering the “Mad Pride” movement seems to be claiming that they are against psychiatric drugs. They are not; they are against forcing drugs on someone who has made the decision to ( Read more... )

My counselor's been getting on my case, lately, about the way I carefully edit all my thoughts so that I never expect anything good. I tell myself that I'm going to fail; that my problems are unsolvable; that things aren't going to get any better; that the only solution is to get used to the fact that life sucks.

I know why I'm such a pessimist.

It's ( Read more... )

Annoyed by all the psychobabble you hear when your autistic super-hearing picks up the stuff the shrinks don't want you to hear? Need a translation? Well, look no further, curious eavesdroppers; I can provide the enlightenment you seek. Having been a student of psychobabble for six years now, including an intensive residential course, my ( Read more... )

A note: When I mention mental illness, assume I am talking about it in the most general way: Any condition that can be diagnosed by a psychologist; psychological, cognitive, or neurological. It takes too long to write that phrase out every single time I mention it ( Read more... )

There’s a fairly arbitrary split between people diagnosed “Asperger” and high-functioning people diagnosed “Autism”. The big difference between these two categories is that the people with Asperger’s had speech before three (though it was probably unusual speech), and the people categorized Autism usually did not. In the HFA group, they almost ( Read more... )

I have three main special interests.

Psychology
I got interested in psychology when I was a teenager; it explained a lot about the multiple episodes of depression I have had over the years, starting at about nine years old, and helped me to learn more about myself. From there, I started studying psychology from textbooks and at the library; by the ( Read more... )