Long Time, No Me

[fickleviolet]

Well, ya know, I really was meaning to update my LJ earlier, but...

*insert excuses for laziness & ADD-ish behavior here*

Seriously, though, I was away for Easter - went to my grandma' as I do every year.  Her house is full of dust and I thought my awful scratchy throat and drippy nose was from that, but it turns out I was just coming down with the

Comments

[anonymous]

Well Autism research in terms of brain anatomy and activation patterns is still very much in its infancy. I think in my project I summed up pretty well where the state of affairs is right now. Mainly because Autism has such characteristic symptoms of social failure that it is easily diagnosed via symptoms, and any other attention problems are written off as secondary to whatever was wrong with their brains. Also in the case of ADD the school problems get the most attention and social failure is attributed to self esteem and not learning social cues because your not paying attention to them.
In my project I addressed this and proposed that there might be a much more serious overlap here than anyone has bothered to look at, by comparing the aspergers kids and the innattentive ADD kids and seeing if under an imaging technique if the two actually do look alike, or if its a coincidence. Either way it changes how we treat each group. Even if this is wrong it shines light on how we ignore secondary symptoms (which might say more than we give them credit for).

But hey if this seems over your head at all, look up this book: "The curious incident of the dog in the night time" by Mark Haddon. It is a detective story written from the perspective of an aspergers 14 year old boy. It is one of the best books EVER written that will show what it feels like to be autistic. This is to the point that it was required reading in my child psych class. So ya, read that book (and it is SUCH an easy read), and tell me if you can identify with that kid lol
k

[fickleviolet]

Very, very cool! And agreed as to how secondary sympotoms are ignored. I'm inattentive type, not hyperactive, and the fact that secondary sympotoms don't really "count" especially in that type might account for the fact that I've only just been diagnosed now, at 24.

That must have been REALLY interesting to research while you were writing that paper. I'm going to see if my library has that book - I'll let you know what I think of it!