Slowtime Check-In Day 8 of 14 (Friday): Depression Falls

[jadxia]

I've been feeling much better today than yesterday, at least mentally. Physically, I feel awful, sore with achy joints. The depression still lingers, like a cold draft seeping around corners in my mind. It's so hard to stick to schedule, to not be constantly distracted by things. Spent too much time organizing papers; I created a collage of

Comments

Re: I dunno, but I don't think Autistic

[jadxia]

Well, it wouldn't be full-blown autism, but Asperger's anyway. I was tested for a study on prosopagnosia (face-blindness) because the tools they were looking at for treating face-blindness did not work if you were autistic. (These conditions tend to run in the same family.) I am somewhat faceblind and have visual memory processing problems. I can remember two-dimensional faces, but not faces in 3D. Meaning, if I don't have a picture of someone to pull up in my head and compare them to, I simply have no idea what that person looks like. I even do this for myself.

Most people on the test they used fell easily onto one end of the spectrum. Either 'normal' or somewhere on the autism spectrum. There was a small grey area of the test, about four points. I was the only person tested to fall into this grey area (usually it was very far in one direction or the other). To which, of course, the study folks said 'cool!' but then admitted they had no idea whether or not their training program would improve my faceblindness or not.

After the study, I tested slightly better, but I did not perceive a noticeable difference in my social interactions at first. I think now that it did help, but at the time I thought it was a total bust. The best thing they did for me was to give me the idea to carry a card in my wallet describing prosopagnosia. For some reason, you can tell someone a million times and they either forget or simply don't believe you can't remember faces or put it in the category of "oh well, I'm terrible with names, we have something in common", but if you show them a card, even a home made card, they suddenly believe you are legit.

The Temple Grandin book I'm reading, Thinking in Pictures is really explanatory about what it is like to live with autism. I'm fascinated because she is totally a visual learner, and I'm totally auditory now (I wasn't as a child, but I think the processing problem swayed me over). This is why I'm such a prolific writer. The big difference she states between autistic and normal is that normal folks think of a concept first and then specifics (so the concept of a dog followed by images of dogs), while an autistic person will think of every specific first, and then use that to construct a concept they can work with. When I think of a dog, I actually see the word 'dog'. That's how auditory I am (reading & writing are actually auditory skills).

ADD & autism are often confused. They have many overlapping symptoms. I've been trying to see how I learn concepts, but to do so I need to find something I know nothing about. Do I grasp the concept first, or do I need a bunch of specifics over and over before I can build a concept that works for me?

Although I may have just answered my own question. My associations are almost entirely based on song lyrics. Interesting....

Re: I dunno, but I don't think Autistic

[jadxia]

Oh yes, over time I have gotten better, which can happen in milder cases. As a child I could not wear patterns, did not even like looking at them. They made me itch, they were just so loud I could feel the colors crawling all over me. I still sometimes have issues with bright paisley.

Re: I dunno, but I don't think Autistic

[misty_moonlight]

I think that I do some of those things. I bring fragments of ideas together and somehow try to connect them in a way that people might be able to understand. I've been looking inward to see if I might have it too because my oldest boy has a more severe autism, and he has a different father.

I'm hoping that the therapists can help my husband to work out of a lot of it. He has trouble holding a job, and in every single instance it's because every single person there hates him, and he just doesn't even see that happening. Now he's in college running up a huge college loan bill, and it frightens me. You know? 85% of Autistic Spectrum Dissorder people don't have full time employment. BUT - the best computer engineers are Autistic, and that's where he's going.

One of the books I ordered for my boy is a picture book and you go through it with him and evaluate what kind of social things are happening, and what would be appropriate responses.

Re: I dunno, but I don't think Autistic

[jadxia]

That is so cool!

Both prosopagnosics & autistic folks have problems with social cues and appropriate social behavior, for different reasons. Prosopagnosics can't read facial expressions (although I'm good with tone of voice). Obviously those in the autism spectrum would have all kinds of other social-cue issues.

I wish there had been someone with a book like that for me growing up. To this day, not only am I often confused when people say one thing but mean another (if you aren't going to mean what you say, why say it??), but I also have an anxiety complex about it because I know how often I have been wrong in the past. I'm much better about those things now, but the years of misreading have taken a toll on my emotional health.

I finally just started telling people I believed in radical honesty and let them like me or lump me. And my real friends have learned to just be honest, and to just say what it is they mean without inferences I'm not going to catch anyway.