Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Autism whitewashed, sociopathy maligned (again)

For as socially lacking as auties supposedly are (and interestingly this seems to be one of their key press points -- don't hate us because you think we are a cold, unfeeling jerk, we're just socially awkward), they sure do seem to be in the cool kids' club of socially acceptable. Coming fresh off the heels of my last post, this amazing piece of investigative journalism:
“One of the most devastating myths about children with autism is that they cannot show affection. While sensory stimulation is processed differently in some children, they can and do give affection. However, it may require patience on the parents' part to accept and give love in the child's terms,” Colston said.

A person who fully understands that they are harming others and simply does not care is called a “sociopath.” A sociopath is adept at reading social cues, is very aware of the feelings of others, and knows precisely how to respond in order to get what they want. They simply do not care whether or not their words or actions harm other people or often, society in general.

Autistic people have no intention of harming or upsetting others. They simply lack the ability to read and respond to social cues. For example, while most children learn that a smile from their friend means the other child is happy through everyday social interaction, an autistic child may have difficulty understanding facial expressions.
Thanks for the shout-out, auties. Next time, though, why don't you try to defend yourself without making us a scapegoat.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

"I am Adam Lanza’s mother'

From a reader:

There's a popular blog post circulating pretty fast around from a mom who has a son with a pretty dangerous mental illness, not properly diagnosed. The message of the post seemed fairly positive, but I found myself taken aback by how she handles her kid, and then goes on to say that he could be the next massacre shooter without proper help.

Is it just me, or does this kind of thing seem inherently wrong? I watched the Child of Rage documentary, and if anyone was going to become a killer, it was that kid, but after some proper therapy and rehabilitation, she ended up pretty damn well-adjusted.

I know you've talked about the issue with labels in the past, and in light of these massacres and a new-found interest in mental health being the root issues of them, it just seems that treating a kid like an unpredictable prisoner is just wrong. I mean, if a child can't even turn to their family for support and understanding, then you've essentially isolated them mentally and emotionally. If they're that unstable, they're not going to have even friends to turn to. When the kid turns 18, he's going to cut loose, because the only people who could have helped him didn't. Considering the behavior she described, if someone doesn't find a way for him to adjust, he's going to go to prison sooner or later.

And this is exactly how they're treating people like sociopaths. Giving them a supposedly incurable mental disease label, and then just settling for locking them and throwing away the key. What life is that?

Speaking of which, currently in the States, 56% of prisoners have a diagnosed mental disorder. So much for the asylum...

I don't know if I have much of an opinion about the macro problem of mental illness. When I first read the blog post linked above I was sort of turned off for a lot of reasons, including the one the reader mentions. I thought about it for a little while, though, and re read it and realized that the mother is not really advocating anything in particular, so much as just wanting to add to (or open up) the conversation on mental illness.

The truth is that I don't really think that this can be addressed effectively on the macro level, but rather any truly effective solution/treatment, at least for children, will be better parenting or people in substitute parenting roles. It reminds me of this selection from the NY Magazine article on autism mentioned yesterday: “A lot of kids are just delayed in development, slow to talk, or anxious, or hyperactive, and a lot of kids are just terribly parented. . . . We see a lot of diagnosis-of-childhood kids, whose parents have never set limits, plus kids who are temperamentally difficult to raise."

That is not to say that parents of severely disturbed children have necessarily done anything "wrong." But I do believe in the plasticity of the child's mind and that there are ways to improve any child's behavior if one thinks creatively enough about it. This is also not to say that every parent is capable of parenting a child with these particular special needs. To the extent a label helps the helpless parent, I can see that possibly being a positive in the child's life. But to the extent that applying labels limits their/our beliefs about whether a child is redeemable or not, then yes, I believe that "labels for life" are counterproductive.

On the micro level, I feel like the biggest opportunity for children, particularly for those who are damaged but not quite mentally ill, is for them to feel a paradigm shift in their own concept of self. Like the girl in Child of Rage who was taught to believe that "when I hurt other people I'm hurting my good self." Maybe I'll write more on that later.

Monday, December 17, 2012

Everyone on the autism spectrum

This NY Magazine article, "Is everyone on the autism spectrum?" has some pretty funny moments, but this is probably the most relevant. In regard to the difficulty of making psychiatric diagnoses, particularly amateur ones:

Men have caught on and, in a kind of inverted gaslighting, begun to describe themselves as having Asperger’s as a way of controlling their spouses. “Having Asperger’s-like syndrome does not give you Asperger’s,” says David Schnarch, a Colorado-based couples therapist. “Having a big belly does not make you pregnant. I’ve not seen a single case of what I would consider to be diagnosable Asperger’s. But I have seen any number of cases of wives accusing husbands of it, any number of cases of husbands claiming to have it.” It’s the new ADHD, he says. “The wife doesn’t want to accept that the husband knows what he’s doing when he’s doing something she doesn’t like.” Schnarch recalls a man who phoned him the day before a scheduled initial couples session and announced that he’d just been diagnosed with Asperger’s. “As soon as this happened,” Schnarch says, “I knew I had difficulty.” He contacted the referring therapist, who said he’d suspected the man had Asperger’s because he said things to his girlfriend that were so cruel he couldn’t possibly understand their impact. As far as Schnarch was concerned, it was an all-too-familiar instance of ­sadism masquerading as disability. “If you’re going to perp, the best place to perp from is the victim position.”

I like the part about big belly not making you pregnant -- PCL-R, anybody? And the flipside of the coin are the self diagnosers who need a diagnosis to give them a sense of ... antisocial belonging?

Sunday, December 16, 2012

Moonstruck and cages

This is not really that topical, but I was watching the film Moonstruck on the plane. There are two pieces of dialogue I had forgotten about. The one-handed Nicholas Cage character explains to Cher how he lost his hand:

                               RONNY
                         It's wood. It's fake. Five years ago
                         I was engaged to be married. Johnny
                         came in here, he ordered bread from
                         me. I put it in the slicer and I
                         talked with him and my hand got caught
                         cause I wasn't paying attention. The
                         slicer chewed off my hand. It's funny
                         'cause - when my fiancĂ© saw that I
                         was maimed, she left me for another
                         man.

                                     LORETTA
                         That's the bad blood between you and
                         Johnny?

                                     RONNY
                         That's it.

                                     LORETTA
                         But that wasn't Johnny's fault.

                                     RONNY
                         I don't care! I ain't no freakin
                         monument to justice! I lost my hand,
                         I lost my bride! Johnny has his hand,
                         Johnny has his bride! You come in
                         here and you want me to put away my
                         heartbreak and forget?

Later she tells him what she thinks of him:


LORETTA
                         The big part of you has no words and
                         it's-a wolf. This woman was a trap
                         for you. She caught you and you could
                         not get away.
                              (She grabs his wooden
                              hand)
                         So you chewed off your foot! That
                         was the price you had to pay to be
                         free.
                              (throws his hand down)
                         Johnny had nothing to do with it.
                         You did what you had to do, between
                         you and you, and I know I'm right, I
                         don't care what you say. And now
                         you're afraid because you found out
                         the big part of you is a wolf that
                         has the courage to bite off its own
                         hand to save itself from the trap of
                         the wrong love. That's why there has
                         been no woman since that wrong woman.
                         You are scared to death what the
                         wolf will do if you make that mistake
                         again!

Later he tells her what's up with her life:

 RONNY
                         And what do you know? You tell me my 
                         life? I'll tell you yours. I'm a 
                         wolf? You run to the wolf in me, 
                         that don't make you no lamb! You're 
                         gonna marry my brother? Why you wanna 
                         sell your life short? Playing it 
                         safe is just about the most dangerous 
                         thing a woman like you could do. You 
                         waited for the right man the first 
                         time, why didn't you wait for the 
                         right man again?

I thought this was such an interesting concept -- "playing it safe is just about the most dangerous thing a woman like you could do." I sometimes feel this way when I think about things that might be considered "playing it safe," like planning on being in a job for longer than three years, being in a committed relationship, otherwise locking myself into something, caging myself in or allowing myself to be caged. I realize it is actually a dangerous thing for a person like me to do. I realize that I probably won't be able to stay locked up like that forever and that when I finally try to extricate myself, there may be significant damage to myself and others.  

It reminds me of the letter Amelia Earhart wrote to her husband George Putnam before they wed: "I may have to keep some place where I can go to be myself, now and then, for I cannot guarantee to endure at all times the confinement of even an attractive cage." And commenting on her own capriciousness in a letter to a friend, "I don't want anything, all the time." So true.

Saturday, December 15, 2012

Promoting prosocial behavior

This was an interesting recent article in the NY Times, "Understanding How Children Develop Empathy," but I thought some of the parts about the source and development of prosocial behavior were just as interesting--particularly that it is not just about (or even primarily) about empathy:


By itself, intense empathy — really feeling someone else’s pain — can backfire, causing so much personal distress that the end result is a desire to avoid the source of the pain, researchers have found. The ingredients of prosocial behavior, from kindness to philanthropy, are more complex and varied.

They include the ability to perceive others’ distress, the sense of self that helps sort out your own identity and feelings, the regulatory skills that prevent distress so severe it turns to aversion, and the cognitive and emotional understanding of the value of helping.

And this part about how people can be taught to feel the rewards of prosocial acts:


Experimental studies have shown that the same brain region that is activated when people win money for themselves is active when they give to charity — that is, that there is a kind of neurologic “reward” built into the motivational system of the brain.

“Charitable giving can activate the same pleasure-reward centers, the dopaminergic centers, in the brain that are very closely tied to habit formation,” said Bill Harbaugh, an economist at the University of Oregon who studies altruism. “This suggests it might be possible to foster the same sorts of habits for charitable giving you see with other sorts of habits.”



The other theory of prosocial behavior, Dr. Huettel said, is based on social cognition — the recognition that other people have needs and goals. The two theories aren’t mutually exclusive: Cognitive understanding accompanied by a motivational reward reinforces prosocial behavior.

But shaping prosocial behavior is a tricky business. For instance, certain financial incentives seem to deter prosocial impulses, a phenomenon called reward undermining, Dr. Huettel said.



I thought that made a lot of sense, that a lot of prosocial acts stem from a greater cognitive understanding that other people have needs and goals. I feel like the more aware I have been taught to be about the inner worlds of others, the more I am naturally inclined to defer to those needs and goals, especially when it is hardly any trouble to me and means so much to them.
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