Aspies For Freedom

The Irish radio has aired a few very good shows on Asperger's Syndrome. Michael Fitzgerald, one of the world's most experienced experts on Asperger's syndrome, appears on these shows. Mainly talking about why he thinks WB Yeats, Andy Warhol, Mozart and many others probably had Asperger's syndrome, great stuff. These shows are available on http://www.rte.ie - completely free to listen to. Just thought some of you would like to listen to this.

Rattlebag - interview with Michael Fitzgerald about Glenn Gould, Mozart and a few others.
http://www.rte.ie/arts/2005/0706/rattlebag.html

Outside the box -  features interviews with Michael Fitzgerald and a guy with Asperger's, Pat Matthews. Another expert on Asperger's syndrome, Roger Newson, also appears on the show. You'll need to fastforward about 3 mins into the show unless you'd like to listen to a few months old Irish news programme.
http://www.rte.ie/radio1/outsidethebox/r...ember.smil

Morning Ireland - interview with Michael Fitzgerald about WB Yeats having Asperger's Syndrome.
http://www.rte.ie/news/2004/0109/morning...d56_4.smil

This sounds like interesting stuff, and I hope I will be able to find time to listen to these shows, to find out more about biographies, but not so much to here Prof. Fitzgerald's opinions. I don't doubt that many very brilliant famous people have or had AS, but I don't think Fitzgerald does a good job of arguing these cases.

I have read most of one of Fitzgerald's books, and it left me feeling quite dissatisfied. A number of very important things appear to be missing from Fitzgerald's book "The genesis of artistic creativity". While Fitzgerald does argue that autism has a basis in the structure of the brain and is genetically transmitted, the book gives the reader little sense of autism/AS as a neurological condition. I have not yet found any mention of stim type behaviours in the biographies that I have read in this book. I would have thought that trying to find what a person's stim is would be one of the first tasks of any writer who sets out to argue that someone is autistic, as I am sure that most autists have a stim of some kind. Here is a list of words that are NOT found in the index of this book: Tourette syndrome, stim, tic, dyspraxia, synaesthesia, epilepsy, sensory integration (or sensory anything), OCD, stuttering, speech, echolalia, head size, microcephaly, or macrocephaly. The impression that I got from the book was of AS as a biologically-based personality disorder, with it's primary effect being on the emotions. I think this is a radically incomplete and largely incorrect picture of AS. The author does not appear to be able to transcend his profession of psychiatry, with all of it's Freudian baggage that sits as an obstacle to genuine scientific understanding.

Fitzgerald also appears to have ignored the systemising theory of autism, a huge and serious omission. The words "systemising" and "testosterone" and "male brain" are all absent from the book's subject index. It's a bit like trying to ignore an elephant in the room! :roll:  :?  :roll:

Other minority groups before us have trawled through history looking for their own among people of genius. (e.g. claims that  Beethoven, Haydn, Pushkin, Leonardo, and Plato were black.)

To succeed in this endeavour it was first necessary to redefine blackness so even those who appeared to be white could be classified as "black." Then only individuals from a pre-photographic age could be chosen to thwart the possibility of objective judgement. And most importantly, the figures should all be dead, the longer the better, so they could not speak for themselves, and descriptions of them by others were fragmentary, or allusive, or couched in antique idiom open to very wide interpretation.

The present vogue for remote diagnosis of ASD in dead heros seems to be of a similar sort, and will bring both advantages and disadvantages to our community, perhaps not in equal measure. Time will tell.

That is why I like to tell people they should not claim Character X or Actor X is autistic without confirmation or evidence. Dan Ackroyd has outed himself as an Aspie, and much of his behaviour in the Ghostbusters films ("It just popped in there") points to his Aspieness. There is also evidence to back up the statement that Albert Einstein was an Aspie.

The problem is that some have been taking it too far, applying the label to people seemingly at random because they happen to like the work or whatever of such individuals. Morrisey is one example that springs to my mind. The challenge at present is to stick with what can be corroborated.

You can't use the book's index to find out all the things that are actually in the book. Fitzgerald does bring up and describe these persons in terms of being hyper-systemizers and having superior focusing skills, although never using the term systemizing nor male brain. He does bring up alot of the things that you say isn't in his books, such as stuttering, ADHD, OCD and sensory problems.

He just uses a different terminology. That implies that he is of a different school than Simon Baron-Cohen, I too have found many inconsistencies between their theories. That doesn't mean it isn't interesting

What he does leave out is the stimming part, instead he focuses on motor clumsiness, and I have no problem with that since stimming is a feature that isn't always very prominent in some with Asperger's.

Iron Man, after listening to a number of tracks on Morrissey's bleak 2004 CD "Morrissey, you are the quarry" I was thinking "If that wasn't about AS, then what was it about?" He certainly is a depressive, but that doesn't explain a fraction of the many issues that he has had for decades. And aspies are often depressives also.

There are so many famous or great people who everyone agrees were/are very unusual types, or had many "issues", but there is not really any DSM category or explanation, besides AS, that fits these people and explains everything, so I think it is often fair to ask "If he wasn't an aspie, then what was he then?" I could pose this question in regard to Morrissey, Michael Jackson, Howard Hughes, Newton ..... With all of these figures there is a mountain of evidence that they are/were "different".

Arle wrote

It might not be obvious as these behaviours are generally either concealed or take the form of some socially acceptable behaviour, but if I were a clinician I wouldn't diagnose AS or autism in any person with whom I couldn't find a stim. PDD-NOS maybe.

And I believe significant motor clumsiness is by no means found in all aspies.

From a pragmatic point of view one can understand why it's hard to find information about a certain person having stim behaviour, and it's not the most important diagnostic criterion, just a hint of it.

Motor clumsiness is not found in all aspies and he certainly knows that, he does look for it though and he finds these features in many of them such as Warhol (who never learnt to dance even though he tried very hard and never learnt to tie his own shoe laces ), but not in all persons he writes about.

Have you considered the fact that unless someone actually wants to be identified as an Aspie, identifying them as such might make them hostile to our cause? Or that in such cases, the ability they have to do damage to our cause is far greater than that which we have to theirs?

I've thought a great deal about that and it's that criticism which is the most valid and what makes this whole thing quite controversial. Nonetheless, Fitzgerald seems to be focusing on persons who reached some sort of insight about themselves. In his view, these persons would probably have agreed that they had AS, had the diagnosis been available.

Fitzgerald writes about dead people who displayed many of the characteristics of AS, one can certainly discuss the ethics of that since they can't confirm nor deny it. But you seem to think that he is diagnosing alive people from a distance without any evidence, which he is not. He uses massive biographical data coupled with his experience and knowledge about autism and AS.

Yeats for instance said: "I have no instincts for the personal life" and "sometimes the barrier between myself and other people filled me with terror". So Fitzgerald argues that Yeats knew what the problem was, as he talked alot about it and acknowledged it. And above all sought to find the answer to why things were as they were.

Personally I don't think that Fitzgerald is right about all these persons, I think some of them had it but hardly all of them. To me it's clear that Michael Fitzgerald admires people with AS a great deal though and that he knows alot about the diagnosis, after all he's diagnosed over 900 persons with autism clinically.

I hope all of the 900 actually have autism!

I think it could be fair to diagnose on the basis of clearly expressed and authentic written work by the person in question, dead or alive, as long as the evidence could only be explained as AS. I'm not convinced that the Yeats quotes are sufficient evidence alone, as I could imagine they could be the musings of a person who is abnormally concerned with things social and has unrealisitc expectations about relationships, as many NTs are.

I found it interesting that being unable to tie shoelaces was cited as evidence of clumsiness in the case of Warhol. I get the impression that when people say of an autistic that "He is so disabled that he can't even tie his own shoelaces!!!" that they are alleging that the autistic is intellectually ***, not merely clumsy.

Fitzgerald made a big deal of Bruce Chatwin's voice as a possible indication of AS in his book. I recently listened to a recording of Chatwin reading one of his books, and his voice didn't strike me as aspie in any way, quite the opposite. I thought it had a self-important tone and competantly-regulated pitch that is typical of NTs. After reading Fitzgerald's piece about Chatwin I was convinced Chatwin was not autistic.

Yeah I agree, the evidence he presents for Chatwin having AS was not convincing at all. However, Warhol is in my opinion, a quite clear case. A fanstastic constellation of strengths and weaknesses, he is a paradox and can only be understood in terms of Asperger's, I'd say.

I never like to diagnose anyone with anything unless I have a clear indication. Unless I see pus oozing from the sides of a toenail, I am not going to tell its owner that their toenail is ingrown.

The best evidence in favour of Albert Einstein being an Aspie is the testimony of his schoolteachers. Some wrote to his parents that he was ***. When he died, his research had changed the world so radically that they named an element of the periodic table or some such after him. As for those schoolteachers, I would be impressed if anyone could name one.

Rather than mass-diagnosing people, I think it would be best to do biographies of famous individuals who were Aspies so that the normies out there can see that Asperger's Syndrome is still only a small part of a very big picture.

I believe that is what is happening, Nobel prize winners, Field's medalists, inventors, professors, famous programmers and artists, are starting to talk about them having AS. I believe that is a good thing, since it'll bring about a more understanding world.

Here's a video, where Vernon Smith, Nobel Prize winner in economics talks about his AS and it's selective advantages:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7030731/

I've added more stuff to my list of "Famous Aspies" in another thread. God help me, I'm an obsessive! :roll: