Aspies For Freedom

Another example of patronizing journalism at it's finest.

Disabled man to receive his associate’s degree in May
April 02,2006
SANDY WALL
SPECIAL TO THE SUN JOURNAL
If you think it’s tough being a college student, imagine how difficult it must be for someone who has Asperger’s Syndrome, a type of autism.

Despite the obvious challenges, Craven Community College student Chris Marr has made it look easy.

Marr will graduate this May with an associate’s degree in mechanical engineering drafting and design. He plans to take a chemistry course this summer and then plans to enroll in Craven’s challenging 2+2 engineering partnership with N.C. State University.

“I want to get a bachelor’s degree and then hopefully get a good job and go from there,” the 22-year-old said recently, adding that, when he graduates, he will become the first person on his mother’s side of his family to earn a college degree.

April is an appropriate time to call attention to and celebrate Marr’s accomplishments here at Craven — it’s National Autism Awareness Month.

According to the Autism Society of America, autism is a complex developmental disability that affects the normal functioning of the brain. Adults and children with autism typically show difficulties in verbal and non-verbal communication, social interactions and leisure or play activities.

Asperger’s Syndrome is a high-functioning form of autism. People with the disorder generally have normal or high levels of intelligence and, while they might not be the most gregarious people in the room, they’re usually capable of doing high-level work.

Marr was diagnosed with Asperger’s when he was 14. Naturally, Marr’s parents were troubled by the news, but they worked with his teachers to make sure he received the services and instruction he needed.

At school, Marr was mainstreamed, with one daily session in the Exceptional Children’s program. At New Bern High, he showed great strength in math and even qualified for an honors class in history.

Marr graduated from high school in 2002 and enrolled at Craven that fall. At about the same time, the motivated Marr got his driver’s license on his first try.

“He is a late bloomer, but all good things come to those who wait,” Marr’s mother, Diane, reports. “Our son is going to make it in this life.”

Marr has thrived at Craven, where he’s even been hired to tutor some of his fellow students in the Computer Aided Design (CAD) lab.

“I like the teachers,” he said. “They’ve been patient. They’ve been very helpful. I’m not just saying that to be nice.”

Marr singled out drafting instructor Donna Bell for praise, and also had kind words for Bill Fortney, director of N.C. State’s 2+2 engineering program, and for recently retired math instructor Harry Lassiter.

He plans to take his NCSU engineering courses at Craven and online so he won’t have to move to Raleigh, and he looks forward to a career in design.

“You can make something,” he said. “You can see something you designed being made.”

Marr said his Asperger’s hasn’t hindered his college education. He even said it might have helped him a little.

And what’s Marr’s advice to his fellow students?

“Be calm, don’t stress. Don’t wig out, basically.”

Sandy Wall is the community relations coordinator at Craven Community College. He can be reached at walls@cravencc.edu.

       :sick:

How nice of him to provide an e-mail address so that we can all tell him what we think.   :twisted:

As bad as that article was it's nothing compared to this:

Petty Quarrels Turn Deadly; Empty Tissue Roller Leads To Murder

February 24, 2006
By JESSE LEAVENWORTH, Courant Staff Writer

We've all been there. Sitting on the pot, staring at an empty cardboard roll, the fury rising.

Most of us will let the anger drain and find an emergency alternative, but police in Florida say Franklin Crow went ape recently over the absence of bathroom tissue and smashed his roommate's skull with a sledgehammer handle.

"We've got the BTK killer, and now we've got the TPK killer - the ·Toilet Paper Killer,'" said Frank Farley, a psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia.

As Farley noted, the why in this case may go much deeper than tissue paper, but Crow is far from unique in his seemingly superficial motive for murder. Police around the country say young people are killing each other over mean looks, and one psychiatrist who works with convicted murderers says more hair-trigger homicides are likely because of a misdiagnosed, or undiagnosed, brain disorder.

In the Florida case, Crow, 56, was arrested Monday on a charge of murder in the death of Kenneth Matthews, 58, of Ocklawaha. Newspaper reports say Crow and Matthews were arguing about a lack of toilet paper in the home they shared when Matthews grabbed a rifle. Crow allegedly knocked the gun away and hit Matthews eight times in the head with a sledgehammer handle. Not finished, Crow hit his roommate two more times with a claw hammer, police said.

Closer to home, a Framingham, Mass., man was convicted of killing his wife after an argument about scorched ziti. After Laura Jane Rosenthal, 34, criticized him for burning their dinner, Richard Rosenthal smashed her head with a rock, then cut her torso open and impaled her heart and lungs on a stake in the backyard. Rosenthal lost an insanity plea and was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for the 1995 killing.

And in Connecticut back in the late 1980s, jurors in the trial of Arthur Werley heard testimony that Werley killed Kimberly Labrecque in part because she said he looked like Howdy Doody. A red-haired and pale young man at the time, Werley allegedly snapped when Labrecque, 21, refused his sexual advances and likened him to the popular 1950s TV marionette. He shoved her down cellar stairs in his Torrington home, then bludgeoned her with a rock. Werley was convicted of manslaughter in 1990 and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Farley, the psychologist, says, "I don't think people should panic and think of this as an epidemic."

However, he said, rage in America has spread far beyond fights between angry motorists, to airplanes, ball fields, ski slopes and the Internet. The anger, Farley said, is fueled in part by an increasingly busy, multitasking society, by family destabilization and by reality TV ringmasters such as Jerry Springer.

"I think, increasingly, we are making the private world public," he said. "There's a loosening of civil inhibitions. ... What you feel may lead to what you do."

The New York Times recently reported on the rise in killings prompted by seemingly petty disputes - over a dress, use of a soap dish, a cellphone - and by young people's perceptions of disrespect. Milwaukee Police Chief Nannette H. Hegerty called it "the rage thing." "We're seeing a very angry population, and they don't go to fists anymore, they go right to guns," Hegerty told the Times.

Some people, however, have biological trigger points that lie dormant, like a hairline crack in a house foundation, until something sets them off, says Dr. Donna Schwartz-Watts, director of forensic services at the University of South Carolina.

Part of her job as a forensic psychiatrist, Schwartz-Watts said, involves working with state prisoners. Four convicted murderers she sees have Asperger's Syndrome, a brain disorder related to autism. Among other problems, those who suffer from Asperger's lack social skills, have trouble empathizing with others and can be ultra-sensitive to sound, light and touch.

One of the cases she worked on, Schwartz-Watts said, involved a 22-year-old man convicted of killing an 8-year-old boy. The two had been trading video games outside when the boy ran over the man's foot with his bicycle, she said. The man went berserk, pulled out a gun and shot the boy.

She found that the man's sudden action was caused by an aspect of Asperger's Syndrome called "tactile defensiveness." Think of the movie "Rain Man," she said, when Tom Cruise's character tries to hug Ray, played by Dustin Hoffman, and Ray folds up and starts screaming.

Schwartz-Watts said she is trying to get a grant to study the prevalence of Asperger's Syndrome among South Carolina inmates. She fears that the disorder is more widespread than is known, and until society gets a better handle on it, "you're going to see a lot more of these crimes."

as a college student currently, this article is digusting, making our accomplishments look like sob stories people should cry about, hey i finished college, that's nice, next.  i think college is much harder on the non autistic student, but that's just my view.  it all depends on the person, saying autism makes college harder is a vast overstatement and sterotyping.  this is why i don't tell people at school i'm autistic.  that's like saying it's harder for blacks to finish college becuase they are black (i'm also black btw.)  college wasn't harder for me becuase i'm autistic (btw, i'm one semester away from graduation with a bs in biology, 3.4 gpa), it was just differnt.  i understood concepts alot easier than my non autistic classmates, i wasn't occupied with soical life as much as everyone else (i do have a bit of a soical life, but school comes first), but yes, college is rough on everyone.  i'm just suprised on how easy college was.  coming from high school, i was expecteing it to be harder...lol.  i have slight speech problems with a few sounds (like th- and f-) and especally if i start talking fast.

i'm not disabled...what a stupid thing to call me.  i'm just diffrent, with diffrent needs...i can easily do things that others struggle with (computers and "complex" things), while i struggle sometimes to do "trival things" (i couldn't tie shoes until high school, still have frequent trouble, partly due to my laces though).

okay, what does soical interactions, lesiure and play activies have to do with doing well in college?  not much, i actually belive it's counterproductive in many cases.  so less distractions from studies means more time hitting the books while the non autistic counterparts are out drinking at some bar downtown the night before an exam.

although i go to a small school where this is alot more important, communcation won't matter much in larger universities, becuase the professors are too busy with their other things to talk to a chump undergrad...that's a diffrent subject entirley, but the point is that communication isn't that high on the college prioity list.

and yeah, what an approitate time to celebrate sterotyping and saying that expect for the lucky few like this person in the article, we are incompetent dependent bums.  i'm talking about autism profit month btw.  and the ASA speaks as if it was bad for us for being born and staying the way we are through adulthood...digusting.

I read somewhere on Attwood's website that Aspies are more likely to go to college. Then I thought to myself, "but less likely to find a job afterwards".

An aspie finished a course? This is news? </sarcasm>

The concerning thing is linking the increase in diagnoses to an increase in murder, what does this tell the public?

That's definitely true, I finished my BA to go with my Associate's last December, but I have yet to find a job. If everything goes well, I may be working for the county. I passed the civil service and typing tests back in January, and I'm just now going to start interviews. Once I get a job, I'll be functioning so normally, it'll get the curbie's panties in a bunch.

I just received this response to my e-mail complaining about the "disabled man receives degree" story:

well im even more detumined and focused then a lot of students on my performing arts course. sure it is hard because i don't have the social skills needed to maintain relationships which are an important part of perfroming arts. but i also know i stuggle less in terms of focusing and cos i dont' go paryting all the time and drinking i am able to come into uni at my best. a lot of autistic people get though uni.

guess what i have a lot of physically disabled friends too and at coventry univercity in england. it is more common for people with disabilites and people from other countries  to suceed then it is for the average person. i feel privaliged to go to uni because not only am i autistic i am also in care! brought up in foster care means that i am at the bottom of the pile in most cases. so i got quite repuatation/stima but that also means people tend to be suprised that i wasn't pregnant at 15 or younger and not on drugs they seem suprised that i succeed. but i feel if i wasn't in care then i wouldn't have got the help i needed so i wouldn't be at uni. my parents wouldn't want to pay lol. i also got the help i needed. so my mum was real brave and good for giving me up.

Yeah, that seems to be a common reaction from NTs, doesn't it?  They don't seem to realise that autism is NOT always a huge drawback in studying, in fact in some cases it's a huge asset. My having hyperlexia is a case in point: I can plough through vast amounts of reading material with comparative ease, and then distill the lot into a smaller, more cohesive whole.  (Something my husband is always exploting; I've helped him get every job he's had since we met thanks to his own ability and my writing of his resumes  :grin: )  

Also, many of us have high IQs, which is another salient point which seems to escape the majority of NTs.  
Alison

I thought you were referring more to foster care than to autism per se.

It's extremely unlikely an autistic girl would get pregnant at 15.

(Do let me know when that happens!).

Thank you for acknowledging your mother.

It's extremely unlikely an autistic girl would get pregnant at 15.

Not that unlikely, autistics girls are more likely to be abused from what we have seen, and the UK has the highest teen pregnancy rate in europe anyway.

Seriously! I recently made the decision to get an engineering degree... because I found astrophysics too difficult...!

Okay, yeah. I've got serious ADHD and I've gotten more than one "F" in my grade reports. It's more difficult for me than for some. But it's not amazing for an Aspie to get a college degree, and I won't be the first. Or even the millionth, most likely.

We don't suffer from AS, just ignorant attitudes and lack of understanding of our condition. I agree though that we often are very intelligent.

No worries - I might have been a bit picky.