When Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger ‘discovered’ autism in the 1940s, their focus was on the solitary nature of their unusual patients. But since then many other ‘symptoms’ have been added to the criteria for diagnosis. I’m sceptical of some of them.
Though I have no problem with the main impairment in language and social-interaction, this idea of “restricted activities and interests” as a fundamental symptom of autism really gets under my skin.
For example, this includes the fairly common autistic habit of reading phone books, or dictionaries, etc. I used to think I didn’t read phone books, but one day, reading autistic writer Donna Williams’ book Nobody, Nowhere, I came upon her explanation of why she found phone books enriching, and I realized that I’d been reading them all my life.
Whenever I looked up a personal phone number in the ‘white pages’ I was never able to resist examining the other names on the open pages. Not only did I find out how many people with the same surname lived in the city, but, in Toronto where I lived, the phone book included their addresses, so I could make a mental map of where those people lived. Were they all close together, or were they scattered through the city? I also found things like the changes in spelling of different surnames, and the resemblance of different surnames to each other interesting. Now of course I use the internet, which is less interesting though also less time consuming.
The same thing happened when I looked up a word in the dictionary. I always had to examine other words on the page, again searching for patterns and relationships. I learned a lot about words that way, maybe one reason that I developed writing skills from an early age, despite my difficulty talking.
But tell a psychologist that you read phone books or dictionaries and they’ll worry about you.
Anyway, how does this fall into “restricted activities and interests”?
Well, if you read the literature, you’ll find that psychologists seem to consider any obsession with one subject to the exclusion of others, especially to the exclusion of interest in social inter-action, to be a “restricted activity and interest”.
When I was a boy, as soon as I could read fluently – age seven maybe – I read every book I could find in the library about fish, to the exclusion of everything else. When I couldn’t find more fish books, I switched to reptiles, then to mammals, then to trees, meanwhile always ignoring the conversations of my talkative peers about NHL hockey, TV sitcoms and their schoolyard fights with one another. That, it seems, was another example of “restricted activities and interests”.
I’m reminded of the boy on the train described in psychologist Francesca Happé’s book, Autism:And Introduction to Psychological Theory, who, riding on a train with his classmates wanted to talk about train signals while they were all talking about ball games. He was diagnosed with right hemisphere disorder.
The fact that in the process of indulging your obsession you may learn far more about the world than your peers do on social media, or talking to each other, doesn’t seem to matter. If you focus on something you find very interesting to the detriment of your social life, you’re likely to be found to have a disorder of some kind.
I suppose the five years Charles Darwin spent on the Beagle, so completely focused on the physical traits of the animals he encountered as the ship travelled around the world, would qualify big time as ‘restricted activity and interests’. Never mind that it resulted in the ground-breaking theory of natural selection.
Had Einstein, another man solitary by nature, not been obsessed with the nature of light and gravity, and their relationship to each other, would we have the famous theories of Special and General Relativity today?
A lot of scientific discoveries have probably been the result of ‘restricted activity and interests’.
My point here is this – how do the theorists come to the conclusion that an intense interest in something deserves to be called ‘restricted’? When someone dives deep into the reality of the non-human world instead of obsessing with human relationships as most of society does, how does that merit the term ‘disorder’?
Oddly enough, psychologist Hans Asperger didn’t see this characteristic as pathological. He said the autistic children who he studied were like ‘little professors’ in their ability to talk about a favorite subject. His term for the “restricted activity and interests” was the more benign “intense absorption in a special interest”. I often wonder why Asperger is not listened to anymore.
But that’s not the only ‘symptom’ of autism that annoys me. In some future posts I’m going to examine other ones that I think are questionable.
Alan Conrad 