gigaday

Ha ha!

Chris Why on Earth were you trying to manufacture nitrogen trichloride? (Let alone chlorine.) Both are very toxic ... I just read that flour bleached with nitrogen trichloride gave dogs epileptic fits and that was discovered in 1947. Anyway, you obviously had a lot of curiosity as a youngster. I experimented a little with chemistry (nitrogen triiodide) and I was very interested in electronics (largely unsuccessfully due to lack of resources) and carpentry. I started a 10 year stint at boarding school aged 7 years. I had some "mates" at school from age 13 to 18 but holiday times were always spent without social contact besides my mother and brother - father was overseas. I hated all my school days ... Apart from alcoholism and pot smoking - now over 30 years ago; and workaholism, depression and irrational behaviour, I was reasonably "successful". But, I understand what you mean about being a fraud - even in computing there were things that I could do quite well and many others that were beyond me. Tony

Well done for your singing, trekster. Sadly for me my singing is as bad as everyone told me - I do sing in a choir though. For me singing along with others is a lot easier than on my own, as I can follow along.

Have you tried meditation or relaxation techniques? I overcame years of alcohol and drug abuse and I found 12-step fellowships provided companionship, but they are not for everyone. I found tai chi the easiest meditation because it gives something physical to focus on. Zen philosophy can also be very calming.

How about using velvet? It might feel better on smooth lips rather than damaged ones.

Chris Thanks for your recommendation on the John Elder Robison book. I finished it a few weeks back and have been meaning to say something. Some of his behaviour to his brother was alarming, the way he bullied him. And his stunt with the mannequin was extreme. I was intrigued at his hypothesis that he was a savant in the way he could _hear_ what electrical circuits sounded like by looking at the circuit diagrams, but is suppose that is no more amazing than others' savant abilities. He did well to find a channel for his abilities in auto-mobiles and he managed his social skills well. I am not at all a savant but I have some talents in problem solving, mechanical engineer and computing. I had quite a successful career in IT - not too remarkable but adequate to raise 3 sons in comfort. The things that bug me are the things that I can't do or find very hard to do - mainly to do with sport and physical activities. For example I would love to have been able to skate but on the occasions I tried I couldn't even stand up for a second. My family have ridiculed my singing for years and when I had dance lessons aged 18, the teacher told me that I was wasting my money after 3 sessions. Playing a musical instrument has always been an ambition and I still try to do this although I recognise that I do not have what people would call talent or aptitude.

Try lip salve eg Chapstick to stop your lips having loose bits that you can pick at.

Do you mean you want to work as a translator or an interpreter? I would think that you could find translation work without having to move away from your family. Failing that, you could use your language skills in other ways eg teaching, research .... People with language skills often make good computer people. too.

Yes, there will be a lot more diagnosis going on and really no way of knowing if there is actually any increase in incidence. How does the 15 in 1000 figure (which is about 1 in 67) relate to the 1 in 42? Anyway, I guess that there is something that could be measured. Take a fully diagnosed sample and then give them all the tests - those not capable of doing the tests are likely the non-HFAs. Thanks Chris for the extra reading material. Tony

Thanks, Chris, for giving us some pointers on reading matter. Just one last thing: if the 1/42 number relates to people who are mainly if not all HFA, the number of people who have debilitating autism must be quite small. Do we have any idea what this number might be? Tony

Very likely. But the most important thing is whether you can cope now. How do you manage?

Chris All very interesting. Now one might ask: what separates the HFAs from the others? At one time they were thought of separately. I wonder if there is any test or definition to differentiate, any line to cross? Autistic savants seem to straddle the line if there is one, with remarkable abilities in something specific but otherwise unable to cope. In my search for answers to my own dilemmas I looked into Neuro Linguistic Programming. Quite a bit of it is fraudulent mumbo-jumbo but there is also a lot of good stuff buried in it if one digs around a bit. One of the ideas that came out (long before it became mainstream and fashionable) was thinking of the brain (animal or human) in terms of computers. Instinct = firmware, memory = data storage, learning = programs, consciousness = central processing - etc. An interesting thing in NLP was that it raised the possibility of changing or implanting "programs"; again these days this isn't so ground breaking but the early 70s it was quite new. One of the most revolutionary ideas was that a person could be made to change their beliefs in just a few minutes by using external or internal persuasion techniques. I have some experience of doing this myself, but I digress. From a young age I held the idea that my brain had been “wired up wrong” or at least differently from other people's – this is reflected by the fact that I am quite good at a few things and totally inept at many things that most people can do fairly easily. Bringing this back to ASD, I have not yet done much reading but I wonder of anyone has any idea what is actually different in these people's brains – it has to come down to brains in the end. And how there might be a continuum of brain structures that results sometimes in specialisms and sometimes in non-functioning. Please pardon me if this is all common knowledge. I would like to know where to start looking for more information. Tony

Chris The fact that people with ASD are included in the control is actually the way that I want it for my own personal quest. It may well distort the distribution curve if you want to look at NTs only but that doesn't bother me. The statistic of 1 in 42/49 males being on the spectrum is of the most interest. Did you say how the CDC arrived at this number? Also, pardon my ignorance, what is CDC? The next interesting thing to look at, for me, is the solid line curve in Fig 1. What accounts for the strange bit hanging out to the left? Is it people who are just weird but not ASD? Is it older subjects who have learned to behave in such a way that they can change their AQ score? Other reasons? Another question would be, at about what AQ score would we expect to stop seeing people who were HFA? The peak of the curve is at about AQ=38; we could imagine that this is the place where we would no longer expect to see HFAs – it's just a what if. Or maybe HFA doesn't relate to AQ score at all. I have just search the ARC document for “functioning” which has raised another interesting point: if a person is not “high-functioning” how did they get them to do the AQ test at all? Maybe it says somewhere. The real question that I am interested in finding an answer to is: “just how weird am I compared to the population at large?”. The “population at large” would include, say, only HFA people as other autistic people might not be generally “at large”. The 1 in 42/49 figure would include all the people under the solid curve not just those “at large” - greatly reducing my chances of meeting one in the street. Tony

Chris I suspect that we are looking at this from different points of view. Yours being more scientific whereas I am accepting that the results of the AQ test are a good indication of what a full diagnosis would be - albeit approximate. If the line is drawn at 32, it doesn't have to be but that seems to be the figure that has been chosen, and I take the dotted curve, import it into GIMP and set up grid lines and then count the squares, I get 357 to the left of 32 and 8 to the right. (I didn't actually "count" them but that's about the numbers.) So, 357 divided by 8 = 44.62, which is very close to the 42 figure for the ratio you quote. This is quite satisfying because it indicates that the graph corresponds with the 1 in 42 figure. In other words, aren't the ones to the right of 32 going to be all ASD as predicted by the test? No-one ever said they were all NTs, just a random sample. In fact, I have probably just reverse engineered the 32 figure and this was how they came up with it in the first place. This would mean that my guess at 20 people in the room was wrong - I didn't count squares, just guessed. So I could be in a roomful of about 45 people not 20 and still be the odd man out - roughly speaking. Tony

Chris I think I see what you mean. The two curves in Fig 1 really have nothing to do with each other and they should not really be on the same diagram, except that they illustrate that a hand picked sample of AS/HFA people score higher than the general population. It would have been interesting to take the random sample _and_then_ diagnose which of them would have been in the AS/HFA group without knowing what they had actually scored. However, I think that my points 1 and 2 are valid nevertheless, but not precise, because they each relate to only one of the curves. I'm an IT person who graduated as a mechanical engineer so I understand graphs better than I do mathematical statistics. Bayesian? Degrees of belief?? Tony

Just to clarify my understanding; my maths isn't what it used to be which wasn't so great anyway: Looking at Fig 1 in the ARC document: If I want to determine what proportion of the population is lower than I am on the AS scale according to the AQ test, I need to look at only the dotted line ie the control group. If I draw a vertical line at AQ=32 (my score), the area under the dotted line to the left measures the proportion of people less autistic than I and the area to the right of the line those that are more autistic than I. Am I right? This would make me in about the top 5% of the population considered to by on the AS spectrum? In other words in any random gathering of 20 people I would be the AS one? Using the same vertical line at 32, the area under the solid line to the left measures the proportion of people who are diagnosed to be on the spectrum that are less autistic that I and the area on the right those that are more autistic than I. Am I right? This would make me in about the bottom 5% of people considered to be on the AS spectrum? Likewise in any gathering of 20 diagnosed AS people I would be the most “normal” one? This means that the only way I can fit in (I am joking here) is to get everyone I meet to test their AQ scores and only select those with scores of, say, 27 to 37 to socialise with. Tony

It's just for personal info that I am interested. I am 71 years old and always thought I was "weird" and had a lot of "difficulties", but I have had a fairly successful life and raised a family etc. My middle son has always had problems and a grandson is definitely odd and my other sons and my father could be said to have traits. The middle son is 47 and has just been assessed - he scored on the spectrum on AQ tests but they decided he was just outside the "limit" on interviews. He also has a job, family, house, son and most to the time he copes, but he does have severe difficulties. On the on-line tests I scored AQ=32 and EQ=20, which if you believe tests puts me on the AS spectrum. There would be little point in getting a full diagnosis now as neither result would be helpful to me, but I do feel that if I am on the spectrum it would answer a lot. Chris, yes thanks for your good work, you are more capable than I and more patient. The document you quoted is interesting in that it set out to prove or disprove the validity of the tests and in fact did show that they have a lot of validity even if not an absolute marker. Of course, there will be people whose scores are wildly at variance with the rest of their characteristics. But Fig 1 does show a high correlation between diagnosis and the test. My interest was sparked by wondering if _everyone_ isn't "on the spectrum" somewhere and whether I am rubbing shoulders with lots of people who are, but I just think they are weird. Maybe not everyone but am _I_ really weird or just a different normal amongst my peers - and what proportion of the population do we comprise. Do most people really not feel depressed and useless? Do they not have dark thoughts? Do they not have secrets they would never reveal? etc etc etc I know that most people can socialise, which I find difficult to the point of sometimes having to duck out because of anxiety feelings. I just want to know where I fit in by not fitting in - if you see what I mean. Tony

Chris Thanks for your reply. It will take me a while to look at and understand it all, but it certainly looks very interesting. Tony

Trekster Thanks. I had a similar idea and wrote to the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University, which I believe is run by Dr Simon Baron Cohen. If anyone has done this research I would think they would know about it.

Trekster True. But if anyone had actually run a study using a properly random selection of people we would know what the distribution in the population at large is. If it's not been done already. I would find this interesting. It could be a student project.

Does anyone know if there are statistics on the percentage of people from the whole population analysed by AQ test scores? Eg xx% of people score = 40 on the test.

KezT, after reading your signature line I decided that I should stop worrying about myself ... Many thanks for your input. My biggest fear would be a negative diagnosis as this would put me back to looking for explanations as to why I am me.

Supposing that someone over 50 years old starts to wonder if the reason for their life difficulties and depressive bouts could be linked to ASD. And they were to complete an on-line AQ test showing that they are indeed on the spectrum. Bearing in mind that they have successfully held down jobs and raised a family through their adult life; what benefit might they achieve from a formal positive/negative diagnosis?

Lufty, thanks for looking into it. I'm sure everyone is doing their best to maintain the forum.

I don't know what the protocol for this is but it seemed to me that I could not post anything until my membership had been validated. I took two weeks for my account to be validated and that only after repeated requests and finally guessing the email addresses of the admins. The contact email address of moderators@asd-forum.org.uk is invalid and bounces making it even harder to make any sort of contact. Now that I am a member I have looked at the member list and I can see that there are at least 14 other people waiting to be validated, some of them for over a month now. I don't know exactly what criteria you look for in someone's application for membership but there is precious little information available to the admins, so it is hard to see what the purpose of validation actually is. In any event it seems to take far too long, if people want to be members of a forum they feel that they have something they want to say and making them wait like this is wrong.