Gary Numan's self diagnosis criticized in Sunday Times

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A Sunday Times columnist called Gary Numan’s autism ‘bollocks’. The autistic community let her have it [OPINION]


Camilla Long wrote:
“There is nothing about Gary Numan and his stupid facepaint that is “autistic”. An insult to real sufferers”

In a twitter exchange with critics Long brought up his self diagnosis.



Wearing facepaint as an autism disqualifier is one of the stupidest things I have seen written. His friends electric and alien themes as well as his presentation are relatable to many on the spectrum.

Gary Numan turned 15 in 1973. It would be extreamly unlikely anybody would suggest Aspergers at that time as it had been mentioned in a only a few psych journals and it was 8 years prior to Lorna Wing’s paper. A suggestion of autism would have been unlikely but possible. While autism was considered rare at the time Daryl Hannah and Courtney Love were diagnosed in the 60’s and 70’s respectively.

Aspie or not the sound, presentation, and themes of Numan and his New Wave/Synth Pop peers arrived for me after a misreable teen period and as I was entering adulthood and was crucial for my self confidence. In the end that and his pioneering role in electronic music is all that really matters.

I thought it was great the way people defended Numan, and and that they tore that journalist's statements to pieces in a civilized way. It was a textbook example of the right way to do it. They didn't lower themselves to her level.

I hate the way some people try to create a competition out of disabilites, and her comment about face paints was just negative and crass. It wouldn't have been ok if Numan was neurotypical either.

So what are you guys saying? That self-diagnosis is as good as a formal diagnosis and if people self-diagnose that should be taken as gospel and not questioned?

The bit about self-diagnosis in the title is misleading. If you read the article, there is the following quote:

'A child psychiatrist at St Thomas’ Hospital in London suggested it might be Asperger’s. At 15, I was put on Valium and Nardil for about a year but as my mum hadn’t heard of the condition she thought the diagnosis was an insult to her parenting so we stopped seeing the psychiatrist and it was brushed under the carpet.'

If a kid is taken repeatedly to see a child psychologist for behavioral issues and then at the end a child psychiatrist suggests Asperger's, that's good enough for me. Of course we don't know exactly how far they went with testing, but in this instance, assuming that Numan is wrong about his condition doesn't make much sense.

So if I went to the doctor with a lump and the doctor said "It might be a cyst, or it might be cancer, we'll need to do proper tests" and I then went around telling people I have cancer, do you think that's sound?

I don't think she was saying Numan was wrong, I think she was just questioning how valid self-diagnosis is and I don't think there is anything wrong with that. Getting back to my opening analogy why are people so accepting of people self-diagnosing ASD but not other medical conditions? Part of a proper diagnosis isn't just what you have, it's what you don't have and if you're not trained in diagnosis and a broad range of conditions then your self-diagnosis carries very little weight.

Except that Aspergers wasn't officially translated from German to English until the 90's and people started to get diagnosed.

While *some* people do their diagnosis themselves and read and interpret the diagnostic criteria properly, some others want to be "snowflakes" because they are "quirky" and feel they should be "special" - they are the reason why you never should accept a self diagnosis, even if *the others* do it well (like me, i was 100% on spot and wasn't very surprised when i got the official diagnosis a few years ago).

Honestly, I think the journalist in question is just a nasty person trying to get attention for herself on twitter by attacking someone who is a bit vulnerable. And, no, she wasn't just questioning the validity of self/diagnosis, it was a nasty personal attack.

The way I think about self-diagnosis is that I understand why people won't want an official diagnosis for personal reasons. They might want only self-understanding, and in that case I think they should keep it to themselves and whoever absolutely needs to know.

I've been reading in the newspaper about how these days people in the performing arts feel pressured into 'admitting' to all kinds of troubles, so as to garner media attention. It gets absurd at times, with all these minor celebrities sharing their 'social anxiety' with the world, but I'm sure quite a lot of them do have it - the arts are difficult in that doing well in those fields often requires a certain level of sensitivity, yet the way those professional worlds operate are murder on people with sensitive personalities.

I do believe people like Numan, Dan Akroyd and Paddy Considine, though. Akroyd had a diagnosis of Tourette's and a lot of social difficulties as a child, and was diagnosed as an adult. Considine was also diagnosed as an adult, and, of course, there are those who make an art form out of disbelieving someone's diagnosis if they are diagnosed as an adult, but it doesn't make much logical sense, I think.

On the other hand you have people like Jerry Seinfeld, who has the kind of influential position that other performers can only dream about, who goes public saying that he's autistic, based purely on self-assessment, and it just seems silly and raises the bar for people who struggle. What I think is often the case for autistic people in the arts is that even though they can be fairly popular, there will always be certain sections of the audience that will absolutely hate their guts, and they won't have the kind of social skills that propels them to Seinfeld-level popularity.

What it boils down to for me, is a question of what is most likely. Some autistics want a level of certainety that I don't think the world can provide. The person(s) carrying out a diagnostic assessment will also have to go by what they think is most likely - they don't have psychic abilities either. What it boils down to is the level of impairment, which fluctuates.

As for the journalist, any bit of digging, which is what journalists do for a living, would have uncovered that Numan had received a professional opinion about having Asperger's. Professional standards forbid her to make that kind of personal attack on someone with a disability.

She's really just nasty and unprofessional.

Let's see: We have The Times trying to remain relevant in the post-tabloid digital world; Numan remaining true to all his previous statements in various media that, while is hasn't been diagnosed with autism, he has spent a lot of time investigating its diagnostic criteria and his own autism-related behaviors, characteristics and comorbids. I respect anyone who does the work needed to be able to disclose self-identified autism to the public.

My only question about some celebrities who do this self-identified work and disclosure is simple: If I was able to save my pennies over four months to afford a diagnosis because I wanted one, certainly a celebrity would have the ability to do the same in much less time.

Celebrities like Gary Numan and actor Dan Aykroyd seem to me to be teasing with their waning credibility, and I don't want to criticize them. But, it appears to me that they perform a kind of kabuki dance in their perennial quest to join the autistic world without actually taking a step over the finish line (something they clearly wish to do but just can't bring themselves to complete). Both celebrities mentioned here have either been misquoted by media or shaded their lives somewhat intentionally, leaving the public to wonder.

That lack of consistency in their statements casts doubt on their veracity, but maybe they are autistic and willing to disclose only enough evidence to get attention for their latest work, or because a reporter asked and they offered only random factoids as a way to dismiss the brief intrusion. If I was a celebrity, I might toy with the media, too, (something I have done as a public figure more than once in my life) but I would hope to be the kind of autistic celebrity like Anthony Hopkins who was diagnosed and said nothing about it publicly for 10 years ( http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/event/a ... rmers.html ) ... until he had a desire to do so in his own hometown newspaper ( http://www.desertsun.com/story/life/ent ... /96018744/ ). Now, that's classy.

Last edited by AspieUtah on 25 Sep 2017, 6:49 am, edited 1 time in total.

She probably is, yeah, but that's not what the OP was complaining about, he was implying the diagnosis shouldn't be questioned even if it's not formal.

All right, that is a valid point. Either the child psychiatrist used another term, or Numan is remembering wrong/simplifying/fibbing.

I still think the journalist was being unprofessional, though.

Just for interest, when you thought you were most likely autistic but hadn't received a diagnosis yet, did you just block out the thought until you got diagnosed? What do you think about the other extreme, people on the internet who insist that someone's diagnosis is incorrect? I keep wondering why they do that.

For some reason I completely missed what the OP wrote under the link to the article. Was that an edit?

Sorry, that changes a lot.

People keep saying Numan is self-diagnosed, but as has been pointed out, the suggestion of Asperger's actually originally came first from his doctor at a respected children's hospital when he was a kid.

It's not like he was the one who engendered the thought, like many people have to be. He basically received an informal diagnosis earlier in life, which takes him at least out of the strictly self diagnosed category, to be precise.

For those who always deny that someone may be on the spectrum, nothing will ever be good enough--- even if Numan were to obtain the most formal of formal diagnosis tomorrow.

For those who have no strong feelings either way about other people's diagnosis status, it's none of our business, when you think about it.

The only people I do find fault with is a case like Jerry Seinfeld whose remarks truly seemed off the cuff and ill considered, rather than the words of a person who had actually seriously done their research because they had profound belief about this.

I have no clue about Dan Akroyd's but I know Paddy Considine and Daryl Hannah have formal diagnoses.

I am the OP and I did not question self diagnosis per say but did question HIS self diagnosis because of when he said it happened. I think the columnist is clueless about autism in all to typical(pun intended) fashion.

While the is he or isn’t he autistic question is interesting, it is his work that is the important thing.

His career is going fine. The new album debuted at number 2 in the UK. He is not playing dinky bars in small towns

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 25 Sep 2017, 8:11 am, edited 6 times in total.

Well, I kinda reconsidered because of the year he was supposed to have been diagnosed. I think there is something I'm not understanding about these celebrities, possibly because I'm not a celebrity myself What I do know is that their lives are very different from ordinary lives in the sense that they have different challenges and routines, and that the people they meet are by no means a cross section of society. People in the arts can be like sect members. Journalists make up and misunderstand a lot of stuff, though. Reading science news sometimes makes me want to spontaneously combust.

On the other hand, I think some of us women react very badly to the endless questioning of people's motives, because we've had a bellyful of them ourselves. I hate the fuzzy logic of people who should know better. I remember a doctor who tried to convince me I had a certain version of a condition, when four blood tests didn't show a trace of said condition. All the crazy stuff I've been told over the years has led to a strong distrust of professionals. Perhaps a tad of Sherlock Syndrome too, it tends to happen to precocious kids.

That's still not a formal diagnosis though.

Yes, it's true this doctor would have been talking to Numan's mother about Aspergers in a time when, from everything I gather, it wasn't even actually well known at all even among professionals.

So I agree, that seems unlikely that someone in the UK in 1973 got told about Asperger's, thus that does make this part of his story a bit shaky.

Then again, Daryl Hannah had an even earlier, and formal, diagnosis of it I think? If that's so, it would seem it wasn't unheard of for perhaps a very informed clinician to raise the issue, particularly if only informally -- it would even kind of have to be informally if there wasn't a category yet in the UK.

The only good thing that comes out a public figure talking about this -- even if they are not even diagnosed -- is that at least people hearing it might get curious and look up the condition itself.

Thus, even if that celeb is a big phony who doesn't have it at all, at least perhaps a few thousand more people may have decided to find out more about the autism spectrum and perhaps learn something they hadn't known before.

That's one way in which it almost doesn't matter about the specific celeb.