Simonono wrote:
Hell, all Aspies have full-blown Alzheimers, dementia or whatever its called, on the social side
I don't think that's true. My grandmother has dementia, so I have some experience to draw upon.
Basically, Aspies get born wit very poor social skills and some of us learn to cover that up or improve on their social skills. Demented people start out with a more or less normal range of skills (the problem here is the definition of "normal") and they lose those over time.
But what I can agree with is that demented people (and people with Alzheimer's, which is very similar to dementia in many respects) can appear socially impaired in much the same way that Aspies are. They cannot understand what is going on in other people, they are baffled by emotions and they have problems reading body language. My granny seems to live in her own world much of the time and some demented people I have met in the senior's residence where she used to live hardly reacted to the presence of other people at all. Many are scared of strangers and cannot handle change of any kind. When faced with stress, many demented show habits of stimming, talking to themselves and self-harm.
Still, Asperger's, dementia and Alzheimer's are three seperate conditions with seperate causes that do in no way exclude each other.
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