Social Skills Training for Adults

Post Reply New Topic

They actually begin to work in hours. The fact that most people do not feel it for weeks is not the same as them not doing something...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8304782.stm



And here we are full circle. HA HA HA at Aspies. We all seem to do this btw. It's called ToM to realize that others will have different feelings and experiences than us. You strongly believe that because something happened to you that it will likely happen to me. Studies are showing that it is possible but not probable.

And while it makes me giggle a bit, I do appreciate your concern and your input. I am being very careful in my choices and will pay much attention to the outcomes of this. If I do develop serious sides such as you state, I'll post them here and you can HA HA at me.







You asked me why I would assume that you felt as though others would feel the same horrible sides as you and I showed you the statements that you said that infer this pretty clearly. THAT is my only point.

The facts are that all SSRIs have horror stories attached to them which is why I have not gone down this road lightly and taken great care to select the right one to start on. In this exchange I pointed out to you real evidence and referenced studies in Pubmed that disagree with your personal anecdotal story. All you are doing in return is throwing out the same anecdotes and straw-man arguments despite the fact that I have asked you repeatedly to show me the studies by which you base your information. You want me to take you seriously and to act differently but you cannot articulate why outside of your experience. I am done playing with you for now. I have thanked you for your concern but if you cannot come up with anything better than your own story or lay press data then this conversation is over.

Last edited by kfisherx on 23 Apr 2011, 7:35 pm, edited 3 times in total.

I do agree with this. I guess I find it problematic to entirely dismiss the tools we do have.

Of course they begin to work (absorb or bond with serotonin) once then chemical is ingested, but that is not the same as doing anything. You don't appear to comprehend the difference between changes in brain chemistry and brain cell receptors which are sensitive to chemicals.

As for the BBC news link (lifted word for word from the American Journal of Psychiatry) - what kind of anti-depressant?




I have no wish to laugh at you at all. I find it both odd and disturbing that you find this a topic of humour.

It's not that I think it's bad that you are learning about it. That isn't actually what I said in my post. I said it annoyed me that the NT way is assumed to be superior, when in this case their way is just accommodating a need that autistic people have less of.

I suppose I'm not awed by the discovery, because this is something I have always understood. If someone had approached me and said hi, I would have known that they wanted to make small talk. Whether or not they got it would depend on my position. If I had been (as I have often been) in an entry level job, I would have chatted to them, because it would increase my chance of keeping/continuing with that job and of getting a good reference for the future. If on the other hand it was outside work, or I was their boss, I would have reacted the way you did, not because I don't get what they want, but because I think it's silly and they should learn not to need it.

You are in a position of power over a number of people, so I think "meeting them half way" should really mean you dealing with the things that you do less efficiently, and making them deal with the things that they do less efficiently. This is a scenario where your way is more efficient. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't learn the skill- in any event it is useful to have it for communication with customers or people with whom you want a friendship, but at work it would be better if people stopped needing emotional bonding to work with other people.

Do you know what a straw-man argument actually is? Please point out where I have used one. I'm genuinely surprised by this claim.



You haven't that I've noticed but it is late here and I'm too tired to re-read all that before bed.



And indeed I've never claimed to have anything other than personal experience and what I have read. And what I have read does indicate that the side effects I mentioned are common enough, even if not the majority, to warrant concern. Since you are fond of quoting your Doctor, mine instantly recognised the sexual dysfunction and apathy caused by Citalopram.



Now we have the crux. Quite unkind

Wrong on both counts. I am not complaining about £15 of company money. Presumably Karla and her colleague are not the only 2 people employed by intel who will be expecting each other to make pointless small talk. This s**t costs companies £millions. My mom spends about 40%-50% of her work day doing this crap (she is in sales, and a key part of the job is relationship management) and while I don't doubt that it is effective, and necessary for the company, it is necessary ONLY BECAUSE of the inadequacy of the way neurotypical people are made that they will make economically irrational decisions to fulfill their psychological needs.

1. I don't understand this assumption that the NT way is "superior" somehow. I don't look at it that way at all. I see it as they are the majority and they have a "need" for this so they do it. I also believe that most of them know very little to nothing about autism and my communication. I cannot ask them to "feel" differently and I am not going to intentionally hurt them because they do not know my Language. In the case of my own team members who are NT and especially those who work for me, I think I should care enough to try to give them this if that is what they want. Of course that is just my opinion and how I am choosing to handle this.

2. The fact that you KNOW instinctively that someone coming up behind you and saying, "Hi" means they want to do small talk tells me you know a crap-ton more about the social rules and isms than I do. That kind of stuff just has always boggled my mind so I felt justified in being rude. Now I know what they are doing and why so I amma gonna sometimes choose to NOT be rude.

3. Your understanding of how teams work makes me giggle a little. The social aspect of it is VERY important and even though I never understood that part of it before I have been leading and around teams enough to know that they need that in order to have synergy. If everyone was as efficient as "we" tend to be there would be too much silo'd work being done and not enough collaboration. The world needs both kinds of people and to this date I have done a fine job of proving that my kind has a place in their world.

I want to add here that while I am doing social skills training thing my whole team is becoming educated about autism and how to speak it. They now let me know before they make context switches. They actually carry "joke cards" and hold them up so that I don't try to defend someones sarcasm, they warn me before loud noises, etc... We are all working to bridge the worlds, both of us making some changes to give to the other... and that is what neurodiversity really is all about.

I think you are probably coming at this from a different perspective because you have been given a diagnosis much later in life, when you had already established yourself in a position of power. I was given mine without having given any consent to the process or expressed any desire for help at the age of 11, and then gave people around me the weight of the medical establishment behind them to argue that I was defective and should change, so I have a lot of resentment towards people framing the NT as the better way when it isn't, and for me automatically choosing to change towards the NT way (when it sucks) seems like giving it more privilege than it should have. I have developed a fairly hardened shell to being expected to change myself, because if I hadn't had that I wouldn't have much of a "self" or much of my own personality left, and the strength of that personality is what has pulled me out of some really negative times when anxiety/depression were getting the better of me. That probably seems like a random tangent but it was intended to give you some idea of the position I come at things from.

I do understand that it's a very different experience if you are much more in control of choosing which demands/needs to fulfill and which to ignore. That said, I still think you are doing things back to front. Ideally, you would learn how to read sarcasm and make context switches (because needing an indication wastes everyone's time, and sarcasm can be a useful communication tool) and they would try to feel differently about small talk, because that wastes everyone's time too.

You are right about my "teamwork" though- it's never been my strong suit. Maybe you have some useful advise

My main problem is that I have difficulty "joining in"- I tend to end up either not doing very much because all the roles have been taken and I am left with something I am not suited to.

Oh. I get it now. This is an aspie pride, super human next step in evolution thing.

1. I think Daspie's argument was that Celexa should be taken off the market because the side effects can be so extreme in enough people that the benefits of having it available for the people for whom it is effective are outweighed by the fact that it risks some people going through the experience s/he had. That isn't a position I support, but I don't think she said everyone had the same response or that it was never effective.

2. I agree with your points re the different effects on autistic people, and since you can metabolise the drug in a few hours, you can theoretically experience the benefits.

3. "Playing with you" was a bit harsh. Having an emotionally strong reaction to a topic (which is likely to be the case when you are talking about horrific suffering because of a med) is likely to cause people to make less-than-rational arguments, even when they are otherwise intelligent and rational people.

Errr, no. I don't think autistic necessarily means better, and I don't think NT necessarily means better. We both have our strengths and weaknesses, and we should all work to build the strengths and eradicate the weaknesses. This is an NT weakness. so NT's should change it. Not grasping sarcasm is an autistic weakness, that should be addressed.

Also, there is nothing about evolution that means better-but that is a whole other debate that isn't relevant.

It'd be nice if people didn't equate "aspie pride" with the rest of that.

A six-nine months old intuitively starts to recognize facial expressions of people and we don't do that. As I have mentioned it earlier also that our social understanding, whatever little it is, comes through drill. And we must appreciate that many of us are too adept at social skills to realize how adept they are!
Six years ago I thought that life is easy for people like me who are intelligent, I did not even know how stupid I was.

I have been called "new born","toddler","infant","just arrived". If we at the age of teen can pass sally-ann test which a 4 year old NT can pass that does not mean that our social understanding is equivalent to at least that of 4. We are using different mechanism than he is doing. My idea on autism/asperger's which I recently got explains it. I cannot tell that here as I would like to work on that with Prof simon Baron-cohen.

The tools we have are different to what NTs have. Just consider it, we believe whatever is said to us but NTs know, I know it because I have developed theory of mind, that whatever information they get, whether visual or auditory, can be a pretense.

I was being entirely facetious.

There is a place for aspie pride. Some of the ways it gets appropriate for specialized agendas rankles me.