Best treatment for AS I ever heard of

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Our country's online forum for people with AS and parents of kids with AS interviewed an expert in AS (a Neuropsychologist) and, among many other questions, asked him about the value of Social Skills courses. I loved his answer. He said that Aspies have to be very firm not to join Social Skills courses for NTs or for both Aspies and NTs because the things we need to learn are too different for it to be a positive experience for us. He said that for a Social Skills course for Aspies to be effective and relevant, it must be a course in learning to relate successfully to NTs as one would learn to relate to a different culture, by adopting some of their culture only for the sake of interaction with them, while keeping our own culture and not trying to change it, maintain our pride, self-esteem and self-confidence in our own Aspie culture. I can't think of a better approach. I only wish there was a therapist in this country who was willing to take on the challenge. As it is, I'm sure no therapist would agree to teach "NT as a second language" as he proposed.

I like this POV, too. My experience with social skills training was in a center for the blidn/VI, where I was of course the only Aspie (and the person with the least residual vision and the only one VI from birth). While I understood all theory being taught and did fairly well in-session, I could not apply any of it int eh real world. I now refuse social skills training (not that I've been said to go into it anyway), because I think I would just be feeling bad after it. One note, however, is that just because a social skills course is for Aspies only, doesn't mean it teaches witht he right attitude (ie. NTs as different culture). My diagnosing psychologist two years ago insisted that I needed to unlearn my particular stim, because it was "a big social handicap", while even most NTs I know didn't agree and thought it was just a little weird.

I love the "NT as a second language" idea

I love the idea! What country is this?

...Aspies have a culture?

No, they have many cultures. It's just those cultures are different from the common NT ones, so NT cultures are a 'second culture'.

That makes sense, but...


Unless we're talking about a "culture of one."

That's how the social aspect of ASD therapies for children in many parts of Germany work. Individual approaches and approaches suited to autism spectrum disorders.

I certainly think that Aspies have their own "culture" to the same extent that NT's do, namely to the extent that they share at least some common modes of thinking/social interaction. That doesn't mean all their social behavior looks the same on the outside. If we didn't share "cultures" to at least some extent in our respective groups, we wouldn't be able to conceive of the distinction between NT and Aspergers in the first place. There would be no Aspergers!

I like this approach. I can relate it to the fact that it's much easier for me to converse with people in a language I've learned through classes - Japanese or Spanish for example. I realized it's because, in those classes, you learn about the culture and you learn how to have conversations with people, how to relate to them. For our native tongues, we never learned the how or why, exactly, just the what. We've never really learned how to apply our vocabularies.

You make it sound like the culture was there before the diagnosis; it wasn't. The clinical diagnosis existed long before anyone was ever talking about an "Aspie culture."

That's not to say that culture cannot arise from someone else making the distinction and acting upon it. Perhaps that is what has happened in recent years, and there are some more-or-less common values with respect to condition, treatment, curability, portrayal of autism in the media, etc. But perhaps that's more the neurodiversity movement than "Aspie culture."

I cite Star Trek conventions and rest my case!

Something needs an proper Western name for something that existed previous for it to have a culture? Disagree, fully. Something doesn't have to be identified for the effect to be felt, for those who are affected to react differently and have an altered perspective as compared to their counterparts. A name only allows for clarification and distinction, not origination.


M.

The cult of one topic

Aspie individuality.

A formal definition provides a rallying point for the promotion of culture, it is true. However, having a "culture" involves sharing experiences around some sort of locally accepted definition that members of the culture have in common. It has nothing to do directly with being affected differently than everyone else in the world.

It's possible that groups of people on the spectrum did get together to talk about how they were different than the rest of the world, and perhaps they did this at Star Trek conventions. However, the culture they most likely identified with was that of Star Trek, not how they felt that their brains were wired differently. Even if they had done so, what you would have had were a bunch of disjointed, localized cultures about AS. You can apply the word "culture" to it, but that's sort of like saying that my friends and I discussing our experiences at a local farmer's market is an example of "farmer's market culture."

Then again, it's possible we're talking about different meanings of the word "culture." In Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (Kroeber, A. L. and C. Kluckhohn, 1952), the authors compiled a list of 164 different definitions of the word "culture" (research done through Wikipedia).

I do agree that a culture can exist without a formal, society-accepted definition. Take the "energy vampire" culture, for instance. There are people in the world that believe they have energy maintenance problems and can get energy "fixes" from various external sources. Having an online forum where they can go to share common experiences and issues is certainly a culture. WP is certainly a culture. Is it necessarily "Aspie culture"? I don't know.

I think I've talked in circles and confused myself...

I'm going by a mostly intuitively-grasped definition of culture: A group of individuals that share common ways of doing things (processing information, interacting socially, interpreting the world). Under this definition, I think one can speak of an "Aspie" culture and an NP culture - not applying to everything, of course.

Definitions of words makes all the difference