NT in desperate need of advice regarding an Aspie friend

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This is going to be a particularly long post, but I don't think there's anywhere other than here I can get suitable advice. I may miss out certain details, so if there are any gaps you notice please feel free to ask me.

I'll introduce myself first of all. I'm 18, just finished my further education and am currently on my summer break. I've got a close group of friends, all of us around the same age, however recently there has been a lot of issues, centred around a friend who I discovered had Asperger's as well as ADHD on monday We've been good friends for about two years until now. Me and my closest friend (who i'd say is more like a brother to me, who we will call Friend A) became friends with him and started him socialising (at this point, we were completely unaware of him being diagnosed as having Asperger's/ADHD). This led to, after about a year, him starting to socialise with other people other than us. Unfortunately, being inexperienced he fell into the wrong relationships and slowly turned into a completely different person.

My friend with Asperger's has recently had a particularly difficult time. The problems arose when a rumour went around a school (my aspie friend's mother is a teacher at this school) that he was taking a variety of different drugs on a consistent basis. His parents did not know what to do when they couldn't talk to him about it, and decided to kick him out of their house. I know this was a huge mistake on their part, and my friends and I tried rectifying this by explaining to his parents this was not true - however, he had been taking MDMA much more often and we felt that his parents had to know this. This is where my guilt comes in, as unfortunately not knowing his condition at the time, we introduced him to cannabis when we began socialising, which I felt in some way contributes to how he is now.

Eventually, after much persuading, his parents allowed him back into their house and for a while, he seemed to improve. However, he became influenced by two people I cut from my life a year or two ago, and against my warnings, befriended them. This is where the main story comes in. About a month or two back now, my aspie friend bumped into another of our group when he broke down (who we will call friend B). He was also with the two dodgy guys I mentioned earlier. They asked Friend B for a lift, and even though he was not able to and told them as much, they refused to listen and the two dodgy guys put the bike they had in his car (yes i know, these guys are not the people you or anyone would want to be friends with). Friend B became really distressed at this point, as he had a lot to do. He walked away from his car to have a cigarette, and left them for approximately 3-4 minutes. When he returned, they had taken the bike out of the car and told him not to worry about it and they left. Shortly after, Friend B drives off alone. His doesn't have a radio, so he takes headphones with him and listens to music through his ipod - however, when he went to put his iPod on he discovers it is missing. Of course, the only people who had been in his car were my Aspie friend, and the two other dodgy guys. We decide to ask my aspie friend if he knew anything, to which he certainly told us he did not. We believed him happily, as we suspected the other two anyway and did not believe he would do such a thing (we were, or so we thought, close friends so he surely would have told us). Of course, the other two guys denied anything to do with it, and for the time being things began to settle down. However the last few weeks we've found out more and more about the actual events, and have even spoke to someone who works in an electronics goods store and said my aspie friend attempted to trade in an iPod fitting Friend B's iPod's description. To top it all off, the monday just gone I went to a local nightclub, and my aspie friend came as well as a few others. I was shown that night a recording of my aspie friend and one of the dodgy guys talking about the iPod - the dodgy guy admitted he stole it, and my aspie friend admitted trying to trade it in himself to my disbelief.

And now I find myself here. I'm stuck and I don't know what to do - my aspie friend is alienating the people who were his only true friends through his drug abuse, thieving (he regularly steals from supermarkets and the like) and his open lying to us. I don't want to cut him off, because that's probably the worst thing I can do as he will have no-one left. What annoys me most, however, is that he used to listen to me (over both friend A and B) however he does not anymore. At the end of the day, i'm only 18 and I have no idea how to handle this kind of thing - i'm pretty sure a lot of the problem is his parents however there is not much I can do about that as due to his manipulation his parents no longer like me or any of my friends. I feel horrible for introducing him to drugs and alcohol as I feel as though it led him down the slippery slope to where he is now.

Of course. that is not all of it - if i were to tell you everything regarding the situation I would be here for days on end. The main issue at the moment is that he is a very good liar and is happy to lie even to close friends, he seems to not mind stealing from his close friends and seems quite happy in what he's doing at the moment to cope with his Asperger's. I am truly worried about him, he has supposedly said to his mother he was going to kill himself recently and a friend has remarked that she saw a pretty bad cut on his arm. I would really appreciate any advice someone may give right now, as to be honest I have am in very unfamiliar territory and I feel one wrong step could have terrible consequences for everyone involved in this.

His behaviour isn't strictly related to his AS, and it's completely your fault for introducing an easily influenced person to drugs and the like anyway. There is no special way to fix him simply because he has AS, and I'm not sure what you expect the answer to be. I would suggest getting him help from somebody who knows what they're doing, or otherwise it'll continue to go downhill.

Last edited by CrystalStars on 15 Aug 2012, 1:10 am, edited 1 time in total.

maybe you should talk to his parents so they can get him help.

Placing blame and telling someone who is NT that "it is all their fault" is not solving the problem. As long as the NT did not pressure the Aspie to "try this smoke" or "swallow this pill", the blame can only be shared.I will venture a guess that no one forced the Aspie to smoke marijuana. Because someone has Aspergers does not mean they are devoid of free will and unable to make decisions. whether good, bad or indifferent. As a matter of fact, certain strains of medical marijuana are helpful to people on the spectrum and, amazing though it may sound, a good number of people with ADHD respond very well to these same strains. The primary reason is the reduction of stress not achieved with traditional pharmaceuticals. If the Aspie was having paradoxical or bad reactions to smoking Cannabis, this would have been evident. I believe the Aspie would have stopped, in such a case.

"Ecstasy" and similar drugs are definitely not recommended, particularly as these mess with Serotonin levels. If I'm understanding the timeline here, the more recent diagnosis of ADHD in this person may be related to use of these drugs, which contain an amphetamine component. If he was taking an SSRI form of antidepressant or one of the newer SSNRI formulations and introduced this chemical into the mix, he may be suffering from mania. When people are manic, they've been known to act out, to steal, to be easily distracted -- in short, their personality will appear very different.

The way the Aspies parents reacted was not showing concern or understanding, which indicates that the relationship between your friend and his parents is not the best. He DOES need to be seen by a Medical Doctor or Psychiatrist who understands pharmacology very well. A blood test and urine test can determine whether his serotonin levels are "out of bounds". If he hasn't been sleeping, this is another sign of mania. Once someone becomes manic, it is difficult to bring them back into balance. If this Aspie is now being treated with medications like Ritalin or Adderall, this will make the mania worse (and also indicates the diagnosis of ADHD is almost certainly incorrect). If the Aspie's parents really care about their kid, throwing him on to the streets is just about the worst action they could take. He needs support, a secure environment, professional help and time to recover.

I thank you for having the courage to write about your friend and to care what has happened and may yet happen to him. Thank you for your honesty and for taking responsibility, although I again must tell you that unless you held this Aspie down and blew smoke into his lungs, you are not entirely at fault. Because someone has Aspergers and they are around NT friends does not mean the Aspie is unable to make decisions or is less intelligent. I first smoked marijuana at the age of twelve (courtesy of a friend six years oldER attending Columbia University) and did not go off the deep end and get into stronger psychoactives. My consumption of cannabis was not extreme or something I did often. This does not mean I had better self control, however.

In fact, if there was ANY drug that became a nightmare for me, it was a LEGAL drug that is, in my opinion, far nastier and with much greater destructive power than Cannabis: ALCOHOL. I was fortunate in that this did not manifest as a problem until I was around 24 years old, but very unfortunate because my behavior was horrendous and I destroyed my own very good marriage to a man I truly loved. I nearly did not survive this experience, which was not a constant consumption, but intermittent "binges" lasting a day, based in part to an allergy I had to hops and in part to a great deal of insecurity I felt that I'd not dealt with. I can my father for the DNA that made me react like a mad woman to alcohol, just as I can blame him for the Aspergers. No one forced me to drink or pressured me. I made this choice, knowing full and well that my there was a history of alcoholism on my father's side of the family (which contained a full-blooded Native American Great-grandfather). I should have known better!

This went on for at least five years and it was devastating! It is sheer luck that I did not get hospitalized or thrown into jail. I got myself sober, too late to save the marriage and having sorely tested the faith and trust of friends. I did not communicate with my family, because there was alcoholism and tragedy and I'd hoped to live a life that was saner than my childhood and adolescence had been. I'd attended University on full scholarship and held jobs during vacations since the age of 14. I'd never been a "party animal."

My friends did not entirely desert me, for which I was and am eternally grateful. They were "my true family". If your Aspie friend's parents are not receptive to getting him the help he needs and refuse to allow him to stay in the home, please contact a Crisis Line or a competent Doctor on his behalf. He needs safety and a secure place to be more than ever.

Your Aspie friend needs to get a handle on himself and his parents may be laboring under the mistaken idea that "by tossing him on the street, he'll learn his lesson." This is the opposite of the truth. You can help him do this by telling him what you've written here: he has changed in ways that you believe are negative and his actions, like stealing and lying, are not typical of him and are not acceptable. His personality is unstable, probably due to an imbalance in brain chemistry. I assume he has been a high-functioning individual in past and can be again, given the correct diagnosis and appropriate treatment. If your parents are more reasonable people, you might want to explain this dilemma to them and ask their advice. Sometimes people are more sensitive and fragile than they appear to be and it is impossible to know in advance how they will react to one substance or another.

brilliant and well balanced post,

OP, you should read the above carefully,

i would also like to add that cannabis in itself has never been a problem for me personally, my family knows and accepts it, my boss knows and accepts it and most of my friends(who dont smoke) know and accept it.

they didnt all start that way, but keeping up with work, life around me and improving myself finally brought them around

Scire, is this aspie friend only being friends with the "dodgy guys" because they appear to him to be the ones who are most interested in him? They might be happy to abuse his niavety and use him to their own ends and this might make being friends with him an attractive option. Perhaps in his mind, they really like him genuinely and maybe he feels they show it the most out of the friends around. When people are telling you not to do something at that age, irrespective of AS many teens/young people will rebel and go the other way. Probably the best thing you could do is approach him and tell him that you consider him a good friend and care about him, and to offer him support when he feels he needs it, if anything at all is concerning him. Make yourself the constant thing in his life, so that when others let him down he will lean on you and hopefully absorb some of your more sensible advice. I won't comment on the drug side of things that you helped introduce him to, because it's hard when there's peer pressure and disapproving doesn't serve any purpose now as it's done.

Maybe you could write a letter to his parents, you can obviously put across your point and concerns well, and explain things to them, explain that you regret any part you had in introducing him to drugs or alcohol, but that obviously he has his own free will, he's an adult and everyone makes mistakes. Say that you would like to work with them in getting him back on track and that you feel that although him returning to his family home didn't work well before, that you believe he is crying out for the support of his family even if he doesn't show it and there will be rough along with the smooth times and you will do what you can to help make things work, so that he will turn his life around before it gets ruined.

Good luck.

I'd really like to thank everyone for their responses so far, i'm starting to see and understand what I should be doing to help.

Your post in particular, Skye, really did hit home. The issue is, however, that I am worried he will refuse to listen to me ever again after a stupid drunken mistake that happened on monday night (the day before I found out about his Asperger's/ADHD). I didn't really want to expose this to this community but to solve my problem i'm going to have to, but please try and see this from my perspective before you judge me.

My aspie friend drunk far too much monday, and most of the night I spent looking after him effectively. He almost got into multiple fights purely due to his intoxication, however luckily I was always on hand to be the diplomat (usually I knew people he almost got into trouble with so I was able to calm things down). I left when the nightclub closed, and Friend B came to pick me up. I was with a small group of people, probably about 7-8 of us and we were just having a general chat, when my aspie friend (who at this point I wasn't happy to see due to the iPod incident mentioned earlier) came over just stood near us. I wasn't bothered, as I knew Friend B would just ignore him for the time being - however the aspie friend felt the need to come over and attempt to talk to us about the problems. I warned him multiple times, reminded him of the promise he made to me to ignore everyone else but he would not listen. This is where it gets ugly - my aspie friend began to get aggressive towards friend B, asking 'you want to start something' (for those who are not knowledgeable about English teenage slang, this means to have a fight effectively). At this point i'd heard enough, and proceeded to push him away very physically as otherwise it would have become a confrontation. I told him to just leave with a friend who was staying at his, and fortunately he did (albeit in a particularly angry mood). What worried me most about this incident, however, was that when I started pushing him away he actually squared up to me. This is the first incident of aggression ever towards me from him, and is why I am so lost. But I will definitely get into contact with his parents, as well as talk with mine to see what we can come up with. I never thought about the other possible consequences and also causes of his recent behaviour, so I will look more into this. And yes, that is the other upsetting this as he had a very bright future ahead in my opinion, as we are both grammar school boys and I know he could have gone quite far had he not spent the last year or so being involved in all this.

Whirlingmind, you see it's even more frustrating because to him yes it would appear that way, however I have tried warning him about their true nature - I was close friends with them for a while and learned what they were really like, and so got rid of them. I have attempted to explain this to him - one of the guys in particular has a very good way with words and can manipulate some people very easily - of course giving me more reason for concern! The issue is, of course, a lot of his friendships and the like have been based around the wrong reasons (i.e. alcohol and drugs).

Everything just feels so much more difficult because i'm looking back on everything that has happened and seen things I could have done differently had I known he suffered from AS...

you might be alienating yourself to him by being so over protective. he most likely just wants to be treated like a normal person and even though the people he hangs out with now are from a bad crowd they treat him like hes normal. what im trying to say is you need to treat him like a normal friend instead of someone with a disability. It can be really frustrating when you have a disability and people treat you differently because of that and this is not limited to just aspergers but all disability's.


also the violence when drunk is not something limited to aspergers. its just how alcohol effects people. it can turn even the nicest person sober into a violent monster when drunk.

This sounds more of a problem with the people he's hanging around with, than anything to do with the drugs as such. Unfortunately it looks like he's viewing these people as friends..

Not sure what to say, these don't sound like great people, so don't put yourself at any risk at his account.

Hopefully he'll grow out of it. The whole drugs thing is usually a short phase for most people

Jason.

I'm sorry if I come across as such, but honestly I never treated him any different to my other friends. I couldn't have, purely because the last time I spoke to him, I didn't know he actually had asperger's, therefore how could I treat him differently? The only affect on my behaviour towards him was his actions.

Apologies for my earlier, unhelpful post, OP.

He may be hanging out with the unsavory guys because it's simple to do. If he does stuff they like, they don't ask much else of him and don't treat him in ways that make him uncomfortable. Real friendship has challenges. If he's into drugs the way you describe, he's not facing challenges and prefers friends that don't expose him to the real challenges of real friendship. It would be unfortunate for him to keep to this practice long enough to find out for himself the down-side of it. But your caring, while appropriate, may be a thing he feels unable to deal with - hence the difficulty of getting him to listen to you. Being cared about can be scary and make a person feel vulnerable and uncertain. That's not your fault, and it doesn't make it wrong for you to care.

I've known people - sometimes for years - and not really known what kind of people they really were, even though others seemed to know. I've thought people I liked were being misjudged and then found out I may have been mistaken. I've gotten angry with others for saying things I've since found out to be true. My discovery of the extent of this is recent, and I'm still dealing with it. I'm very sorry for your friend. Drugs aren't making him this way, but the culture of them that he's fallen into is making it possible for these other guys to get in his life and manipulate him.

You've gotten good advice. The best I can offer is that I'd say to do what is good with Aspies in general, which is stuff like keeping things simple, not surprising him, appealing to his sense of logic, and backing off in situations where he feels pressed or overwhelmed so that he has space and a sense of time to think, so that he can process things. That's in any dealings with him in general, plus doing what others have advised for specifics to this situation. Also, learn all you can about Asperger's. Hey, check out this thread about a new video and read the comments for a good starting point: Asperger's Video

The people I'm really angry about are those two guys who taught an Aspie to lie and stuff in order to get along with others. We can be very on/off about things, so it would appear he's now in "lying mode" as a way to move through life, it seems to me. It's not your fault that they're bad guys and that they tried to get their hooks into him. Thank you for not giving up on him. I hope you are able to help him in the end.