Korean view of Asperger

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Whether one is a patient is diagnosed based on the length of the period the person has refused to have contact with others—six months in Japan and three in Korea.

One of the most apparent symptoms of the disorder is a persecution complex,

While they lack of social activities, they spend time daydreaming, often setting up “grand plans,” showing aspects of megalomania. For instance, you can picture a boy who has just quit middle school drawing up a plan to be admitted by Harvard University.

Depending on the case, the disorder accompanies multiple-personality disorder, depression, personality disorder, or anxiety disorder.

Normally, with the full cooperation of other family members, it takes about a year to three years to cure the syndrome.

One fact that is not very well known to the general population but pretty well known to people in the international autism world is that autism is highly stigmatized in South Korea, and that families will do just about anything to avoid a diagnosis of autism, because it is so shameful. In my experience attending talks about international autism services and in my research, I have found that this fact is cited more than almost any other in the case for better international autism services. In fact, if you google “autism” and “stigma” and “South Korea” you find literally dozens of articles that talk about the high social stigma of autism in South Korea. Which is actually kind of remarkable, given that it’s really HARD to find accurate or interesting information about autism in other countries just by googling (trust me, I’ve tried.)

So, what’s in a fact? Well, the origin of the interest in South Korea started with this book by Roy Richard Grinker. A father of a daughter with autism by fate and an anthropologist by training, Grinker writes about all things autism and culture. Grinker is a gift to the autism world, because he is really good at what he does. He’s an incredible anthropologist, who spent a lot of years writing about other cultures before he decided to make the personal professional and start studying autism. And study, he did. He spent time in South Korea, he did a lot of interviews. And what he found was this– some parents believe that having a child with a diagnosis of autism means that the family is genetically compromised.

Autism existing in a child means that all members of the family are less eligible for marriage, more likely the objects of discrimination, and more likely to be excluded from important social circles. Families report that they might even struggle to sell their apartment or property, because people don’t want to buy a house that someone with autism has lived in. One mother he interviewed said, “It’s like I’m always in the middle of winter.” He also documented that parents often prefer and try to aquire a diagnosis of Reactive Attachment Disorder (a rare disorder of severe, often irreparable childhood pathology caused by significant abuse or neglect by caregivers. It’s very rare often quite severe, marked by a complete lack of empathy bordering on sociopathy. The only child I’ve ever seen with RAD had to be locked in her room at night to prevent her from murdering her siblings.). This is NOT a good disorder to have. Yet parents in south Korea prefer it sometimes, because it means the mother can take the blame for poor care, as opposed to it being genetically linked to the entire family.