"Malice and Asperger Syndrome"

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Okay!

Has anyone read this article? :

"Malice and Asperger Syndrome" by Digby Tantam ,with ref to a paper by Asperger.

http://www.autismuk.com/index%20tatum.htm

Me reeling in shock. I knew there had to be some less nicey nicey ASD sufferers , otherwise I couldn't be one!! But this is scary, it's so me!! Not that I'm quite as bad , but I identify/recognise this so well.

Who else ?
Please ?! !!

PS: Thanks to Paulo for posting the reference in the In-Depth Adult discussion forum ; thread title "Nobel for Doris Lessing".

Last edited by ouinon on 17 Oct 2007, 10:36 am, edited 3 times in total.

I remember Stephen Juan writing a not dissimilar claim in The Odd Mind, where he claimed people with AS commit more crimes....

I don't think it necessarily leads to socially recognised crime, just to a possible tendency to commit malicious acts. To experiment to see what actions on people produce what results?

I'm still feeling pretty weird about this autistic "typology"discovery. It picks up on a whole area of my behaviour which all the rose-tinted ASD stuff I keep reading on here misses or overlooks completely.

Apparently failing to identify correctly emotions on faces is a key "symptom", and that's the one I always do worst at on Emotional Intelligence tests. And throughout my life my favourite drawing subject, the thing that I would draw and draw and draw ,on any available paper ,has been faces. They fascinate me!

And I have teased and bullied and shocked and outraged and created turmoil and been verbally cruel and taunting .
And ,until I became a mother and even then it took a couple of years, I always looked HEAPS younger than my age. In my mid thirties people still sometimes mistook me for, in a couple of cases ,a 19 year old.

And I locate the moment that things changed and I suddenly "got" compassion,( literally sort of "learnt"it, and ironically began to seem more and more obviously a person with ASD afterwards) ! !, in a strange out of body experience the year I turned 29 and saw myself stretched out on my bed after a horrific migraine and realised that I would not treat an animal the way I treated myself , that I was like a battered and abused creature, for whom I began to cry.

Shortly after that I began to explore the humanising effects that cutting out gluten had on me aswell!

Last edited by ouinon on 12 Oct 2007, 9:26 am, edited 2 times in total.

Am wondering whether the "malicious" behaviours of autism aren't some sort of denial/protection/defense against ones feeling of handicap and confusion in infancy , OR is an automatic/involuntary result of yet another piece of autistic style literal/black-and-white misinterpretation , laid over the Autistic spec disorder until such time as "learn" a vital piece of information to correct it ?

Looking back with this new perspective I am struck by the fact that it was almost directly after "getting" compassion, like a brilliant light of understanding, that I "became" increasingly visibly AS Disordered. Friends remarked on my changed demeanour. Some of them found me lots less interesting. Basically I lost friends by becoming compassionate ( or at least my understanding of it all of a sudden)! ! It made me boring, too serious, no fun!! !

That moment when I started weeping for this poor beaten creature that was me, and rolling onto my stomach began to wipe away my tears , I realised that my body loved me , that it would do anything for me, and I kissed my hands . I used to describe this moment as a moment of grace for a long time afterwards , and equated what I had experienced with what some people seem to mean when they talk about having felt Christs love.
It certainly transformed my life.
And soon afterwards I found that I could reduce the sensory nightmares ( chiefly noise and smells)and increase my sense of being in the world and that people around me were real, by excluding gluten.

Last edited by ouinon on 17 Oct 2007, 10:37 am, edited 7 times in total.

I think the problem is largely due to the fact that "psychopathy" in English is a word that used to mean "any mental illness" (and still did in terms of the UK Mental health act until 2001 or so).

In German, where the use a largely different psych terminology, "psykopathy STILL means "any mental illness" and should strictly be translated as "psychopathology" not psychopathy.

In other words, don't sweat the small stuff.

I have to be honest, AS doesn't come bundled with a halo, and I have known malicious and unscrupulous Aspies who were hardly distinguishable from psychopaths at all...

But that doesn't mean we are all "that way inclined". Malice is, after all a moral choice, not a mental or neurological condition, and we can choose to "go to the bad" just like anyone else, and some do...others, do not.

I have a serious problem however with "The Autism society" presenting an article that gives an impression of us as either gullable simpletons or malevolent female aliens...

M

Last edited by mechanima on 12 Oct 2007, 6:21 pm, edited 3 times in total.

But my whole point ( and the point of the article )is that perhaps this maliciousness IS hardwired autistic handicap ( for SOME on the spectrum)and nothing to do with "immorality" until actually understand the missing piece , about compassion!! !
That I am wondering precisely whether for some , with this autistic condition, their apparent immorality is the consequence of their neurology ,and that they are having trouble learning the bit that would enable them to distinguish correctly!!
After all ," a moral choice" is quite a complicated thing!! AS great thinkers know!! , and perhaps certain people on the autistic spectrum haven't the cognitive skills to understand it just like that! I think I can now say that until the age of 29 I had only the dimmest notion of what morality meant. In fact it wasn't even on my map of the world.
With this neurological blindspot ( until the missing bit of info or understanding comes along) perhaps don't "choose" to "go to the bad". It just happens.

Detailed instructions about not talking to people "like that", not pressuring people like this", not causing pain by saying such and such ,don't exist in nice lists , unlike the ten commandments.
Each new "case" is discovered to be forbidden , or not , depending on the reactions.
And until I " got" the compassion piece of the puzzzle I think I literally didn't extrapolate from one kind of hurtful behaviour to another. Perhaps I was conducting an experiment in finding out what is allowed , by taking a tour round all the behaviours available to me which hadn't already been clearly and distinctly forbidden ! !
I don't know ! But I do know that my whole world view on people , as creatures to care about in general , was transformed in one glorious moment of enlightenment on weeping for my body.( The whole wall came crashing down.)
And suddenly I became aware of the minefield of paying attention to other peoples feelings, of "taking them into consideration", of the total fuzzy mess of including people in calculations ! !

Does anyone know what I'm talking about ?! !

Last edited by ouinon on 12 Oct 2007, 6:27 am, edited 2 times in total.

First of all, Asperger did NOT say psychopathic autistic. He said Autistic psychopathy. Psychopathy = brain sickness. But MAN!! !!

" This kind of maliciousness is not something that is normally associated with Asperger Syndrome: too many sufferers seem too innocent, too law abiding, and too unaware of their own self interest to be described as malicious"

That is the STORY OF MY LIFE! TOO LONG, I am "too innocent, too law abiding, and too unaware of [my] own self interest".

Too many of the things mentioned in the text could be subjective or one sided. I myself have gotten blamed for speaking in class for trying to get others to stop, even when I never said a word. I've gotten blamed for worse. I have even been considered a troublemaker when I was the nicest one there.

I would really like to hear if there are any other peoples on here with similar experiences of their past , perhaps only in early childhood , rather than right into adulthood, of committing malicious acts.

I related my own worst in some detail on the " Nobel for Doris Lessing" thread.( If you want to see how honest I am being and how much I hope to learn from talking about this with other people who have known this side of ASD!)

Anyone else gone through a revolution on the matter?

I suppose so or you wouldn't even be on here; you'd still be , like I was, happily living without taking people into account , and as a result may not even realised that you have ASD ! !!

How many of us are there out there?! !

Last edited by ouinon on 12 Oct 2007, 6:28 am, edited 1 time in total.

hoo boy

I used to be a seething mass of anger - more correctly, rage. What saved me during my formative years was my good looks, intelligence, and family love. I got myself into so much trouble, though. Now, I have techniques that help me, and strategies. And I have let go of a lot of stuff. However, if my childhood had been different, I have no doubt things would have been very different. What I'm saying is that I can see how some pretty scary people can be AS. Nature and nurture together are needed to create this, though.

Thank you, Mechanima and 2ukenker , for your feedback on the title of my thread; I have now changed it. Much appreciate the clarification.

Yes, I think I got away with stuff , not with my family , but with friends from sixth form college onwards after two people helped me get my rather gauche and spaced out act together, because I also was goodlooking aswell as intelligent. The ways I behaved sometimes ! !! ; I only avoided censure because guys thought I was so attractive and some women envied it.

Yes, I have that feeling of having let go of a lot of stuff. I still sometimes miss it. That not caring , literally insouciance; it's so attractive. In fact my own mother remarked on it admiringly ( how wrong can someone be!!?) when I was about 19 ; how much she envied me my devil-may-care adventurings. At that point I no longer lived at home; when I did she had not appreciated it at all, translated into 'treating house like hotel" selfish , lazy, inconsiderate, don't care about anybody else but yourself.

The last label being correct; I didn't know HOW to care about anybody else!

Last edited by ouinon on 12 Oct 2007, 6:49 am, edited 4 times in total.

as for being bad as a hardwired symptom for some aspies (and NTs), no duh. But it can be controlled (like an iron yoke) so no excuses for the ones who don't control themselves. I used to do things as a TODDLER and I knew what I was doing and I knew what would happen and I did it anyway but THOSE acts adults chalked up as accidents whereas my beatings had nothing to do with any wrongdoing on my part. And yeah the goodness in act is a construct. It's like a demon bowing its head at the superiority of the moral world and sometimes the innately awful demon behaves better than the humans who are naturally good but behave badly due to unclear thinking.

And as such may well be beyond the cognitive capacities of certain people on the ASD spectrum!

German AD1930 =/= English AD2000

In the german language, 'psychopathie' is an outdated term for personality disorder.

According to Wiki,

Drawing conclusions based on the assumption that a word would have the same meaning in the german language of around AD1930 as in modern english is insane.

According to Wiki,
and they base this on

I've already corrected this mistake, both in the thread title and in my first post, thank you!!

The rest still stands as intended, no problems,because neither the article that I quote , nor I , wish to argue that this condition on the Autistic spectrum causes violent or criminal behaviour. Thank you for making the research.

Anyone with a beef about anyone can write an article and call it a day. That doesn't make it credible or even remotely close to the truth. Everyone - AS - NT - the entire force of humanity has good and evil inclinations - not one more than the other. So stop believing the vilifications about one group as opposed to the other. We are all equal in this respect and no one is more fd up than the other. It's really an indiviudal thing and the sole responsibility of every single one on earth to heal from. Hope this makes some sense.