For the millionth time: Social skills can't be learned

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What it is a certain type of heuristics that are not based on binary first order logic. I daresay it's fuzzy logic but it's not entirely a conscious process.

I had been drugged on and off by psychiatrists since I was a kid. None of it did anything positive for me whatsoever. All I got were horrible side effects. Shrinks like to put people on drugs because they don't want to bother to try to actually figure out how to solve the problem.

Drugs work for people that actually have mood disorders or imbalances that can be corrected. If your life is crappy, and you are depressed as a result, the drugs are not necessary. People with crappy lives are going to be depressed. People who have a good reason to be anxious should also not be drugged.

I had perfectly good reasons to be depressed, because I had bad things going on in my life, and perfectly good reasons to be anxious. Yet I was medicated. It's ridiculous.

A psychiatrist is supposed to be trained to do both. But I am beginning to wonder about the use of magnetic stimulation to treat certain features of AS which most psychiatrists are not trained to do as it tends to be the domain of neurologists. I actually think that aspies are better served by neurologists as it is primarily a disorder in the wiring of the brain rather than a synaptic chemical imbalance.

Yes, but NT children (and adults) watch movies, too, and they, too, improve their social skills through them considerably. There is an interesting talk that developmental psychologist (or cognitive psychologist) Jean Piaget once gave at the United Nations about stories and how they can improve solidarity among people; his concern was that some people just reach a conventional morality, while others develop (quite late for an NT also) a post-conventional morality.

If the question is whether an aspie can learn social skill or not: yes, they can, but most of them will never be able to catch up not even with young NTs. As with non-verbal or low-verbal autists and whether they should be pushed to develop their verbal skills, the question would also be in each individual case, whether it makes sense to insist a lot on it, or whether it is too stressful and counterproductive.



Adam Smith e.a. say exactly the opposite, and they are right, basically at least. Unless for those aspies that have hardened themselves too much against their emotional empathy because, without the emotional regulation provided by cognitive empathy or rationalisation, they consider their feelings in too many situations as too overwhelming. (This is important when sensory issues are severe or when the upbringing is particularly difficult, e.g. with a lot of abuse or threats). When an aspie watches a movie like "Who is afraid of Virginia Woolfe" (Research) he will not only watch more around the mouths area of the actor than on the eye area, his attention will also be completely absorbed by the two people flirting at the front -- while failing to notice the jealous husband mixing the drinks in the background. It has a tremendous effect on the understanding of the world that is around you, if from age 6 to age 16 you have missed on million and billion of phenomena like the jealous husband in the background! Isnt that very OBVIOUS ???

that movie was just too heavy for me.

Fixed.


Skill = ABILITY + Effort. It's analogous to the transformation of potential energy into kinetic energy in an isolated physical system: You can't produce more kinetic energy when your only source is internal potential energy.

You have lied about me by mis-quoting me. This is offensive. I have reported your post.

Huh? Could you repeat that in English?

Hey, I did not just want to repost your post, even if it is worth being posted more than once.

What I wanted to say: It is not just "ridiculous", it is a crime. It is also not just that most shrinks "dont bother to figure out": most of all they are cognitively not able to figure it out, and for the rest they lack responsibility. Then they have also vicious motivations for doing what they do (excessive need to control, vanity).

It would be good, if people would be less lenient with crimes like this, and see the people who commit them as what they are.

Last edited by Evam on 27 Jan 2016, 1:50 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Ooookay....

I didn't misquote you I corrected you. Why so sensitive all the sudden, Fnord?

You omitted the fact that skill requires more than just effort; it requires potential.

Yes, I agree it is a crime. I was a child, not quite 13, and didn't know any better. By the time I got off the medications entirely, I realized how much it had messed up my life.

I'd seen numerous psychiatrists. I think I only liked one that I ever met. Every time I see a therapist, they want to push medications on me. They don't work for me. Not a single one has ever done anything positive, besides make it easier to sleep, but then I wanted to sleep all the time.

They need to realize that simply medicating a person's problems away is not a good solution. It's only a solution if there is a real abnormality in the way the brain is working, and only if it can actually help the problem.

My interpretation is that they just didn't give a crap about some kid with behavioral problems. And when I was an adult, I'm sure they thought I was poor white trash, because I was on government insurance at the time. Even though I had come from an upper middle class family. Plus they always seem to assume that I'm stupid. I must have "I'm an idiot" stamped on my forehead.

Medication is an easy fix. They didn't view me as a person, but as a problem to be solved.

I dont think it is mainly "they just didnt give a crap about some kid with behavioral problems". It is really bigger psychic issues that they have and that made them go for their career in the first place. Then there is a really bad inclination towards the physiologic. I mean: what makes one so interested in the sex organs of eels, and then their neurologic system, what makes one try cocaine, and then after just some weeks recommend it strongly for all kinds of mental problems in a scientific article, what makes one perform a surgery on a woman s nose and on his eldest daughter s womb in order to cure them from hysteria? what makes one recommend electric shocks, then admitting that it does not really help, and then exculpating a colleague who was responsible for the partly deadly electroshock treatment of the "war neurotics", and what makes one vaccillate so strongly between that many of his female patients must have been sexually abused and that they just made the abuse up in their mind (to name some of the things Freud has done)?

Recently I found that Erich Fromm who was one of the few shrinks that I thought to be quite O.K. (and assumed to have always been such) said that he had been highly neurotic as a young adult, that he was very "dogmatic" in the first years of his practice as a psychoanalyst, "afraid of acting against the rules" and that he had "no lively relationship with his patients".

I mean: it cant be so difficult to conclude that one with his own mental issues should rather refrain from therapy, can it? No, it is what Victor Frankl says in an interview in a little bit creepy way: yes, we would not have studied psychology or psychiatry, if we had not felt something pathologic in ourselves. As a colleague of mine once said: it is better that I hold the key to the ward in my own pocket, instead of someone else holding it.

Last edited by Evam on 27 Jan 2016, 4:12 am, edited 1 time in total.

Google is your friend.

I hate psychiatrists. I prefer psychologists though they really aren't much better either.

I'm supposed to be taking a medication, Rispedal, and I can't seem to get them to get me off it.

I've been to three different GP's (general practitioner) and a psychologist and everytime me or my parents bring up a 'possible medication review' they brush it off by saying 'we'll sort that out later' as a manipulative way of saying 'no', as it never happens.

I can't stand the meds. Risperidone blocks the bodies dopamine production, which only worsens my depression. It caused me to gain weight, dizzyness, general stupidity/sluggish-like behavior, tired all the time, etc.

Not going back on it again either as recently discovered it can cause male breast development - a permament condition needing surgery to remove...

And yes, social skills can be learned, but I agree with what another user said one time - that for NT's, social skills are a reflex, a reactive/passive ability, while for us, it's an active ability that takes mental effort.

it seems to me, a useful analogy to the social skills that NTs take for granted versus the social skills that the higher-functioning AS folk must laboriously practice at all their lives- it is like the NTs have a social co-processor in their CPU that AS folk lack and their CPU must do [somewhat taxing] double-duty as a result, which is the reason for the struggle.