"You definitely don't have Asperger's"

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My acting teacher for the acting class I'm taking got on my case for always having a stiff upper body and trouble making certain sounds as well as issues with projecting energy/"too laid back" as she called it (I have sensory issues that make it difficult to open my eyes very wide), so I told her I have "NLD, which is like mild Asperger's" since I didn't feel like explaining PDD-NOS to ask for her suggestions in dealing with it.

She said "no you don't. We had a girl come in from a group home to one of my classes. She was the sweetest thing ever, but she was completely useless and couldn't learn lines or arrange to meet with other students. So you definitely don't have it."

It seems like here there are lots of semi-functional people with Asperger's here to whom I can relate and some more functional than me in a variety of areas. I have talked with one girl from here on Skype who almost seems like a full NT but still has few or no friends. Why is it so impossible for people to understand how ASD can be mild and nearly invisible and still cause a host of difficulties?

Isn't this a type of discrimination? An institution or employer making incorrect assumptions about a person's disability or refusing to accept paperwork showing that the person has one or just stereotyping based on a label is actually illegal under Title I of the ADA.

She's not qualified to make such a judgment, and shouldn't be so intrusive as that.

I am not sure what to advise in regards to dealing with her. I usually end up dropping the subject and if possible I usually stop interacting with such people just to avoid their rather overbearing attempts to convince me to accept their version of reality over my own experiences. I am certain this is not actually good advice, however.

I don't quite get this. Isn't an acting teacher supposed to get on someone's case regarding things they think need improvement? Didn't the teacher say that the other person was useless as an actor, not that that person was exempted because the teacher knew that person has autism? I don't see a double standard here or discrimination. What am I missing?

As for her doubting your claim, to tell the truth, before I knew about Aspergers, I think if a lot of people who have it, told me they had autism, I possibly wouldn't have believed it based on all the autistic kids I went to school with.

Last edited by briankelley on 31 Mar 2013, 3:55 am, edited 1 time in total.

I don't see how Asperger's stops one from memorising lines; aren't we meant to be famed for our rote memories?
When I did acting as a kid I memorised the entire plays.

If people haven´t read about this carefully and thoughtfully, they will tend to have very primitive views on it, - like a one eyed expert, who needs to see signs resembling severe childhood autism in adults before accepting the possibility of one having difficulties of the kind, that you have.
Quite another approach would be acceptance of your Dx and a following effort to help you overcome it, as best, you can.
She shouldn´t judge.

Sad how she met one person on the spectrum and now has decided to project this image of people on the spectrum on everyone. Every person on the spectrum is unique and we all have different levels of problems. Some of us have greater sensory issues, other have more problems in repetitive behavior and special interest. We are all different, and people need to understand this.

I seriously doubt that I could do it. It's one thing to be able to memorize things personally fascinated with that are gone over and over and over again. It would be quite an entirely different thing to have to memorize lines from a script in x amount of time as an assignment. It would most likely take me considerably longer to memorize something like that than the average person.

There are some movies I can repeat line for line. There's others that I'd have trouble trying to even describe the general plot of.

Because it's nearly invisible. My best friend since high school's mother, who has seen me a few times a year+ for ~14 years, works as some sort of teachers aid for high school kids with behavioural problems etc, including Asperger's. When I told her in early December 2012 that I figured out I was AS she was skeptical and said I was, "way too social for that," and "I still consider you in the diagnostic phase.." to which I replied & explained the exhausting intellectual processing of social interactions vs. intuitive actions, and listed a bunch of traits I have, including my vocal prosody, gait to my step, some sensory & internal thought process things and that I'd always assumed I had picked up a habit of reading lips from communicating with her deaf son vs. having the trait of avoiding eye contact. She was silent.. her mouth just sort of hung open a bit.. and she said, "well, if you are on the spectrum you're very high functioning & there are much much worse things you could have instead.." (something to that effect, anyways.) She works with AS teens and didn't see it in me because she deals with people that are much more severely affected by their AS and thus her paradigms of AS people are formed around the range of students she's worked with over the years vs. having Aspie-esque encyclopaedic knowledge of the wide variety of potential AS traits.

It's not discrimination. It's ignorance. They don't know that they don't know.

However, in your case it's some sorta BS for sure. No teacher/instructor/professor should be declaring someone as misdiagnosed because they've met one other person with AS and you don't match the same criteria. Again, ignorance. Your acting teacher is also ignorant of the acting we all do on a daily basis to fit into the NT world, and that because of it some Aspies can become excellent actors. There are also those of us that can mimic voices or do impressions extremely well.

Some people are not intelligent enough to distinguish facts from opinions, generalizations, speculations, imaginations etc. That woman seems to be one of them, seeing one example and thinking she knows everything. I usually disregard such people unless their actions actually are going to affect me in a practical way.

Sounds maybe like one of those vicious circle things. One is able to "pass" in some respects and not others.

Ask her how she knows more than a qualified and experienced clinician who is legally entitled to give diagnoses.

Agreed. I was once told by the uni attendance officer that I don't have Aspergers - she's right, I don't. But I do have Autism of some sort.

That was before my diagnosis and I'd had at least one person (he knows what he's talking about - he's got it and he knows me far better) suggest before then that I have it.

I would love to know why teachers think they are somehow medically trained to know whether someone is on the spectrum or not. I've had a trainee GP tell me he isn't sure because "you've got other disabilities for which the symptoms can overlap". (he is right and there is meant to be a link between Autism and those other disabilities)

I think this teacher is weird, who is he or she to say that?

Wow. It's one thing to say that you wouldn't have suspected that someone has it, or that you seem different from others they've met on the spectrum. I could even see where she was coming from if she said that she didn't think your disability was to blame for your troubles in class, though I'd disagree. But to completely deny it is just displaying willful ignorance and is ridiculous and cold. You should bring your paperwork in to prove her wrong.

+3

You and your doctor know more about your medical conditions than an acting teacher.

It sounds like a basic communication problem--it sounds like you said you had something like Asperger's because you didn't want to go into detail--and she didn't accept that--then it sounds like you got offended because she didn't accept your explanation.

I think she needs a better explanation of what you have--how is she supposed to figure it out? NTs can't read minds any better than people on the spectrum. I find myself constantly frustrated by people who expect me be able to fill in the details...

Sometimes it takes time to properly explain even the simplest things--surely you can spend the time necessary to explain your situation?

Last edited by BTDT on 31 Mar 2013, 5:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.