Dealing with Asperger's Syndrome, with the help of his wife.

Re:Dealing with Asperger's Syndrome, with the help of his wife. by nkurz on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @04:40AM (#680498)

I'm glad that others feel they benefit from this article, but somehow it rings false to me. It feels like a parody rather than the confession it purports to be. Here are a few of the wrong-notes for me:

  * He's obsessed with cleaning-product slogans and cattle behaviour?
  * He's working as a __marketing__ engineer?
  * Standing alone at parties 'kind of dancing'?
  * Calling 'methylchloroisothiazolinone' unpronounceable
  * Being self-consciously self-centered?

I realize that there is a lot of variation within Asperger's, but this piece doesn't line up for me. It feels to me like a talented MFA student writing a credible impersonation of Mark Leyner or David Sedaris based around a caricature of Asperger's. Does anyone here know and vouch for the author? Does his description ring true to anyone's sense of self, or only of their perception of others with some similar characteristics?

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Re:Dealing with Asperger's Syndrome, with the help of his wife. by kragen on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @05:04AM (#680517)

"Calling 'methylchloroisothiazolinone' unpronounceable"

That seemed a little strange to me, too.

The other day, my wife was reading this article. She got to the part about methylchloroisothiazolinone and said, "methyl, uh, mechlo..."

"Methylchloroisothiazolinone?" I said.

"Yeah. How did you know?"

"What, you don't read the ingredients on shampoo bottles?"

True story! But she's a neurotypical, not an aspie.

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Re:Dealing with Asperger's Syndrome, with the help of his wife. by rjurney on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @08:46AM (#680667)

It wouldn't really be possible to list his symptoms exhaustively and in terms of the DSM, and have the article be readable by a general audience.

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Re:Dealing with Asperger's Syndrome, with the help of his wife. by CWuestefeld on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @09:02AM (#680688)

The killer paradox of media. For anything to be interesting, it can't delve too deep. Anything in-depth can't be interesting.

And thus the curse: any journalism must follow the pattern of telling anecdotes of one or maybe two representative cases. This lends a personal feel, but gets mired in the trap of "anecdote is not the singular for of data".

Reporting that is engaging is rarely informative, at least to people that already have a working model of the topic.

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Re:Dealing with Asperger's Syndrome, with the help of his wife. by rjurney on Wednesday July 01, 2009 @11:15PM (#683786)

I think you can do in-depth and be interesting. Its just quite hard. You're never going to please everyone, but you can inform a wide audience without being factually incorrect. This takes an enormous amount of work, though, and so its hard to pull off.

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Re:Dealing with Asperger's Syndrome, with the help of his wife. by krisneuharth on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @02:20PM (#681265)

Marketing engineer generally means that you have enough technical design experience and intimate understanding of the product to sell it, probably to other technical people and companies given that his job is at a semiconductor company. I wouldn't immediately discredit the author for his title at work. And yes, people are really like this. Everyone is different.

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