First of all I would like to thank you for the insights I gain from your writing and the information and views you share. Many thanks.

I’m a father and I have a young blog (in Hebrew) of my own focusing in ethics, human rights, parenting and science aspects of autism.

I would like to ask for your permission to translate “A Tale of Three Experts” to Hebrew and post it in my blog. Needless to say, that it will be published under your name and with a link to your original post.

Thanks again.
sharon

The only thing I can think of that would link it to depression and anxiety is that it can cause you to be in pain a lot, and if you don’t know what the source of your pain is, you’re certainly likely to be depressed and anxious about it.

Wikipedia isn’t necessarily a reliable source on everything, people often interject weird ‘facts’ into the articles that are basically just their own ideas.

As I understand it, hypermobility is an ability to move your joints in ways that most people cannot. Just because a person may happen to self injure, or have depression, or have anxiety does not necessarily imply hypermobility, or vice versa.

(Where wikipedia says that they may be “linked” I think they probably mean that a person who has one condition might be more likely to have one of the other conditions as well. But this won’t necessarily be the case for everyone. And it doesn’t mean that one necessarily *causes* another–they might just go together genetically or something, in the same way that people with blue eyes more frequently have blond hair and vice versa–blue eyes don’t cause blond hair, they just happen to frequently occur together.)

Given that hypermobile joints are more prone to injury, I suppose that a person who is hypermobile and who also happens to participate in self-injuring behaviors might find it easier to injure themselves through behaviors that might be relatively harmless for most other (non-hypermobile) people. But simply posturing your fingers into various positions, painfully or not, does not imply that you necessarily have hypermobility unless you are able to stretch your fingers into positions that are highly unusual and impossible for most of the other (non-family) people you know. (I specify non-family because I’m assuming hypermobility is part genetic, which would mean that if one person is hypermobile maybe other blood relatives are also.) And not everyone with hypermobility necessarily self-injures on purpose.

Hypermobility is not a behavior. It is a physical condition.

Re, animals: Amanda’s story was allegorical (an extended metaphor or analogy). It was not meant to be taken seriously or literally.

Hope this helps. Or was this what you were looking for?

I guess I could see where that would come in, to diagnosing Asperger’s Syndrome. What with the lack of socialization and all. Maybe Autism. I think them saying having alot of pets is a personality disorder, is just saying “Well you’re not social, therfore not “normal” in another fashion. I mean The Crocodile Hunter, he was very into caring for animals, and everyone loved him.

I’m also wondering, if you have a habit for caring for AI pets. Like Tamagotchi, ect. Would you be diagnosed as being on the spectrum, or diagnosed as acting as if you were Japanese? j/k Like, AI pets are very popular in Japan.

Interesting, that they say at Wikipedia, Hypermobility is related to depression and anxiety. Do you think this might be, in part to how some people with depression and/or anxiety have a tendency to deal with the symptoms through self harm.

For example, sometimes if I’m anxious about something, I’ll do trick with my fingers. Like cross them over in weird positions, and stuff. Is that like Hypermobility, or stimming. Or it could be both stimming and self harm, cuz sometimes I do it even though it’s painful. I figure as long as I don’t break anything (Which I am very very careful not to do), at least it’s not as noticible as scabs from picking myself to SI that way.

Autistics in alegories have more space for keeping animals than autistics in real life.