On an NLD support list I occasionally read, some of the people have wondered if NLD is actually part of the autistic spectrum. Now, NLD certainly has enough variations, that some forms might be “wandering in” from other categories of cognitive or learning disability. But just from my own experiences and readings, I was already pretty sure that my own form is in fact on the autistic spectrum, and your videos confirmed that.

A lot of the things you were doing are things that I’ve done at various times, it’s just that for me they aren’t compulsive behaviors, just enjoyable pastimes. I could certainly “connect” with your doing them, and while I couldn’t really “read” your body language, neither did your actions seem “purposeless” to me. Likewise, reading your posts, a lot of the disabilities you describe are similar in “type” to my own, much milder, handicaps. So while I won’t claim to “know what it’s like” to be you (I get enough of that myself from NT’s), I can at least empathize a little bit, and be really impressed at how well you’ve managed to hold onto and rebuild yourself, in spite of all the stuff you’ve had to deal with.

Regarding the issue of “personhood”, I agree that for most people, the word “person” is defined socially, and specifically in terms of communication. When someone declares you an “non-person”, that’s exactly equivalent to saying that they can’t recognize your communication. Of course, that says more about them, than about you!

You are very fortunate in having this alternate means of communication, through computers and the Internet. Here in cyberspace, you can indeed be generally accepted as a person, because here, you can communicate. The ‘Net really is a miracle for all us folks on the spectrum!

PS: I like your newer voice synthesizer much better than the crude one from the older video! I’m hard of hearing, and the new voice is much easier for me to understand.

http://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com/2008/04/02/finding-amanda

is from Grace (April 3rd 2008 3.01am EST). She says she is being treated for a low-grade viral encephalitis by an infectious disease clinic. She describes her speech difficulties. At times she is unable to get words from her mind to her mouth. She finds it easier to type than to talk and has trouble looking people in the eye, especially while talking.

Most of the comments are appreciative and positive.

This is probably true, however, if we happen to develop a perseverative/strong interest in something involving illegal drugs as a teen, then we’re probably just as likely as any other teenager to try something. (Especially if everyone already thinks we’re on drugs anyway and accuses us of it constantly.)

“Drug-using” social groups are probably some of the easiest to gain “admission” to of all the different adolescent subcultures out there. Paul Graham actually alludes to this in his essay, “Why Nerds Are Unpopular”. Quoting him there:

Teenage kids, even rebels, don’t like to be alone, so when kids opt out of the system, they tend to do it as a group. At the schools I went to, the focus of rebellion was drug use, specifically marijuana. The kids in this tribe wore black concert t-shirts and were called “freaks.”

Freaks and nerds were allies, and there was a good deal of overlap between them. Freaks were on the whole smarter than other kids, though never studying (or at least never appearing to) was an important tribal value. I was more in the nerd camp, but I was friends with a lot of freaks.

LSD cannot possibly cause autism. If it did there would have been an increase in autism diagnoses among the LSD taking hippy/counter culture groups in the mid to late 1960s/early 1970s; and there would be scientific evidence that it does.

The use by autistics of LSD and other street drugs is counter to commonly held ideas and stereotypes about autistics:

That because they have poor social skills/don’t want to socialise, they don’t become part of drug-taking groups.

That autistics have an aversion to trying anything new. They insist on keeping to what is familar.

I don’t know if autistics are more or less likely to be law-abiding than non-autistics, thus making them more or less likely to use illegal drugs.

I would think that autistics are less likely to use illegal drugs than non-autistics.

A psychiatrist named Max Rinkel reported at the 1951 APA convention in Cincinnati on his work in giving LSD to test subjects. “For every person who became autistic, another turned manic”.

Also, in high school, the kids who were prone to experimenting with hallucinogens and other substances tended to be some of the only ones who would actually tolerate my presence (and I was naive enough at the time to mistake the toleration of my presence for “being friendly”). So it’s not really that surprising to me that some autistic people might end up getting pulled into that sort of “subculture”.

And while I’m not a chemist or a neurologist, I did have something of a perseveration (strong interest) on the subject of hallucinogens as a young adolescent, and nothing I ever saw indicated that LSD could “cause autism”. As a matter of fact, there are a number of studies (such as this one suggesting it as a possible treatment for otherwise-unresponsive autistic children. A number of studies were performed with reports issued between 1959 and 1974 indicating possible “improvements” in communication and relatedness in autistic children when LSD was administered, though few people know about this today and it obviously didn’t exactly catch on. My guess is that it very well might have if not for the post-1960s/post-Leary backlash against LSD and other substances that had previously enjoyed tremendous popularity and that had been widely studied as potential therapeutic agents.

(Mind you, I don’t personally think this was a good idea — I just figured the history was interesting and worth noting.)

And additionally, while some individuals do seem to experience after-effects from LSD use, nothing I’ve ever come across describes anything that sounds like autism — usually people who have trouble with long-term LSD effects experience issues like depression, panic, persisting hallucination (e.g., “tracers” on moving objects that don’t go away), phobias, mood swings, etc.