Tag: Aspergers

This is a repost of an old post that got quite popular.

Straight to the point. I live in Sweden, the country from which a short teenage girl with braids come from. Yes, that’s right. Greta Thunberg has surely taken the world with storm. I am proud to be Swedish when I hear about people like Greta. But I also get very angry when I hear all the rumours and hate against her. I think it’s even more hate against Greta here in Sweden, than anywhere else. I don’t know why, but appearently, the hatred gets more and more extreme. It’s one thing to critisise her or have another opinion than her. But I’ve seen a lot worse than that. I have been forced to work with people who have the most evil and hateful thoughts about her.

I had a boss that almost everyday called her DAMP-Greta. DAMP is an older word for some variations of ADHD, and is still used as an insult for people who cannot control their anger. “Jag får DAMP”, means “I got DAMP”. When they say that, they mean that they get angry and lose their mind. Anyway. My boss often used that word. Even if I told him that I have the same diagnos as her, and that I feel targeted and uncomfortable when he talk like that. Sometimes he also said “poor mongoloide” about her. Mongoloide is an old word for people with Downs Syndrome. A lot of people in Sweden calls her both retarded and mentally ill. I’ve been working with these people. They made a lot of sex jokes about her as well, which I don’t even want to talk about here.

Greta have Aspergers Syndrome and ended school with the highest grades in almost everything. People with aspergers syndrome are not retarded, as many Greta haters say. In fact, they tend to have a bit higher IQ than average. Einstein, Mozart and many other scientists and artists, had Aspergers.

The term Asperger is not given anymore. Today it’s considered as a moderate form of autism. But everyone who got their asperger diagnoses before the name change, still have it on paper. I got my Asperger diagnos just some years before they made that change. Asperger means that you have a peoblem with social communication. In general you don’t like small talk, you just want to talk about the things you are very intrested in. People with Asperger tend to be very good at unusual, theoretical or creative activities, like art, music, drawing or science. It’s hard for them to see the whole picture. Understatements and sarcasm or irony, might be hard for an aspie to detect. But our interest for details is often extraordinary.

If you have aspergers, you are often very good at theoretical, artistic and academic work, but you often have a problem with practical routines. That could be things like tying your shoes, cock food or drive a car.

Maybe the most detectable problem with most aspies, is our lack of sence for relevance in converstions and ability to see something from other people’s perspective. For example, a person with asperger often start to talk about physics, music, history or science, or changing topic rapidly from weather and small talk, to trivial facts about biology, history or something related to fact. This is just an example, it’s not always so extreme. But we could also have problems to identify understatements. It could be diddicult for us to detect people’s face expression or reaction that showsthat they don’t want to talk about a this anymore, or that they believe we talk too much.

This post is very exaggretated and stereotype, but I just wante to make it more simple to understand. All people with Aspergers are different and for some people, the aspergers is hard to notice at all. But, in general, this is often a struggle that we aspies are experiencing every day. Like myself, Greta, Einstein or Mozart and a lot of other people through history. Some other time, I will also tell you about my other diagnoses.

Have a great time, folks. <3

As some of you might know, I have four diagnostics on te paper. Tourettes Syndrom, ADHD, Aspergers Syndrom and Bipolar Disorder. It is a part of me and who I am and here I will go through all of them

ADHD, (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder) use to include major or minor concentration difficulty and impulsivity. There are different varieties, but my biggest problem is my temper. I can get very angry due to minor problems. And when I am angry I can easily get an outburst. Even if I’ve learned to control it much better since I’ve become a grown male, I still have this anger within me for very small things.

Tourettes is a diagnose that incluedes different varieties of obsessional or compulsive actions or movements. These might look completely different from eachother. The common picture of Tourettes is a guy who sits in the middle of a crowd and screaming cursewords and insults at people, not because of rudeness, but of OCD. But Tourettes could actually include anything, even minor actions that not hurt anybody. OCD is a feeling that you just have to do things even if you have no reason to do it. The compulsive behavier intensifies by the fact that you know that you are NOT allowed to do it. For a person with serious Tourettes, it doesn’t help that this person know that what he does will lead to problems. Rather the opposite. It always seems to be the fact that a certain action is abusive or taboo, that will make it even harder to resist doing.

If you do not do certain actions in a specific way, like screaming a insulting slur at a person, or moving a glass on the table to the exactly right place. But it’s not always serious actions. The only thing they have in common, is that you feel forced to do it, even if nobody have forced you. The only one forcing you, is your mind. They are called tics. It might be blinking, stretching, moving your neck in a certain way, or sometimes, cursing at people. However, I have never had so much verbal tics, mostly minor movements. But I’ve become better and better to control them.

Stuttering is more usual you might think, but with me it has always been very obvious. It means that you start to hack or get stuck when you try to say something. Often some letters are more hard to say without stuttering, than others. My stuttering have sometimes been almost gone, and some periods I stutter a lot more. The worst is gone for me, but I still stutter a little.

Aspergers syndrome was something I got on the paper maybe eight years ago or something. It’s a complicated diagnose, because you cannot discribe it in one meaning like the others. Aspergers is nowadays included in the autism spectra and is a form of high functional autism. Autism includes a difficulty to see contexts and read between the lines, but a phenomenal mind for details that are interesting for you. People with autism or aspergers use to have problems with the social codes, mostly due to their special interests. People with Asperger are often very good at a special and rare topic. This means that they do not like small talk. For example, if I am hanging out with a friend, I don’t do small talk, I start to talk about science, politics, history and facts that I’m interested in, instead of asking about my friend’s interests. I’ve now so concious about it that I’ve started to control it more and more, since I’ve been older. Many people with aspergers might have hard to understand irony or sarcasm. I however have not.

Bipolar disorder. When you are depressed, everything feels bad and meaningless. The opposite is called mania and that means an exaggerated happiness, euphoria, energy and creativity. People with bipolarity tend to change from mania to depression with an interval of longer or shorter periods. The change from depression to mania, or from mania to depression can happen suddenly after a couple of days or weeks. A bipolar person in his depressive period is tired, sad and have dark feeling. But in the manic period, he or she are almost speeded, don’t need much sleep, and he talks, talks and talks about his brand new idéas and perspectives.

A lot of people say that these diagnostics are a gift or a strength, but they are not. Not for me, anyway. In some ways they can clearly be an advantage, but for most people it is also a daily struggle.

Worst of all, I think, is the new political correct word “functional variation”. It’s just another new word that normalises diagnoses in a way that makes the actual struggles for people with diasbilities invisible. The word functional variation was indeed a good word, but now when it is used as a synonyme to diagnose, the word diagnose loses it’s meaning. The purpose seems to be to insinuate that all people more or less have diagnoses and that is a problem. It undermines the groups that have actual diagnoses.

I do not think it’s okay to say that it’s okay to behave badly just because somebody have a diagnostics. Disabilities is not an excuse for bad behaviour. One time I even had a discussion with a woman who said she worked with children with disabilities. She went completely mad at me because I said that diagnostics is not an excuse. When I told her that I have disabilities and that I’ve learned to control them, she said that it is impossible to control. She even questioned if I really had diabilities.

This attitude makes me angry. I am not an stupid just because I have diasbilities. I know what I do and I am capable of making decisions, even if I have ADHD, and Aspergers and all what it’s called.

Another think that makes me both sad and angry is all the lies about Greta Thunberg, and all this unawarness about her aspergers. People think that she is retarded and that she have Down Syndrome. If people can’t see the difference between an intellectual disability and high functional autism, they should just shut up! People who say Greta Thunberg is a “mongo” or “retard” they are saying that I am a “mongo” or “retard”. And I do not accept it. I actually thought people after all these years would have better knowledge about autism and aspergers, but there is so much prejudice out there even today.