the autistic brain thinking across the spectrum

In fact, almost the minute we got the diagnosis, my resistance to labeling melted, and so did my husband’s. It turned out to be more useful to us than we had expected. What, we asked ourselves at the time, could a label teach us about our son that we didn’t already know?īut after a few years of resorting to elaborate, novelistic descriptions to explain him to teachers and friends, we began to wonder whether some more officially recognized category, even if flawed, might be helpful.

Several years later, he was deep into programming languages and still having trouble getting on anybody else’s wavelength. Who needed all that baggage? Not us, I figured, and not Jacob, though it was easy enough to spot the symptoms, starting with his very early and intense obsession with letters, which he seemed to relate to more easily than he did to his peers. The term Asperger’s was becoming shorthand for hyper-focused, often precocious talent and a socially awkward personality-a potential lonely misfit or even, as Nora Ephron once wrote, a “prick,” the kind of guy who might cook up a social-media site in his dorm room to take revenge on some girl who had spurned him. John Elder Robison’s Look Me in the Eye and Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day introduced the world to two eccentric but also enviable minds, one gifted with machines and the other with numbers. Their authors accomplished what those with the label weren’t supposed to be able to manage: they vividly shared the view from within, and helped to define the type. In 2007, the year Jacob turned 4, a pair of Asperger’s memoirs arrived on the New York Times best-seller list. Our son, after all, was growing up during the years when Asperger’s-officially added to the DSM in 1994-was assuming the status of a signature disorder of the high-tech information age. Many parents would have been on the case much earlier. The about-face stung, not least because my husband and I had procrastinated for so long before having Jacob evaluated. Four months later, the American Psychiatric Association declared that Asperger’s was no longer a valid diagnosis, and removed it from the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

In January 2013, a psychologist diagnosed our 10-year-old son, Jacob, with Asperger’s syndrome.

The autistic brain thinking across the spectrum