Friday, September 19, 2008

Wrong Diagnosis

Tomorrow I'm going to meet Maggie and some friends of hers at a bar in the West Village to celebrate the two-year anniversary of one of her Innocence Project exonerations. The case is devastating: the exoneree, who is now 34, was wrongly convicted of rape when he was sixteen, and then spent the next sixteen years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. Worse yet, he has Asperger Syndrome, which was part of the reason why he was unfairly targeted by police in the first place. So, in anticipation of meeting him tomorrow, and having absolutely nothing better to do on a Friday night, I decided to look up some information on AS. Here is what Wikipedia had to say:

"Unlike those with autism, people with AS are not usually withdrawn around others; they approach others, even if awkwardly, for example by engaging in a one-sided, long-winded speech about a favorite topic while being oblivious to the listener's feelings or reactions, such as signs of boredom or haste to leave. This failure to react appropriately to social interaction may appear as disregard for other people's feelings, and may come across as insensitive. People with AS may analyze and distill their observation of social interaction into rigid behavioral guidelines and apply these rules in awkward ways—such as forced eye contact—resulting in demeanor that appears rigid or socially naïve...

Pursuit of specific and narrow areas of interest is one of the most striking features of AS. Individuals with AS may collect volumes of detailed information on a relatively narrow topic such as dinosaurs or deep fat fryers, without necessarily having genuine understanding of the broader topic...

Language acquisition and use is often atypical. Abnormalities include verbosity; abrupt transitions; literal interpretations and miscomprehension of nuance; use of metaphor meaningful only to the speaker; unusually pedantic, formal or idiosyncratic speech; and oddities in loudness, pitch, intonation, prosody, and rhythm."

By the end of the article, I had come to realize the sad, simple truth about life in academia: this, virtually without exception, describes everyone I know.

by Corbett at 9:50 PM |