asperger syndrome

Children with asperger syndrome often get horrendously bullied at school. Due to their inability to read social cues they tend to come across as a bit weird, and often say embarrassing remarks or make social blunders. As a result, the school bullies home in on them like lions circling an injured wildebeest.

Which makes this story even more shocking.
Read the rest of this entry »

The quickest and most effective way to totally invalidate somebody’s viewpoint - as I’m sure Ted will be happy to tell you - is to state that they’re mentally ill. The psychoanalytic movement in particular used to be notorious for dressing up their feuds in the language of psychopathology. At its most horrific extreme, the Soviet Union used psychiatric hospitals to incarcerate and drug political dissidents on the grounds that “no sane person would declaim against Soviet government and Communism”.

The example I’m going to use isn’t anywhere near on that scale, but it does demonstrate the ways in which psychiatric labels can be abused as a means of attacking a political opponent. It involves none other than my old mate Dr Crippen.
Read the rest of this entry »

Apologies to those of you who are fans of gratuitous nudity and girl-on-girl action involving Mia Kirshner (and who doesn’t like that, eh?), but the L word we’re referring to here is “labelling”.

Labels, particularly psychiatric labels, tend to come with a large amount of baggage. They’re regarded as pejorative, they often stay on your medical record permanently and they can be source of discrimination and stigma.

I’m going to discuss this in the context of a young lad with Aspergers Syndrome. We’ll call him Edmund.
Read the rest of this entry »