Giftedness and Autism

This is the first in a series of posts on the subject of giftedness that I will write over the next few weeks until my next big project takes hold. I'm only writing a lot of this to get it out of my head.
A friend recently posted on Facebook that the way to figure out what you should be doing as an adult is to remember what you used to do as a child that you lost yourself in. What did you do that made you lose all sense of time and get totally absorbed in? For a lot of people the answer will be drawing or reading, for me the answer is writing. Not creative writing or story writing, I'm surprisingly terrible at that for someone who is pretty good at spinning a yarn out of an anecdote. No, I'm an academic writer. I like to write while I think. I like to plan out my thoughts and formalise them outwardly. I think usually people who like to formalise and externalise their thoughts make YouTube videos, but verbal outlets aren't as good for me as written ones. So I ill carry on blogging away and if you care, you can read it. If you don't you can leave. Go on now go. Just turn around now, you're not welcome anymore.

The Qualities of the Gifted Adult

When someone uses the word “gifted” to describe themselves the instant reaction they receive is often an incredulous “you're not special”. The very term”Gifted” has pseudo religious implications, who gave some individuals this gift and not others? People who are gifted seem be definition to be stating that they are better or superior to those who are not gifted and in the same stroke as saying “I am better than you” thy seem to say “and there's nothing you can do about it”. It seems like a sort of intellectual elitism that lays value at the door of academic ability and frames itself as a certain special exceptional brilliance that YOU are not a part of. So Ha. 

However the road to the use of the term ‘gifted’ is not so simple as that. Oe can think of it in terms of ‘atypical neurological intensity’. Some people are just wired in such a way that they think obsessively about problems, they experience in vivid and sometimes all-consuming ways. This is a simple biological difference, these people are often severely disabled by their intensity. Atypically Neurologically Intense (ANI) people struggle to get along socially, struggle in education, struggle with depression and self-harm, struggle to maintain positive familial relationships. It is lonely and difficult and when it goes unaccounted for it is much more like a curse than a gift. I would not wish it on anyone. 

However, if you have it then you have it and there is nothing you can do about it. So it makes good sense to frame it in a positive term and focus one’s self-development on the ways in which ANI can be used for good. Good for the individual, good for the world. Once that is established as a goal it is a mode of self-preservation and acceptance to change one’s stance on the curse of ANI and insist to oneself that they think of it as a gift instead. On those grounds, I am happy to use the term ‘gifted’ about myself now in a way I would never have been just a few years ago when I was bogged down in the depression of having my socially acceptable chameleonic skin ripped from me when I was made redundant after 8 years as a secondary school Philosophy teacher. 

In the UK education system, identifying “giftedness” is a very simple quantitative formula application. Students are tested on key skill areas at age 11 on entry to secondary education and the top 5% are labelled as “gifted". But the student who sees through this process, who sees that it is a ridiculous way to differentiate between typical and atypical neurological intensity, may easily sit through the exam and not write a single thing. They may deliberately answer questions incorrectly, they may play games with themselves to see how quickly they can answer all the questions rather than actually trying to get them all right, the may take offence at the way that questions are worded or ordered, some may even spend the examination time writing notes to the examiner about how ridiculous the test is. These are the truly gifted children and the system is drastically inept at both recognising them and accommodating for their needs through education. I have taught many gifted children, since I worked at a school with intense academic entry level competition. The only students we had in the school were, by virtue of their very presence, included in the top 2% in standard testing. They were absolutely not all gifted. The handful of gifted students I knew in my teaching years are not the ones who have gone on to have glittering careers in medicine, journalism and academia. They re the ones who's lack of appropriate education left them depressed, unemployable and desperately unhappy. I wish that I had understood giftedness in the ways that I now understand it. Some of those students may be reading this now so it seems like a good opportunity to say that I see you, I always saw you. I understand, I am sorry. I should have been better, I should have done more, I should have fought for you, I should have tried to save you. I have found ways to save myself and I can only hope that if you read this you will find some ideas of how you can save yourself. You are not cursed, you are GIFTED.

The Qualities of the Gifted Adult

Gifted adults differ intellectually from others and are more sophisticated, more global thinkers who have the capacity to generalise and to see the complex relationships in the world.

Gifted adults have a heightened capacity to appreciate the beauty and the wonderment in our universe. They deeply experience the richness of the world and see beauty in human relations, nature, literature.

Gifted adults crave interchanging ideas with other gifted adults and many love to engage in intense intellectual discussions. 

Gifted adults have an inner urge to fulfil their own expectations and feel very guilty if they cannot even when no one else sees the need to.

One of the most outstanding features of gifted adults is their sense of humour which differs from others and consists often of subtle jokes, intricate teasing or puns. Gifted people often find that their jokes are received with silence because they are not understood.

Gifted adults often have strong feelings encompassing many areas of life and have difficulty understanding the seemingly inconsistent and shortsighted behaviour of others because they can see the foolishness, unfairness and danger of many actions in public and personal life.

Gifted adults have a special problem awareness. They have the ability to predict consequences, see relationships, and foresee problems which are likely to occur.

Because gifted adults know more what is at stake, risk taking for a gifted person may be more difficult than for others because it may take longer for them to decide.

Gifted adults often develop their own method of learning and grasping concepts which can lead to conflict with others who don’t use or understand their method.

Gifted adults are often confronted with the problem of having too many abilities in too many areas in which they would like to work, discover and excel.

Gifted adults are often driven by their giftedness and may be overwhelmed by the pressure of their creativity. Giftedness is a drive, an energy, an necessity to act—it’s a need for mastery, intellectually, creatively, and physically which grows from the need to make sense of the world, to understand the world and to create one’s world.

Gifted adults need time for inner life experiences, and to understand themselves. Because it takes quiet time to clarify thoughts and feelings, gifted adults need contemplation, solitude and daydreaming

Gifted adults relate best to others who share their interests.

Gifted adults may have a small circle of friends or sometimes only one, but the relationships are meaningful.

Gifted adults are independent thinkers who do not just automatically accept the decisions of their supervisors. They function well in a participatory community and with those who are accepting of their attitudes and innovations.

Gifted adults have strong moral convictions and many use their specific talents, insights and knowledge for the betterment of the world.

(from gifted-adults.com edited for use)

Aspergers

For a lot longer than I have recognised that I am gifted, I have recognised that I have Asperger’s Syndrome. However, I've been reading recently about the massive overlap between the symptoms of AS and the qualities of giftedness and it is widely acknowledged that disorders such as ASD and ADHD, OCD and other personality disorders like BPD, are often misdiagnosed since the manifestations of the negative experiences and interactions of gifted people can be easily assumed to be pathological rather than developmental, particularly in children. I am still working on thinking through the boundaries and scope of giftedness and Aspergers and doing some deep self-analysis to see whether I do indeed have both, or only one (if so which) or even neither and perhaps misdiagnosis has been much more drastic than I hd thought it could be. As many people fashionably diagnose themselves as having an ASD (the “we're all the spectrum” claim of non-autistic people abounds and displays a gross misunderstanding of what the idea of a 'spectrum disorder’ means. We aren’t all on the spectrum, please don’t say that to autistic people) as diagnose themselves or their children as ‘gifted’. I have a huge concern about being”that guy” and I need to be absolutely certain of the accuracy of terms that I internalise about myself and my self-understanding so this is a massive task for me and I expect it will b my next project after I finish this blog. 

Criteria for Diagnosis of Asperger’s Diagnosis *DSM IV

nb. The DSM V has stuck Asperger’s and High Functioning Autism together. I do not like this and I consider Asperger's to be a distinct disorder from autism, although with enough overlapping symptoms to consider AS to be part of the spectrum of Autistic Spectrum Disorders. 

A. Qualitative impairment in social interaction, as manifested by at least two of the following:

• Marked impairments in the use of multiple nonverbal behaviours such as eye-to-eye gaze, facial expression, body postures, and gestures to regulate social interaction.

failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level.

• A lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests, or achievements with other people (e.g. by a lack of showing, bringing, or pointing out objects of interest to other people).
• lack of social or emotional reciprocity.

B. Restricted repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behaviour, interests, and activities, as manifested by at least one of the following:

• Encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus.
• Apparently inflexible adherence to specific, nonfunctional routines or rituals.

stereotyped and repetitive motor mannerisms (e.g., hand or finger flapping or twisting, or complex whole-body movements).

• persistent preoccupation with parts of objects.

C. The disturbance causes clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning

D. There is no clinically significant general delay in language (e.g., single words used by age 2 years, communicative phrases used by age 3 years).

E. There is no clinically significant delay in cognitive development or in the development of age-appropriate self-help skills, adaptive behaviour (other than social interaction), and curiosity about the environment in childhood.

F. Criteria are not met for another specific Pervasive Developmental Disorder or Schizophrenia.

For me, the question of whether I have ANI, ASD or both rides on the level of disorder that my ‘ways’ have on my life and how that disorderedness is best addressed. So far, I believe that I have both ANI and AS on the basis of my impaired social functioning even amongst other gifted people, my tendency to take things immediately as literal before applying my internal ‘autocorrect’ function (if I can do so from experience of knowing what he context dependent meaning actually is, sometimes that is not possible and although I find it deeply amusing when I see new idiomatic elements of speech and their literal meaning is all I get, other people mostly don’t understand. The first time I saw the phrase “does your face fit” I thought it was fucking HILARIOUS, didn't occur to me that it didn’t mean literally. Shame. Literal interpretation is often just brilliant and it being the default setting of my brain makes my world pretty fun). I also have a stim tendency and shutdowns when I overload.This is emotionally based and causes lie within those ASD parts of myself that are incapable of primary emotional functioning and processing. I prefer not to emote at all and I do not seek to change myself into a more feely type of person. Bleurgh.