My Poverty, Like My Asperger's, Is Not a Myth

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/whitney-bradley/working-poor-disability_b_4512700.html

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Teacher Assistant developed depression because of Unstable Employment due to Asperger

【記者王家文報道】智商超過120但自幼被視為「怪人」的阿Wing，志願做教師，大學畢業後五年間卻轉職了六間學校，能力屢被質疑，男友也覺嫌棄。患了抑鬱試過三次尋死，年近30歲始確診亞氏保加症，但如釋重負，「相信自己與別人不一樣，但不比別人差」。她積極尋求改善，終走出困局，勉勵同路人，「努力發揮自己長處」。
阿Wing現兼職中學音樂科教學助理，工作近一年，有信心獲續約。她不願上鏡怕被標籤，但勇於道出自身經歷，包括三次走過鬼門關，對上一次是兩、三年前，多次工作失敗，且患上抑鬱症，前男友說怕要養她一世，她衝出馬路尋死，「覺得自己冇價值，我努力咗，點解其他人睇唔到？」。在中大畢業後，阿Wing考獲教育文憑。首份工在Band1中學任教師兼教學助理，遭投訴工作慢，被校方減少堂數，她自行離職。之後轉教Band3中學，無法控制學生秩序，更驚動訓導主任。壓力越來越大，她第一次想到自殺，走上學校天台，「諗過死咗就解決件事」。
八萬自閉者七成屬高能力
阿Wing是家中獨女，自幼讀書好，學習快，但不懂與人相處。升上中學，被同學排擠，「做Project（報告）分唔到組，特登唔約你，比晒啲爛嘢你做」。她口直心快，易得罪人，前男友更說，「唔想帶你出嚟見朋友，驚冇面」。「以前好似外星人咁，有時唔明人講乜，人哋又覺得你怪。」任教特殊學校時，同事建議Wing做評估，確診亞氏保加症，屬自閉症一種。排期治療期間，她轉職幼稚園助理，過不到試用期，打擊很大，曾爬出窗企跳，「覺得好絕望」，價值觀也被打破，「努力咗都唔會有回報」。
後來轉介至香港耀能協會接受輔導和治療，阿Wing終尋回出路，正面看待自身障礙和限制。她參與小組訓練，改善情緒管理和溝通技巧，認清強弱項，不再尋死，「搵到自己有價值地方，有人重視」。
該協會臨床心理學家黃志茵指，本港有逾8萬自閉症患者，當中約七成屬高能力自閉症（HFA），即智商達70或以上程度的自閉症或亞氏保加症患者，阿Wing便屬此類。該協會09年開展「吾懂人情」計劃，現為100名HFA患者提供評估、治療和訓練等支援服務，協助他們升學就業，融入社區

認識「高能力自閉症」 2013-5-15
高能力自閉症患者天生社交及自我意識薄弱
工作分配組織力弱、不能理解空泛指令、錯估別人說話意思，擁有以上特徵者，已可能是「高能力自閉症」人士。有成績不俗的女生，大學畢業後5年間，轉工5次，每份工不逾1年，多不獲續約，一度抑鬱尋死。及後她求助心理學家，始發現自己有高能力自閉症，因天生社交能力弱，使工作表現受挫。「兒時已不太懂與其他小孩相處，有時會強迫別人用自己的方法玩遊戲。但媽媽說可能因我是獨生女，沒有兄弟姊妹，不懂與人相處。」畢業於中文大學中文系的阿Wing說，自己一向記性好，成績不俗，因此父母從未正視她社交能力欠佳的問題。
不過，阿Wing中學時已意識到自己不受同學歡迎，每次做功課總是找不到同學分組。一次，她問同學自己為何不受歡迎，對方卻說：「他們說你怪。」但她依然不明白。她和媽媽認為自己只是說話直接，加上應付學業綽綽有餘，故合得來的朋友也不多，她也從未懷疑自己的能力。惟工作後，問題逐一湧現。
阿Wing首3份工作都是教師職位，教學以外，需應付各種突發且指令不一的工作，因而令她手足無措，未能分辨當中的優先次序及安排相應程序；又因她容易錯解別人想法而影響與同事的關係，結果首份工作，她因被投訴工作速度慢、表現不理想，一年後自行辭職；其後3份工作也做不過半年，因而令她情緒低落，且更三度企圖自殺，患上抑鬱。
直至阿Wing認識到熟悉特殊學習能力障礙的同事，才估計自己可能患上高能力自閉症，其後她尋找協助。香港耀能協會心理學家黃志茵說，現在阿Wing的情緒已較兩年多前穩定，想法亦趨正面。阿Wing坦言終重拾自己價值。黃解釋，如阿Wing的高能力自閉症者，因自我及社交意識薄弱，故不能辨別自己做出了別人眼中看來「怪異」的行為，「而他們又不理解這些行為有何不妥，只知自己不很受歡迎。」她又稱因他們的智力大多在正常或以上，所以當他們普遍在成年階段，於工作表現及個人交際出現重大問題時才有機會發現。
香港耀能協會臨床心理學家黃志茵指，外國目前每88個人中有一人患自閉，以此推算，香港約有8萬多名自閉症人士，高能力自閉症則佔約7成，但本港目前未有相關正式統計。黃指不少人誤會自閉症人士不懂社交而認為他們是「怪人」，但核心問題是他們天生社交及自我意識薄弱，她亦說，要初步評估自己是否高能力自閉症人士，除觀察不同特徵外，最重要是看日常生活如工作及讀書表現受到多嚴重影響。
她坦言不少高材生都是高能力自閉症人士，他們智商高、記性好，因此高中階段前的學業，應付自如；升大學後，因上課時間不定，又要求學生自行組織學習內容及課堂筆記，因此不擅長自我組織及面對彈性多變環境的他們，成績一落千丈，不停質疑自己為何現問題，結果壓力「爆煲」，求助專業人士始發現問題。
她續說，到成年階段才確定自己是自閉症人士，不少人會難以接受，不欲面對，但她認為及早察覺才能正視問題。

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Navigating Love and Asperger

The following article does an excellent job in illustrating to normal people what is like to have Asperger:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/us/navigating-love-and-autism.html?pagewanted=3&_r=0

GREENFIELD, Mass. — Jack Robison, 19, who had since childhood thought of himself as “not like the other humans,” regarded Kirsten Lindsmith with undisguised tenderness.
She was the only girl to have ever asked questions about his obsessive interests — chemistry, libertarian politics, the small drone aircraft he was building in his kitchen — as though she actually cared to hear his answer. To Jack, who has a form of autism called AS syndrome, her mind was uncannily like his. She was also, he thought, beautiful.
So far they had only cuddled; Jack, who had dropped out of high school but was acing organic chemistry in continuing education classes, had hopes for something more. Yet when she smiled at him the next morning, her lips seeking his, he turned away.
“I don’t really like kissing,” he said.
Kirsten, 18, a college freshman, drew back. If he knew she was disappointed, he showed no sign.
On that fall day in 2009, Kirsten did not know that someone as intelligent and articulate as Jack might be unable to read the feelings of others, or gauge the impact of his words. And only later would she recognize that her own lifelong troubles — bullying by students, anger from teachers and emotional meltdowns that she felt unable to control — were clues that she, too, occupied a spot on what is known as the autism spectrum.
But she found comfort in Jack’s forthrightness. If he did not always say what she wanted to hear, she knew that whatever he did say, he meant. As he dropped her off on campus that morning, she replayed in her head the e-mail he had sent the other day, describing their brief courtship with characteristic precision.
“Is this what love is, Kirsten?” he had asked.
Only since the mid-1990s have a group of socially impaired young people with otherwise normal intelligence and language development been recognized as the neurological cousins of nonverbal autistic children. Because they have a hard time grasping what another is feeling — a trait sometimes described as “mindblindness” — many assumed that those with such autism spectrum disorders were incapable of, or indifferent to, intimate relationships. Parents and teachers have focused instead on helping them with school, friendship and, more recently, the workplace.
Yet as they reach adulthood, the overarching quest of many in this first generation to be identified with AS syndrome is the same as many of their nonautistic peers:  to find someone to love who will love them back.
The recent recognition that their social missteps arise from a neurological condition has lifted their romantic prospects, they say, allowing them to explain behavior once attributed to rudeness or a failure of character — and to ask for help. So has the recent proliferation of Web sites and forums where self-described “Aspies,” or “Aspergians,” trade dating tips and sometimes find actual dates. Lessons learned with the advent of social skills classes and therapies, typically intended to help them get jobs, are now being applied to the more  treacherous work of forging intimacy.
The months that followed Jack and Kirsten’s first night together show how daunting it can be for the mindblind to achieve the kind of mutual understanding that so often eludes even nonautistic couples. But if the tendency to fixate on a narrow area of interest is sometimes considered a drawback, it may also explain one couple’s single-minded determination to keep trying.
A Meeting
Kirsten was first introduced to Jack in the fall of 2008 by her boyfriend at the time, who jumped up from their table at Rao’s Coffee in Amherst, Mass., to greet his friend, who was dressed uncharacteristically in a suit that hung from his lean frame.
Jack, it turned out, was on his way to court. A chemistry whiz, he had spent much of his adolescence teaching himself to make explosives and setting them off in the woods in experiments that he hoped would earn him a patent but that instead led the state police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to charge him with several counts of malicious explosion.
By the following spring, he would be cleared of all the charges and recruited by the director of the undergraduate chemistry program at the University of Massachusetts, who was impressed by a newspaper account of Jack’s home-built laboratory. Kirsten’s boyfriend, a popular Amherst High senior, had offered to serve as a character witness for his former classmate, and the three spent much time together that year.
The boyfriend told Kirsten that Jack had AS syndrome: his condition may have blinded him to the possibility that the explosions, which he recorded and posted on YouTube, could well be viewed by law enforcement authorities as anything other than the ambitious chemistry experiments he saw them.
But if Kirsten noticed that Jack held himself stiffly, spoke with an unusual formality and rarely made eye contact, she gave little thought to his condition, other than to note that it ran in families: his father, John Elder Robison, is the author of “Look Me in the Eye,” a best-selling 2007 memoir about his own diagnosis of Asperger’s at age 39.
After reading of the intense interests that often come with the condition — the elder Mr. Robison’s passion for Land Rovers, he had written, was the basis for his successful business servicing luxury vehicles — Kirsten and her boyfriend made light: “I have Asperger’s for McDonald’s,” she would joke. But Jack was all too familiar with the book’s more sobering stories, too: about the  despair his father felt in his youth as he looked at happy couples around him and his rocky marriage to Jack’s mother, which ended in divorce.
“All these young Aspergians want to know how to succeed at dating,” John Robison told his son after his speaking engagements. And as a high school girlfriend broke up with Jack over the course of that year, Jack began to wonder more urgently about the same question.
Kirsten’s two previous boyfriends had broken up with her, too, and her current boyfriend was an unlikely match — a charismatic extrovert with soulful blue eyes who thrived on meeting new people. But when she admitted at the outset of their senior year in high school that she envied his social ease, he had embraced the role of social coach.
Years of social rejection had made her, in his view, overly eager to please. “People will take advantage of you if you act that way,” he warned. “If you don’t watch out, you’ll be a natural doormat.”
Noting her tendency to speak in a monotone, he urged her to be more expressive. He sought to quiet her hand movements, gave her personal hygiene tips (“You can’t do that,” he told her flatly when she used her fingers to scoop up food she had dropped on a table at Taco Bell and ate it) and pointed out the unspoken social cues she often missed. He elbowed her as she spoke for long minutes to an acquaintance about her  interest in animal physiology. “When people look away,” he explained, “it means they’re not interested.”
And sometimes, he was plainly upset by what he perceived as her rudeness. “I can’t believe you did that,” he huffed when his mother asked Kirsten how she was and she did not reciprocate.
Much of the time, Kirsten embraced the tutoring, which he punctuated with unabashed displays of affection. “I love this girl!” the boyfriend once proclaimed, tackling her on his mother’s couch. Diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder at age 11, she never heard the word autism. They were convinced that with some effort she could become as socially adept as he was.
But she also chafed at his frequent instructions, which required constant, invisible exertion to obey. And she despaired of ever living up to his most urgent request: that she share her innermost feelings with him.
“Just don’t filter,” he said one night, lying in bed with her.
“It’s like the blue screen of death,” she said, describing her difficulty conveying her emotion with a widely used term for a Windows computer crash. “There are no words there.”
“You’re not a robot,” he insisted, intending to comfort her. “I know you can do this. You’re a human being.”
But not, she thought, the kind he wanted her to be.
In contrast to her boyfriend’s emotional probing, Jack’s enthusiasm for facts — like how far his green laser pointer could reach across the University of Massachusetts campus in Amherst — came as a relief. So, too, did his apparent lack of concern for fitting in. A supporter of President Obama, she found herself admiring Jack’s anti-Obama bumper sticker, which almost invariably elicited angry honks in left-leaning Amherst but once got him out of a ticket.
If Jack had trouble reading Kirsten’s expressions and body language, he also noticed that she had what he considered a perfect smile. On his laptop, he showed her bootleg episodes of his favorite TV show, “Breaking Bad,” about a chemistry teacher turned methamphetamine producer. And on the evenings when he argued libertarian positions with Kirsten’s boyfriend, a liberal Democrat, he often found himself disappointed when she went to bed early.
One afternoon in the fall of 2009 he asked if she was free to meet between classes at UMass, where she was enrolled as a freshman and he was studying chemistry for an associate’s degree. They talked about their childhoods in Amherst, both social outcasts even among their geeky classmates, offspring of academics. Jack’s poor grades reflected the hours he spent reading chemistry Web sites rather than doing homework; one teacher had suggested to Kirsten’s mother, an administrator at UMass, that she would be “a perfect candidate for home-schooling.”
Kirsten told Jack, at some length, of her desire to be a medical examiner. He replied, at even greater length, about chemistry, his interest having shifted from explosives to designing new compounds for medical use. Sometimes, as they circled the campus, she broke in with questions “What’s that?” she wanted to know when his descriptions grew technical, or “Why?” Accustomed to being treated with something more akin to polite fascination when he held forth on his favorite subjects —  he often felt, he said, like a zoo animal — he checked to be sure her interest was genuine before providing detailed answers.
Jack, Kirsten noticed, bit his lips, a habit he told her came from not knowing how he was supposed to arrange his face to show his emotions. Kirsten, Jack noticed, cracked her knuckles, which she later told him was her public version of the hand-flapping she reserved for when she was alone, a common autistic behavior thought to ease stress.
Their difficulty discerning unspoken cues might have made it harder to know if the attraction was mutual. Kirsten stalked Jack on Facebook, she later told him, but he rarely posted. In one phone conversation, Jack wondered, “Is she flirting with me?” But he could not be sure.
But Jack, who had never known how to hide his feelings, wrote Kirsten an e-mail laying them out. And when Kirsten’s boyfriend pleaded with her to tell him what was wrong, she did, sobbing. She could not explain, she said. She knew only that she felt as if she had found her soulmate.
Road Bumps
From the beginning, their physical relationship was governed by the peculiar ways their respective brains processed sensory messages. Like many people with autism, each had uncomfortable sensitivities to types of touch or texture, and they came in different combinations.
Jack recoiled when Kirsten tried to give him a back massage, pushing deeply with her palms.
“Pet me,” he said, showing her, his fingers grazing her skin. But Kirsten, who had always hated the feeling of light touch, shrank from his caress.
“Only deep pressure,” she showed him, hugging herself.
He tried to kiss her, but it was hard for her to enjoy it, so obvious was his aversion. To him, kissing felt like what it was, he told her: mashing your face against someone else’s. Neither did he like the sweaty feeling of hand-holding, a sensation that seemed to dominate all others whenever they tried it.
 “I’m sorry,” he said helplessly.
What mattered more to Kirsten was how comfortable she felt for the first time in a relationship. Even if she did something wrong, she believed, Jack would not leave her. When he remarked on her obliviousness after she chattered on one day about vertebrate anatomy to their neighbor — “Matson was totally bored,” he informed her — there was no judgment, only pride that he had managed to notice. “Is that why he was yawning?” she asked, laughing with him.
She moved out of her dorm and into his apartment that fall. Despite his distaste for her habit of scavenging, he did not complain when she decorated his bare living room with a plastic orange, magnetic trains and a Wolverine action figure rescued from the sidewalk. And when he rejected her suggestion that a cat would make the apartment cozier, she did not push it.
She liked his large hands, with their long, tapered fingers and wide knuckles, and thought he was the most interesting person she had ever met.
“You’re very pretty,” he told her frequently, looking up from his computer on their kitchen table to appreciate her tall, slender frame, her big eyes bright under her dark bangs.
For his part, Jack rejoiced to find that Kirsten did not hold certain social expectations that had caused him anxiety with a high school girlfriend. He apologized, for instance, that he failed to get her a Christmas present because he had not been able to think of what she would like.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said with a shrug. “I can tell you what to get me next time.”
She tolerated his discomfort with public displays of affection, though she pushed for more in private. When he explained that his lack of expression did not mean a lack of warmth for her — he often simply forgot — she devised a straightforward strategy to help him.
“When I put my hand on your leg,” she said, “you put your arm on my back.”
It was the disagreements that spiraled into serious conflicts when they could not understand and, then, find a way to comfort each other that threatened to break them apart. One might start over Kirsten’s request that Jack hug her when she came home from school, or his perception that she was already angry at him when she came through the door.
 “The more we argue, the worse it gets,” Jack said once, close to despair.
One night as Kirsten cooked dinner, he peered into the pan where she was sautéing vegetables to comment on the way she had cut the cauliflower.
“It’s too big,” he explained. “It won’t cook through.”
“It’s better when it’s not all mushy,” she insisted.
“No,” he said. “You’re just doing it wrong.”
Eventually, Kirsten, unable to contain her tears, fled to the living room.
“What I want,” she told him when they analyzed their clashes in less-fraught moments, “is to be held and rocked and comforted.”
But Jack, believing himself accused of a slight he had not made, could not bring himself to touch her.
He needed to be apart, to cool down.
Once, he had tried to do as she requested, stiffly wrapping his arms around her, against all that seemed natural to him. But when it only seemed to elicit more tears, he did not try again.
Instead, he hovered near her. “Stop crying,” he would say, pacing the perimeter of the small apartment and returning to where she sat.
He could not distract himself at those moments, even with the chemistry entries on Wikipedia, or an old episode of “Breaking Bad.”
The Diagnosis
Looking for clues to fix her new relationship, Kirsten began frequenting autism Web sites like WrongPlanet.net, where hundreds of messages a day are posted. “Eligible Odd-Bods,” read one. Another, “Are relationships harder for Aspies?”
In the library, she paged through autism guidebooks, few of which contained any information about relationships, not to mention sex. But as she read about the manifestations of the condition, she recognized them — and not only in Jack.
A passage about the difficulty that people with autism have reading facial expressions reminded her of being mocked by a friend at age 5 with whom she had agreed to draw “angry ghosts.” The friend’s ghost had zigzag lines for scowling lips and a knitted brow. Kirsten, unsure how to depict anger, had drawn a blank-faced ghost with a dialogue box above its head that read “Grrr.”
In one chapter about the repetitive behavior and thought-process “ruts” that are common among autistic people, she saw her own difficulty climbing out of her black moods. Many children of her generation who probably had Asperger’s, she read, were misdiagnosed with A.D.H.D. because autism carried more of a stigma. Girls with the condition, one theory went, were overlooked because their shyness was tolerated more and “mother hen” friends might shield them from the worst social isolation, as had happened to Kirsten.
And then there was the characteristic of autism — focusing on a detail rather than the whole — that seemed to define  the nitpicky arguments she and Jack had daily, even hourly, it sometimes seemed. There was the one, for example, when they were trying to recount something that had happened at a particular hotel, but could not advance past the semantics of its size.
“The hotel was miles wide,” Kirsten had started. “And — ”
“It was not ‘miles’ wide,” Jack had broken in. “It was maybe an acre, but not a mile wide, I can guarantee it.”
“I don’t think you can guarantee it,” she had retorted — and so on.
These fights, which Jack had dubbed “Aspie arguments,” were not soul-sapping, like the ones where he could not comprehend her need for a certain kind of comfort and she could not abide his inability to give it. But the cumulative effect was exhausting. It had been Jack’s similar escalation of arguments with his father that had prompted John Robison to send him to the therapist who gave him the Asperger’s diagnosis at age 15.
No prescription would come with a diagnosis, Kirsten knew. The only drugs for autism treated side effects, like depression or anxiety; she already had medication for A.D.H.D. It might help her get more time for assignments at school, where the constant effort of social interaction sometimes left her drained and struggling even with tasks that should be easy for her. But mostly, she wanted to know if there was an explanation for the awkwardness that had plagued her for so long.
Her answer came in the fall of 2010, the result of a six-hour battery of questionnaires and puzzles and a visit with a psychologist. “Lack of awareness of self-impact,” the report read. “Diminished expression of ordinary social graces.” She had left, the doctor wrote, “without a parting word.”
Many others with the same diagnosis, she knew, were more impaired than she. In online forums, she encountered skeptics who saw Asperger’s as an excuse for rudeness — or, worse, a means of pathologizing essentially normal behavior and diverting resources from those who were truly challenged. Her ex-boyfriend, she suspected, felt similarly about her own diagnosis when she reported the news.
But Kirsten took heart in the official acknowledgment and the community it made her a part of. She changed her account setting at WrongPlanet.net from “undiagnosed” to “AS syndrome” and persuaded her mother to pay for  a therapist who specialized in treating people on the autism spectrum.
And between classes one day in the library that fall, she read the first chapters of “Thinking in Pictures,” the autobiography of Temple Grandin, the autistic animal scientist whose life story was made into an HBO movie. Kirsten, too, had always thought in pictures.
People with autism, Dr. Grandin suggested, can more easily put themselves in the shoes of an animal than in those of another person because of their sensory-oriented and visual thought process. Suddenly, Kirsten yearned for the kind of uncomplicated comfort and affection that came with a small furry animal.
She would talk to Jack again about a cat, she thought, closing the book.

A Meltdown
Kirsten’s diagnosis brought her closer to Jack.
Alex Plank, 25, the founder of the WrongPlanet Web site, also had Asperger’s and  had enlisted Jack in the production of Autism Talk TV, featuring video interviews with autism experts.
 Kirsten now joined them, and as they traveled to conferences, Alex’s tales of his own romantic ups and downs — echoed by many on his Web site — gave them perspective on their own dramas. “It’s easy for me to get a girl’s number,” he told them. “I can build attraction. But attraction isn’t enough.”
Still, Kirsten’s wish for more physical affection from Jack was proving harder to manage. Once, during a family gathering at his father’s house, she saw Mr. Robison put his arms around the woman he had been dating and would soon marry. That, she thought with a pang, was more than Jack would do unprompted even if there was no one around.
If she didn’t ask him so much, he would do it more, Jack countered. Didn’t she understand how fake it felt when he knew he was “supposed” to do it?
Yet when the opportunity arose to date other people, they did not take it. This past spring, a male student sitting next to Kirsten in anthropology class passed her a tic-tac-toe board he had drawn during a lecture. She played along, but when he asked her, “Do you have a boyfriend?” she replied, “Yes,” and that was the end of it. Nor did Jack, asked to lunch by his female lab partner, show any interest.
But at Fox Lane Middle School in Bedford, N.Y., where Jack and Kirsten, now Internet mini-celebrities, were invited to speak about autism, the staff asked them, “Have you ever thought about dating each other?”
“We’re so platonic,” Kirsten complained to Jack later. “They didn’t even know.”
Nor was she the only one now craving affection. “Why do you pet Tybalt more than me?” he asked after a visit to her mother’s house, referring to the family dog named for the Shakespeare character.
The talk about the cat, when she raised the issue again last spring, was not much of a talk. He was allergic, Jack told her. And the apartment already felt too small. It was obvious to him that it made no sense. Yet he had grown up with a cat, Kirsten pointed out. His allergies were not so bad. She could keep him supplied with Zyrtec. If he wouldn’t hold her when she was sad, at least she could cuddle a cat.
It was obvious to her, too.
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” Jack told her.
They could both see the meltdown coming. This time, as she huddled, sobbing, in a chair in the living room, he stretched out next to her on the couch.
“Go in the other room,” she told him. “You don’t have to be here.”
But he wouldn’t leave.
Exploring Therapies
Jack and Kirsten considered autism a part of who they are, and fundamental to what drew them to each other.
But for a time this past summer, Jack became captivated by the idea of designing an empathy drug. On the nights when he was not manipulating the virtual economy of the computer game Eve Online, which he often played late into the night after Kirsten had gone to bed, he read all he could find on the hormone oxytocin, which has been linked to trust and social interaction.
A small study suggesting that some of the social difficulties associated with AS syndrome could be relieved temporarily by inhaling an oxytocin nasal spray had generated media interest the year before.
But to Jack, the more interesting possibility was a drug that worked on the same principle as the popular antidepressants called S.S.R.I.’s, whose effect could last considerably longer than a spray.
“I’m sure people are working on it,” he told Kirsten, showing her an obscure Wikipedia entry he had found on the subject one night. “But no one’s published anything so far as I could tell.”
He explained, in his animated way, why the chemistry should work, and also, why it might not.
Then he paused.
“I wonder if I took it, whether I would be better at being affectionate,” he said.
“I wonder,” she said, “what effect it would have on me.”
They had both undergone a different experimental treatment, for a study at Harvard Medical School. Jack’s father believed that earlier studies with that procedure, which  delivered current to areas of the brain, had given him a temporary insight into other people he had not had previously. But they had noticed no such effect on themselves.
And Kirsten had been working hard with her own therapist to develop strategies for soothing herself. When she found herself in a bad-mood rut, she had agreed with her therapist, she would visualize Twilight Sparkle, the nerdy intellectual character in the animated children’s show “My Little Pony” — of which her knowledge bordered on encyclopedic and whose goofiness made her laugh. She also kept a list of “twisted thoughts” that she sought to resist when they came, like her tendency to presume Jack was angry when he was making a neutral observation.
“I think it’s helping,” he told her.
A cat, she thought, would help more. In recent weeks, she had been showing him irresistibly cute pictures of kittens from a forum on Reddit.com called “aww.” But she did not mention the cat that night. Instead, she asked if he would come to bed with her rather than staying up to play Eve.
“Will you pet me if I come to bed?” he asked.
She agreed.
Giving Ground
Around Thanksgiving, Jack began to think that he should let Kirsten get a cat. Maybe he would keep the idea a secret, he thought, and make it a Christmas gift. He wasn’t sure.
But Kirsten, taking matters into her own hands, stopped by the animal shelter one day to see if it was possible to get a hypoallergenic cat.
There is no such thing, she told him on arriving home, but females, the shelter staff had told her, are less allergenic — so perhaps that was an option.
“Forget it, then,” Jack said absently.
He had not meant it as a final word. But Kirsten, feeling tears welling up, employed one of the new strategies she had discussed in therapy: going out for a drive, rather than wallowing.
Jack called on her cellphone almost as soon as she pulled out of their street.
“What are you doing?” he asked. “Are you — leaving?”
Trying to control her voice, she said nothing. And then, she managed, “No.”
She was driving into Amherst, hoping to see a friend.
In the apartment alone, he paced, the phone to his ear.
“Kirsten,” he said. “Just come back. We’ll get the cat.”
He did have one requirement: it had to be able to chase a laser pointer.
On a day early this month, before their planned trip to the animal shelter, Kirsten and Jack stood before a group of young adults with autism at the Kinney Center for Autism Education and Support in Philadelphia, answering their questions while Jack’s father addressed their parents in a different room. “Did you ever think you would be alone?” one teenager wanted to know.
Kirsten answered first. “I thought I was going to be alone forever,” she said. “Kids who picked on me said I was so ugly I’m going to die alone.”
Her blunt tip on dating success: “A lot of it is how you dress. I found people don’t flirt with me if I wear big man pants and a rainbow sweatshirt.”
Then it was Jack’s turn to answer, in classic Aspie style. “I think I sort of lucked out,” he said. “I have no doubt if I wasn’t dating Kirsten I would have a very hard time acquiring a girlfriend that was worthwhile.”
A mother who had slipped into the room put up her hand.
“Where do you guys see your relationship going in the future?” she asked. “No pressure.”
Kirsten looked at Jack. “You go first,” she said.
“I see it going along the way it is for the foreseeable future,” Jack said.
One of the teenagers hummed the Wedding March.
“So I guess you’re saying, there is hope in the future for longer relationships,” the mother pressed.
Kirsten gazed around the room. A few other adults had crowded in.
“Parents always ask, ‘Who would like to marry my kid? They’re so weird,’ ” she said. “But, like, another weird person, that’s who.”
The Cat
The next morning, Kirsten woke up from a nightmare: they were late to get the cat, and she couldn’t reach Jack. She was riding a motorbike with pedals in weird places, and she couldn’t find the animal shelter.
In fact, they would have just enough time to reach the shelter before it closed after getting breakfast and buying a laser pointer with a lower-intensity red beam than his green one to test the prospective adoptees. In the car, Kirsten noticed a blinking “E” on the gas gauge, and the couple had the following exchange:
Kirsten: Oh, we need to get gas. Do you want to stop at the 7-Eleven?
Jack: No, we’ll stop on the way back.
Kirsten: How can you not get stressed when that thing is blinking?
Jack: I’m not intimidated by liquid crystal displays.
Kirsten: You know what I mean, you get anxious about everything.
Jack: I know we have at least 20 miles of gas.
Kirsten: We have to drive seven miles there, and then seven back.
Jack: No, we have three miles back.
Kirsten: Should we just stop at 7-Eleven?
Both of them breathed a sigh of relief when the only female kitten at the shelter pounced without hesitation on the red laser beam Jack shined into her cage. At home, however, she ran straight under the old-fashioned bathtub.
Jack bent down and scooped up the kitten, holding her up to the mirror above the sink. Kirsten stroked her black fur in his arms, their hands touching briefly across the kitten’s back, and in the reflection.
“Are you looking at yourself in the mirror?” Jack asked the kitten. “Are you smart enough to recognize yourself?”
They stood for a moment together, awaiting the reaction.

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Born for this: Autistic Child Becomes Missionary to Japan

http://www.sbcbaptistpress.org/bpnews.asp?id=39991
"The voice of Truth says, 'This is for My glory.' Out of all the voices calling out to me, I will choose to listen and believe the voice of Truth."

Listening to Steven sing, his parents -- missionaries Tim and Iracema Kunkel -- wiped tears from their eyes. More than anyone else in the room besides Steven, they understood what these words have meant to him.

Eighteen years ago, Steven was diagnosed with autism, a developmental disorder causing problems in behavior, communication and social interaction. At age 5, Steven couldn't speak. Today, at 23, he speaks four languages -- English, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese. And he's learning five more -- Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, Mandarin Chinese and Tagalog.

Symptoms of Autism

From the beginning, doctors said Steven was high functioning. Even so, he displayed all 14 of the most common symptoms of autism.

Steven couldn't tolerate change, for example. He didn't like to hug. He preferred being alone. He avoided eye contact, echoed others' words and laughed at inappropriate times. He also had a habit of spinning himself and objects.

Today, as a missionary in Japan, Steven has only one of the 14 symptoms -- inappropriate laughter -- and it's hardly noticeable. He taught himself how to manage it through Internet research.

Steven spent years struggling to overcome most of the other symptoms, and God used many people in that process. Steven's parents created a structured and loving family environment, guiding him through the challenges of autism. His two older siblings, Julia and John Glenn, encouraged him with their love. Many believers prayed. Professionals like speech therapists and physicians provided specialized help.

Strengthened by God and his support team, Steven himself did years of hard work for healing.

"Sometimes it was like I was climbing a mountain, facing a lot of difficulties," he said. "Whenever I felt a difficulty or a weakness come, I fell down. But I managed to get up and keep walking."

And through God's power, Steven has climbed to some amazing heights.

‘Seeing through God’s eyes’

One of these was Steve’s commissioning as a missionary to Japan.

"I've felt today that so many questions about Steven's autism have been answered," Steven's mom, Iracema, said, "like a veil is being lifted from my eyes and I'm seeing things through God's eyes. I'm thinking, 'for this day you were born, Steven.'"

Holding his well-marked Japanese Bible, Steven sat with head bowed as fellow believers surrounded him inside the Japanese-Paraguayan house church. The circle included church members, visitors and Japanese children Steven had taught at the church. Steven's parents -- International Mission Board missionaries in Asunción -- stood behind him.

The group laid hands on Steven as pastor Koki Nowada, his Japanese mentor, led in prayer. Nowada's normally soft voice grew louder and more intense as he prayed in Japanese for God's anointing on Steven.

It's a powerful moment for worshippers. Steven's dad, Tim, sobbed with joy.

He remembers the day doctors diagnosed Steven with autism, not long after the Kunkels moved to Uruguay as new missionaries.

"It was like one child died and another child was born," Tim recalls. "But God, in His permissive will, allowed this to happen. And God, in His sovereignty, had a plan."

The Kunkels saw God's plan unfold as they continued serving in Uruguay. Because few services for autistic children were available there, Iracema studied special education so she could teach Steven herself. In the process, she discovered a gift for working with autistic children. She began sharing that expertise with parents of other autistic children in Uruguay. In turn, God used those connections to open doors for the Kunkels to witness for Christ.

"I'm realizing now that a lot of what God has had us doing on the mission field -- first in Uruguay and then after we moved to Paraguay -- hasn't been so much about us as missionaries," Iracema says. "It was about Steven. It was like God was using us to help put all the pieces of the puzzle in place for Steven, so this autistic child could grow up to be a missionary for God's glory."

One important puzzle piece fell into place when Steven accepted Christ at age 8. Later at 15, he became interested in Japan. While visiting some friends in Uruguay's countryside, Steven fell asleep under a tree. He dreamed a Japanese girl told him she wanted him to learn her language and culture. When Steven woke up, he had a strong desire to learn Japanese and travel to Japan.

"Now, I think it was kind of like the dream Paul had when the Macedonian called him to come over and help," Steven says.

After the dream, Steven couldn't stop thinking about Japan. But no Japanese people lived in Salto, the small Uruguayan city where his parents then served. So Steven began learning Japanese on his own.

His mom bought him a Japanese phrasebook in her native Brazil, a country with the largest Japanese population outside of Japan. Steven taught himself all the phrases. He also became interested in Japanese cartoons called manga and began drawing his own.

Meanwhile, God was putting another puzzle piece in place.

Moving to Paraguay


Soon God showed Steven something more: Some of the Japanese manga he'd been reading had evil overtones.

"When I realized that, I tore up the bad manga with my bare hands," Steven recounts.

From then on, Steven used biblical themes in cartoons he drew himself. Later he began composing sacred piano music.

"The Lord showed me He had given me gifts He wanted to use in Japan," Steven says.

Preparing for Japan


During Steven's commissioning service, visiting preacher Jonathan Yao reminded those children -- and their parents -- that God wants to use them, too.

"If you say, 'Lord, here I am,' God will use you," said Yao, a Chinese-Filipino pastor and a Kunkel family friend. "Don't limit what God can do."

God used Yao to open the door for Steven to serve in Japan, Tim notes.

"The missing piece in this whole puzzle was how Steven was going to get there," Tim says. "That was a piece I just couldn't figure out."

In 2011 God provided that piece when Yao took Steven on a survey trip to Japan. Yao knew no Japanese pastors, but before the trip he made a connection with a Filipino congregation in the small city of Shiojiri, Japan. He and Steven visited the church.

Steven made a strong impression on the congregation, who'd been praying for more workers. To help them expand their outreach to the Japanese, the church needed a Japanese translator, someone to teach Japanese to Filipino church members and a worker to teach English to Japanese children. The congregation also needed help in music and outreach to Brazilian immigrants.

As church leaders got to know Steven, they realized his skills matched everything in their prayers -- all in one person.

"Steven is a miracle, a grace from God," the pastor told Yao. "Where God's grace is, His favor is."

The congregation then invited Steven to "come over and help them." He said "yes."

That was seven years after Steven dreamed about Japan as a teenager in Uruguay.

"Since that dream, there have been lots of struggles and tests. But my faith has stayed strong," Steven says.

"Today, I'm sure Japan is the land God has been preparing me for."

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Positive Feedback on using psychotherapy from a Mom

Article from a Mom with daughter with Asperger:


我剛剛帶了囡囡去蕊展見了心理學家, 經過一個半小時的會面傾談和測試，心理學家評估囡囡為患有『亞氏保加症』，是我們預料之內。但囡囡的情況較特別，她的『亞氏保加症』伴隨有『焦慮症』及『選擇性緘默症 - Selective Mutism』。

心理學家解釋，大部份患有『亞氏保加症』的兒童，都會有焦慮，而少部份的『亞氏保加症』兒童更會在焦慮的環境下抑制自己不說話。而這種抑壓自己不講話是他們不能自制的，他們很想說話，但辦不到。這就是我囡囡為什麼很喜歡學校和老師，但是在學校這兩個月來不肯說話，只用非語言的方式去表達的原因。

感恩的是心理學家認為囡囡的智商偏高，理解能力好，當她遇上困難的時候，她懂得運用她自己的一套邏輯去思考，又因她性格較溫和，願意遵守規則，所以減少了很多行為上的問題。而一般對此症狀不認識的人不會察覺到她有不妥的地方，以為只是較害羞而已。

由於香港政府現時沒有專為『亞氏保加症』的兒童而設的服務，教育學院的『蕊展計劃』成為我們唯一的幫助。

我們在聆聽心理學家的建議時，心裡很激動，很感謝天父！因為終於有一位在這方面有豐富經驗的專家清晰及肯定地告訴我們，囡囡有甚麼問題，不再用疑似自閉症傾向/可能是焦慮症/懷疑亞氏保加症等字眼。心理學家認同我們的觀察及教法是正確的，我們現在有方向了。


請問就我囡囡現時的情況, 協康的個別幼兒導師訓練對她有幫助嗎？我們去見了一次, 導師坦言未訓練過有亞氏保加症的兒童, 更未聽過有 Selective Mutism. 我有一點兒擔心這訓練是否適切我囡囡的需要。
我今日打去小童群益會, 佢地都有評估服務, 最快都要排到08年3月先有期見心理學家
仔仔學校已約教署的心理學家, 17號到校觀課, 到時會見埋我同仔仔.
另外, 我排左小童群益會08年3月做評估. 時間同蕊展的差不多, 因為小童群益會在灣仔, 近我. 所以冇考慮蕊展. 我以前曾經同仔仔join 過健腦操, 而家除左落公園跑下, 玩下拋/接球, 會同佢做番健腦操.

蕊展首次約見有心理學家會面傾談和測試, 佢地可以告訴你囝囝有甚麼問題，同俾意見你, 應該係免費的,約左未?

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中大碩士失業漢

http://hk.apple.nextmedia.com/news/art/20110214/14970808
碩士本來是社會的棟樑，但26歲的梁健鵬三年前在中文大學統計系碩士課程畢業後，做過兩份工均極速被炒，年半前更開始領失業綜援，每月靠1,830元過活；他幾乎每三日見一份工，但逾200份申請卻無一份成功，連應徵麥當勞也被拒門外。梁在網上撰文控訴教育制度失敗，「細個幾努力讀書都冇用」。網民看過文章後，有人深表同情，更多人直斥他是80後「高學歷、低能力」的人辦。梁對抨擊不以為然，說：「我唔係高分低能！」
記者：梁曙光、馬耀文
阿鵬自幼讀書成績優異，在觀塘瑪利諾書院畢業，會考26分，高考2B1C，03年入讀中大統計系，08年碩士畢業時 GPA有3.6分（即學業成績平均點數，4分滿分），成績優異。在屋邨長大，父母做勞工的阿鵬以為碩士畢業後前途美好，回報雙親，豈料踏出校門卻墮入生活困窘。
兩份工兩個月內被炒
受訪時阿鵬思路清晰，沒有精神問題，語言表達能力亦沒問題，只是社交技巧笨拙，說話從不望人。他說，08年9月受聘於一間美國化工公司，但遇上金融海嘯，上班不足兩個月就被炒魷；09年4月他到保險公司做 Sales，未夠兩個月又被炒。
他聲稱之後有努力搵工，平均每個月見工10份，兩年來超過200份，但沒有一成功，「我乜工都搵，乜工都願做，最想做啲同讀書有關嘅工作，例如會計、數據分析等，但好多工要工作經驗，我未做過點有經驗？」
阿鵬否認自己心頭高，「麥當勞我都見過兩次，只係想做普通店員，但對方好驚訝，話『你係碩士喎，唔好玩啦！』」他曾報考警員、救護員，都全因體能「肥佬」被拒門外，「引體向上要做到七下，我只做到兩下」。記者問他為何不早作操練，他腼腆說：「下次會留意吓。」
中大曾公佈08年畢業生平均月薪17,898元，阿鵬於09年9月開始申領失業綜援，每月1,830元，「每日得61蚊用，朝早食杯麪，午餐晚飯食超巿19蚊特價飯，有時要慳錢搭車見工，晚飯都唔食」。由於沒有錢買衣服，阿鵬每天都是穿同一套見工西裝外出。
「讀唔讀書有乜分別」
無朋友、無拍拖、無人理，鬱悶無出路，阿鵬於是在網誌上以《中大碩士失業漢》為題撰文宣洩。引來網民熱烈討論，有網民指梁不肯放下身段由低做起，認為他缺乏社交及溝通技巧，落得如此下場與人無尤，亦有自稱中大學生行為影響中大校譽，建議校方或校友出手相助。
碩士畢業要吃綜援，阿鵬說不怕別人眼光，認為自己的故事是對教育制度的侮辱，「連碩士生都冇能力靠自己生活，咁讀唔讀書有乜分別？叫啲細路點會勤力讀書？根本係浪費納稅人嘅錢……」
「希望社會畀機會我」
記者反覆問他，為何每年那麼多人大學畢業，惟獨他找不到工作，他最後還是承認自己有責任，「可能自己見工表現差，人際關係唔好，我有嘗試改變，但學唔識，讀書又冇教，希望社會畀個機會我！」
記者問阿鵬是否感到自己屬於「高分低能」，他說：「我唔覺自己係，但身邊好多人係。年輕人要為公開試掙扎，消耗晒所有精神，社交同溝通技巧梗係有問題。」
「你冇熱情、唔投入、冇性格，過程中連一眼都冇望過我……」資深人事顧問 CORE SEARCH的董事總經理張慧敏，與阿鵬進行模擬面試後直指其表現差勁，坦言：「係老闆都唔會請你！」
「似部錄音機，內容空洞」
張慧敏說，阿鵬面試過程全無眼神接觸，其次是問非所答：「你話自己強項係邏輯分析，又話好勤力，但你冇做嘢兩年，成日喺商場 hea，我睇唔到你有幾勤力。」經常將「中大碩士畢業」掛在嘴邊更是第三個致命傷，「畢業證書只係入場券，我要請嘅係你個人。你碩士畢業，但要求五、六千蚊人工，令人覺得好奇怪！」最後是溝通技巧差劣，「你好似部錄音機，重複內容空洞」。
張續提點阿鵬要先放下碩士生的包袱：「你見過200幾份工，經歷咁多次失敗，一定會有啲得着，自己有冇檢討？」至於阿鵬的「見工 Look」，張認為尚可接受，「但係頭髮可唔可以整吓，最低限度要乾淨企理……件白恤衫好似灰色喎」。當她把錦囊妙計傾囊相授時，阿鵬坐在一旁無甚反應，表現不耐煩。
阿鵬強調渴望改變，記者特別為他安排這個模擬面試，他最初表現雀躍。面試前一日，記者致電約他翌日早上10時半在中環恒生銀行總行等，他回應：「好呀，中環港鐵站恒生銀行。」記者強調是恒生總行，他大聲說：「我唔識去呀，都係中環站恒生等啦。」
到第二日早上10時，阿鵬以短訊通知記者：「我肚痛，改期吧！」記者即時回電及以短訊了解，再到其住所「尋人」，但均無果。當日下午3時許，記者終於找到阿鵬，經再三勸說後，他才願意與張會面。
「佢係唔係高分低能？ Sorry，我唔覺得佢高分，至於低能係貶意，我唔方便評論……」張慧敏對阿鵬評價似有保留，其女助手則有另一番體會。當阿鵬在辦公室等候時，助手問他要否飲東西，他說：「果汁吖唔該！」「我哋公司冇果汁，只有茶或水…」「咁要茶啦，有冇果汁茶呀？」助手當場語塞。
本報記者

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高功能自閉症治療經驗分享

http://tw.myblog.yahoo.com/sabina-20060814/article?mid=7147

劉昱志醫師

小明是一個清秀可愛的小男孩，來到診間時是三歲，主要問題為語言發展遲緩，社會性互動少，有一些重覆、固著行為。媽媽讓小明去上托兒所，希望能增加小明的人際互動，但老師發現小明無法遵守指令及配合其他小朋友的行動﹔在學習上也有有明顯落後。經確定診斷後開始治療，在治療中我引入了相互注意協調的概念給媽媽，例如以控制需求的行為來加強相互注意協調（要吃喜歡的食物前，要把食物放到小明及媽媽的視線中間，當小明除了看著食物或手指食物，也能看著媽媽時，才給食物），並於生活中要保持注意溝通及模仿意圖的增強。經一年治療後語言及與認知能力的表現越來越好，但是卻開始出現人際挫敗經驗，無法了解他人意圖也無法合宜的反應，隨後的治療方向也轉向以遊戲治療來做人際關係的預演與強化社會化行為，持續加強家長親職教育的能力，穩固治療效果，及討論下一發展階段的行為任務，最終希望達成逐步回歸主流教育系統的目的。

相互注意協調能力的概念
相互注意協調能力這一名詞的使用及描述，則始自Scaife與Bruner在1975年發表於Nature的文章，他們以橫斷式的研究方法，描述早期的親子互動中，6個月大的嬰兒即漸次發展出跟隨大人眼神的行為，而這類行為在溝通協調中的意義及對嬰兒後續的心智發展有其重要影響。相互注意協調能力（joint attention skills），是為了分享對物品或事件的經驗，而以眼神、手勢或姿勢引發或維持對方的注意，行為的本身，在功能上是敘述式或分享式的，有明顯的情感涉入。從正常嬰幼兒發展的觀點來看，這項假說重要的理由有三：第一，相互注意協調能力是嬰幼兒發展出人/我分化最早的能力；第二，相互注意協調能力是一種兼具認知與情感的早期溝通能力；第三，相互注意協調能力的發展與嬰幼兒的語言發展有密切關係。從自閉症患者早期的發展障礙來看，其最早顯現的問題之一就是相互注意協調能力的缺陷，絕大部份的自閉症患者，都呈現不同程度的語言障礙，從早期診斷，早期療育的觀點，若能清楚探究其障礙機制，在臨床上的應用將有相當大的助益。
本案例為高功能自閉症，對於以訓練相互注意協調能力為主的治療方式反應良好，同時語言能力也有進步後，決定繼續加強相互注意協調能力訓練，進行「親子間親密互動」（情感層面）形成及增強，之後藉此親密互動作為次級增強物，並擬訂加強模仿他人意圖的計畫，來強化個案對社會情境線索的掌握，及更合宜互動反應。

高功能自閉症治療上的一些想法
1.相互注意協調能力可能為溝通企圖、模仿等能力的基礎，確實的相互注意協調能力訓練，可改善高功能自閉症病童的社會互動障礙，訓練後互動需求的增加，可增進溝通企圖及其他更高社會認知功能的出現。
2.     高功能自閉症（含亞斯伯格症），其語言機構（理解∕表達）並無問題，但仍舊先得跨過相互注意協調能力及溝通企圖等門檻，一旦有足夠的相互注意協調能力後，語言發展能力就會如同水到渠成般的增進。
3. 遊戲治療的使用：對高功能的病童而言，象徵及想像能力雖然比一般人弱，但經過積極的遊戲訓練，是可以循著發展軌跡追上的﹙Nonfunctional play→ Functional play →Symbolic play→ Pretend play﹚，而象徵及想像能力是個體取得心理表徵能力的展現。心理表徵能力在行為上的表現是象徵、假扮式的遊戲，而在語音上的表現即為語言，這二者應有相當的〝同源共生〞關係，藉由二者的相互刺激，來提高整體的認知能力。
4. 高功能自閉症患者在語言發展及社會性互動有所進步後，會開始對人際關係的建立發生興趣，希望和其他人一起玩，但因為對於社會情境及遊戲規則理解能力仍有缺陷，常造成在人際互動時常遭受挫折，進而產生不恰當的自我評價及情緒反應。這種與同儕社會化能力的落差，常常使得自閉症病童的生活中，充滿挫折性的人際關係；尤其在高功能的病童更易出現，這在門診的大孩子身上屢見不鮮，甚至造成自殘或自殺的行為。高功能自閉症及亞斯伯格症病童的共病疾患中，情感性疾患佔相當的比例，上述挫折性的人際互動經驗可能是心理層面上的致病因素；因此如何處理這個問題，並積極預防不利因素的發生，對於病童是否能適應學校及社會生活是很重要的，也是他們長大後的重要生活議題，需要我們持續的注意及幫忙。

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Daniel Wendler's Successful Story

How can we make sure everyone has a community where they feel accepted ? For many people -- the awkward, the shy, or the simply misunderstood -- life is a lonely experience, and good friends are hard to come by.

Daniel Wendler experienced this firsthand. He has Asperger's Syndrome, which is a neurological condition that prevented him from learning social skills naturally. Without the social skills to make friends or defend himself from bullies, Daniel grew up an outcast.

However, Daniel did not let his challenges define him. When he realized that his struggles were due to his lack of social skills, he decided to study social interaction like a foreign language. Over time, he manually taught himself the social skills that he was unable to learn automatically. He used his newfound skills to reach out to other "outsiders" and discovered the power of close relationships and genuine community.

Today, he works to share what he learned with others. He works as a social skills coach and runs an online resource -- www.improveyoursocialskills.com -- that has had over a quarter million visits. He believes that everyone deserves a place where they belong, and that all of us have something in common with the awkward kid sitting alone in the cafeteria.

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由人格障礙到精神病的故事

Positive feedback from a student using government service:

http://forum7.hkgolden.com/view.aspx?type=SY&message=2121217&page=1

同好多小朋友一樣，細細個我有一個開心的童年
之後到左12歲開始發育開始都變得好奇怪，例如我唔鐘意同人有親密的關系(例如要女朋友), 唔鐘意同人合作，成日獨來獨往，好閉固同多疑，根住又成日好多野諗，一時好hyper又好depressed，一時又好想喊一時又成日發牌氣，但依d問題都係困擾左我，但我都handle到，例如讀書都ok，集中到精神上堂，但係到左中六因為AL，壓力好大，同埋我搞一個國際型的活動，以前的病症就變得嚴重，例如會不斷諗同一樣野，做唔到決定，集中唔到精神，又驚得罪人而個個人害我，上堂開始聽唔到書，無咩自信，情緒低落，最緊要呢，係夜晚太緊張訓唔到覺，無咩食欲同性慾，(以前我差唔多晚晚都J，但竟然係個陣完全無mood) ，覺得人生無咩意義同成日胃痛，成績又差左

之後呢，我就頂唔順，諗住睇精神科，初初就唔識邊到有精神科，完全無接觸過，中學個陣每年都有身體檢查，唯有去左健康院同個度的醫生傾傾，睇下點解決(其實我去個時係寫明話要檢察J, 我去到我揭起我件衫按幾按就無除我條褲，好好彩…)

好啦，之後經轉介信就去左政府醫院的精神科門診部，入去之前呢會有d護士同你做個初步評估，各位巴打注意啦，因為呢個係決定你排期幾奈先可以睇醫生，我建議就有得吹就吹到幾嚴重，但係又唔可以過龍，一般黎講而家好多人睇排期都要排一年呀Hi，出面睇要成$700-1000一次，邊到咁多錢，政府睇就$60一次，都算平架啦好好彩個陣評估之後我好快就睇到。

第一次我去我都同好多人一樣都以為睇精神科的人係好變態，好有暴力傾向，其實唔係，主要係腦功能失調令佢過唔到日常生活，同埋我發現Hi原來有好多人去睇，好兩極化，一邊係阿伯同阿婆，一邊係學生哥，學生哥個d都有14-18歲，嚇死我真低好多人，有d仲係靚女呀Hi，心諗點解靚女都要睇精神科呢，睇親個d都係無暴力傾向，同正常人一樣，有病個d已經送晒入青山啦Hi

其實睇精神科好似真係睇平時d西醫咁，要買飛然後搵位坐，之後我入到醫生房，第一次見呢通常都係問你好多野，倒如屋企同病歷，有無拍拖呀，成績考成點，詳細在此唔講，起初醫生診斷到我有抑鬱症同強迫症，但係醫生又覺得好奇怪wor, 似d又唔似d咁，但暫定我有思覺失調，

，開左d藥我食(係抗抑鬱同抗思覺失調)，同時叫我去抽血同照腦電圖，睇下係唔係遺傳因素導止，亦都轉介我去睇心理醫生

講一講腦電圖啦，其實係去左一間大房，入面有好多儀器，有一個護士，佢要擺個headset落你個頭到，個頭插滿晒電線，加小小gel，成個IQ博士同機械人咁，要40分鐘唔郁睇下個腦的電波訊號，過程都ok，條女幾大波，搞到我一路唔郁望住對波

抽血唔講啦，無咩特別，但係建議各位巴打平時一定要做開運動，因為做得多輸起血上黎會順d，唔做太多脂肪係個血到會kick住kick住咁會好痛。之後發現我兩邊都好正常。

再講講d藥，其實好多人都有個謬誤就係d精神科藥係唔好，但係到你個腦有問題個陣好痛苦的時候你會選擇繼續痛苦定係用藥幫助你維持精神穩定，同埋呢而家d藥出到第四代，副作用係小好多，小量黎講身體上會無問題，大量就另計，
以抗抑鬱藥為例，食左真係可以好快集中到精神，心情會好快平復，當然唔好依懶啦佢，我食完之後d病症就3-4個星期會無晒，真係好快。

講一講心理醫生啦，可能睇過無間道，諗起入面扮心理醫生的kelly，起初入到去以為會有個大波靚女醫生同一張床，你知架啦Hi，d心理醫生好鐘意催眠架嗎，之後入到去發現Hi…得一張抬同個位比你坐，但係個女醫生都ok靚女，其實唔似戲咁佢會幫你催眠，但係佢都樂意同你傾計，只要有咩野就同佢講得啦，佢會同你解釋你邊d行為正常，邊d行為唔正常

之後呢心理醫生比左個有國際通用的心理測驗比我做，Hi Auntie有成２百題，咁就做啦，做完之後過左一個月佢同我講佢話我唔係有精神病，係我有分裂性性人格障礙，人格障礙即係性格先天有缺陷，有d人會天生好想破壞社會，或者好固執，第一次聽就覺得Hi Auntie緊係唔信啦，但諗下諗下就覺得佢覺得arm，例如我天生係完美主義者，好難經歷失敗等等，通常睇下精神科的人都會問醫生，有無得醫架? 之後心理醫生話其實精神病無得話醫好，只可以將痛症預防同避免復發架姐，我個個係由人格障礙演變成的精神病，但算係前期的一種

係度比個關於人格障礙的網比大家睇睇
http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hk/%E4%BA%BA%E6%A0%BC%E9%9A%9C%E7%A4%99

仲有個測驗不過係英文
http://www.4degreez.com/misc/personality_disorder_test.mv

後記：睇左一年幾，其實都好得七七八八，之前的病徵無左8,9成，就黎唔使再睇。精神病其實係一場心理戰，要好長時間先可以戰勝，各位巴打，萬一有事就一定要去睇，我覺得無論係精神科同人格障礙都好，最緊要了解自已同體諒自已，例如要知道自已的行為目的想點，警覺性要高d，例如我成日亂諗野焦慮咁，當又黎的時候我唔會再struggle係依d野到

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