Anguish in the air

The sky has been a bit misty these days. The wind direction has changed again and brought the shower of ashes that the firestorm cooked up to the south where I stay. The smell of burning bushes and flesh has been filling the air. It is just too horrifying to imagine what the ashes once were and suddenly they all come so close to me, enveloping me in the acrid smell of misery and terror, right in the air I was inhaling into my body. The red moon hung low in the sky last night as if it were mourning for the woes.

The blazes are still raging and a few are yet to be contained. Newspapers and national websites are splashed with stories of the survived, the perished and the heroes, and investigations over suspected arson. Disasters are always made worse by a few derailed minds, yet they unite people as the human race. There is sorrow and anger, but there is also hope.

As the Valentine’s Day wears on, I hope we all can feel the love around us, or better, love those around us.

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The slippery slope

Statistically speaking, 82.2% of the population falls into the normal range. That means there are people bound to be abnormal, either in the upper ends or the lower ones. Yet, I wonder how many people fall in the normal range in ALL aspects of life—the very normal of the already normal.

This is an era of psychological pathology. The DSM is getting thicker with a diversity of freshly termed disorders which render everyone abnormal to certain extent. If there are those who fall into this the-very-normal-of-the-normal category, it is actually rather abnormal and should deserve a fancy label of disorder (say the Stepford Wife Syndrome? um...maybe not; it's too sexist). Although statistics rarity is not usually the sole diagnostic factor, it makes a clinician more comfortable of dispensing a label. It seems to have desensitized our sense of abnormality and created a slippery slope for psychological diagnosis.

Last week, I encountered a case in which a boy was having problems establishing social ties with his peers at school but got on fine with his mates in Scouts and his same-age cousins. His mum took him to a psychologist who has given him a diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome but wanted to seek a second opinion from our team that consists of paediatricians, psychologists and speech pathologists.

He did fine in cognitive assessment and social language assessment. In fact, he could converse naturally with a stranger like me on daily topics with appropriate eye contact. Yet, the diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome was reconfirmed by the team because his cognitive profile shows uneven development (though he scored normal in all domains) and he has specific interests like Star War. I’m still new in this field but I’m really uncomfortable with the diagnosis.

Asperger Syndrome is a lifelong condition and signifies severe social impairment. Yet is that possible that the boy is just having episodic problems with his peers at school? Or is it that his peers are being too harsh on him? There were always one or two students in every class who were being picked on by others when I was in primary and secondary schools and when I taught in a secondary school. Everybody knows kids at primary schools and secondary schools can’t tolerate much difference in interests or even personality. Conformity is the ticket to socialization in primary school and high school. As long as those different ones can make their way to university, they will know it is a place more tolerate, if not appreciative, of individual differences and distinct personalities.

The boy may not be very good at social skills or having small talks, but Asperger? He is not engaging excessively in his interest. He doesn’t take metaphors literally either. Uneven cognitive development (which is a statistics rarity) may constitute a concern but not a problem. So now being different is actually a disorder?

And isn’t it ironic that parents bring their kids to psychologists for answers when their kids are not getting on well with their peers at school? Shouldn’t parents talk with their kids and tell them how to be good friends and appreciate the uniqueness of themselves like parents in the past did? Somehow a label detaches parents’, teachers’, peer’s or even the kids/teenagers’ responsibilities over their own problems or difficulties as it is the disorder doing the evil.

If I had thought like a professional psychologist, I would have gone along with others on the team. But then I’m still too layman.

I realize there are kids who encounter severe social difficulties because of the way they perceive language and interpret social situations. And in that case, these kids need intervention and a label can help them understand themselves better. But sometimes we overinterpret a difficulty that almost every kid encounters in a normal course of development.

The more I encounter similar cases, the more I suspect myself having Asperger Syndrome.

P.S. I do think many otaku have Asperger Syndrome.