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Post by pyradonis on Nov 14, 2020 15:07:01 GMT
I was rather hoping that, at the last minute, Tony would ask C!Annie, "Do you want to come with me?" But it seems like that was too much to ask. Baby steps. Well, I doubt he himself has any idea where he's going. |
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Post by fia on Nov 14, 2020 16:42:06 GMT
Folks, just a word about the debate about whether Tony is autistic or just has social anxiety of some form... we're not diagnosticians (unless we actually are, heh) and we may never even know in the end. It could be simply that Tom is drawing Tony as a personality and not a paradigm; a complex character, not a type. A colleague who is also autistic passed me this link last night that really helped me get a better understanding of what sorts of things in what combinations constitute "autism" and what sorts of things are simply considered "things that some people have in common with autistic people". See what you think. If nothing else, at least we'll be better informed about these things in general, and understanding each other better is always a wonderful thing. <3 neuroclastic.com/2019/05/04/its-a-spectrum-doesnt-mean-what-you-think/Interesting article. I didn't know about Ido Kedar or Carly Fleischmann. Thanks for sharing it! What frustrates me about autism, as a concept, is that if the symptoms of autism and their solutions can be so dramatically different, then I feel like it shouldn't all be called autism. There should be smaller, more specific categories. Or maybe just keep each symptom separate. Like, "I have a sensory processing disorder, I have difficulty starting or stopping activities, and I often need to do some sort of repetitive physical action to stay calm." I struggle with all of the things on the spectrum that this person has made, to some degree. As far as I understand it, they're also symptoms of ADHD. Or in my case, maybe it's a combination of PTSD, anxiety, and, I dunno, a learning disability? The distinctions seem unhelpful to me. I have specific problems; focusing so much on bundling them all together and giving them a header doesn't help me solve them. But I like being precise about things more than most people. Maybe "autistic" is just more comfortable for people to say, even if it doesn't tell the whole story, or leads people to incorrect assumptions. Which is fair enough, I suppose. Based on my research, I think your frustrations make sense –– genes linked with autistic traits number in the thousands. It is very clear that "autism" is a diagnostic category helpful to clinicians for certain purposes (up to a point –– autism gets confused even by clinicians with a lot of other things, including ADHD, as far as I can tell in the research, and often it takes years for patients to get a clear diagnosis that fits their lived experience and comes with a treatment/coping program that they find useful), but it is not a naturalistic grouping of people or natural kind in the way, say, "cetaceans" is a natural kind. It's a little more like "Irritable Bowel Syndrome" in that it tracks a grouping of symptoms or processing differences, not necessarily a joint underlying cause. So, while someone saying, "I am autistic," can be clinically informative and sometimes sociologically helpful, it won't give you many specifics about what ways that person is neurodivergent. So I agree with speedwell and speedwell's friend that speculating about what traits someone has (whether they're fictional or not) has limited informativeness. I think if we stick to what we observe as regularities in Tony's behavior, we'll ultimately learn more than if we try to systematize it under a label like "autistic" or like "social anxiety," which are actually specific diagnostic profiles, and we wouldn't know which Tony has unless we were able to give him a diagnostic test or clinical interview. It's very possible he has neither, and instead has a different anxiety disorder, like PTSD, some sort of psychotic or schizotypal disorder triggered by his grief, or it is also possible (less likely now I think given evidence) he's just a straight-up jerk and hates his own daughter (potentially a personality disorder). Even if he had a specific disorder like autism, it might be co-morbid with other things anyway, like major depression. Tony is probably suffering in a lot of different ways at the same time. Might be better just to focus on the things we see him do, rather than on whether he has a fundamental functional pattern we can diagnose. EDIT to say: My family is full of psychology majors, doctors, therapists, etc, and my siblings and I have had many discussions about whether one of our parents might have ASD and the other or both ADHD, and consequently, whether we siblings might have one or the other. Our parents will not themselves go to a therapist, so at this point, it's almost impossible to do much more than conjecture and make inferences on the basis of our own experiences in therapy and guesses about inheritability of traits. But it's really a crapshoot. At this point, if a treatment works for one of us, we assume that means it is a better guess for what we "are" or "have" than a treatment that does not. But whether it works for one of us may or may not have anything to do with whether it would work for one of our parents or a sibling with similar traits. Fundamentally, on my view, it's impossible to know, even with your own parents, whether they have ASD or ADHD or any other disorder, unless you've had clinical training, clinical diagnostic tools, and one-on-one interactions in a clinical setting. I myself would love to know, because it would help with interacting with them. But we may never know. I'm learning to live with that, and also learning that the literal social accommodations we have to make for others probably need to expand given how much uncertainty there is about any one person's neurotypicality ratio, even for trained experts. |
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Post by imaginaryfriend on Nov 15, 2020 1:05:42 GMT
I was rather hoping that, at the last minute, Tony would ask C!Annie, "Do you want to come with me?" But it seems like that was too much to ask. Baby steps. Well, I doubt he himself has any idea where he's going. He's going away from Courtnie. That's where he's going. |
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Post by blazingstar on Nov 16, 2020 6:34:14 GMT
speedwell, foxurus, and fia, I don't have the energy to respond to (or even process) those walls of text, but I get the gist of them, and let me just say that as a neurodivergent person myself, I deeply appreciate this valuable discourse about autism and ADHD and the usefulness of labels (or lack thereof).
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Post by wies on Nov 16, 2020 9:22:52 GMT
Thanks, guys, now this theory is my favorite one so far. I'm glad you like it! I hadn't considered it before, but Anthony's rush to get away might be because he's on the verge of a panic attack. In which case, leaving might have been the right call; watching her own dad have such an intense breakdown would probably be a bigger destabilizer to her mental health than him not talking to her. At least she's used to him not talking. She did see him breaking down earlier in the chapter Annie and the Fire. Though that was not a panic attack, admittedly. (I would link but the site is momentarily down. Maybe I will edit this post later.) |
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Post by foxurus on Nov 16, 2020 19:55:59 GMT
I'm glad you like it! I hadn't considered it before, but Anthony's rush to get away might be because he's on the verge of a panic attack. In which case, leaving might have been the right call; watching her own dad have such an intense breakdown would probably be a bigger destabilizer to her mental health than him not talking to her. At least she's used to him not talking. She did see him breaking down earlier in the chapter Annie and the Fire. Though that was not a panic attack, admittedly. (I would link but the site is momentarily down. Maybe I will edit this post later.) True! I think a panic attack is sufficiently different, though. |
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