Report: Vines Lead Singer Has Asperger's

[Khephra]

SYDNEY, Australia -- Authorities dropped an assault charge filed against the lead singer of Australian rock band The Vines after his lawyers said he has Asperger's syndrome, according to reports Saturday.

Craig Nicholls was charged for allegedly kicking a press photographer and damaged her camera at one of his band's Sydney concerts six months ago.

Magistrate Susan Seagrave dropped the assault case Friday during a hearing at Sydney's Balmain Local Court on condition Nicholls continue medical treatment for Asperger's syndrome, The Australian newspaper said.

Asperger's is an autism-related condition characterized by social and communication deficiencies.

http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/news/wire/sns-ap-people-the-vines-nicholls,0,4953599.story?coll=sns-ap-entertainment-headlines

[fugue]

1. WHAT?

What medical treatment for Asperger's? It's brain-wiring. You can't treat it.

I'm an Aspie. I know.

On edit: it's also not "autism related." It's a kind of autism. The official term is "autistic spectrum disorder" (ASD).

[buff2]

3. I've never heard of that before

No offense in my previous posting. I thought it was a "made up" syndrome. :hi:

[sallyseven]

5. I think bush has it.

[buff2]

6. He's just mentally phucked up.

Seriously,that is what's so scary about this idiot being the most "powerful" man in the country. It's like putting a blind man in a room full of dynamite and plenty of books of matches. You can only fear the worst.I fear the little mental midget more than I fear ANY terrorist. In fact,bu$h IS a terrorist, when you think about all his policies,his arrogance and defiance.I've never been so scared in my life. :scared:

[fugue]

7. No, it was found by Dr. Hans Asperger in Vienna in 1944

He wrote a paper on it. His clinic was bombed almost immediately afterward.

His paper was resurrected posthumously (1990, I think). The syndrome made it into the DSM-IV (1994).

Aspies are generally very intelligent (I'm a middling Aspie, and I test at about 144 in IQ), but we have a disruption in one or more of the seven senses--the two you don't hear about are vestibular (that is, the orientation of your body in space) and proprioceptive (that is, the relation of your body parts to each other) senses. For instance, I cannot process visual data quickly enough to drive. I am also affected vestibularly (if you want to reduce me to quivering jelly, put me on a roller coaster) and proprioceptively (I am so clumsy that I'm never without some injury). We just don't process incoming sensory data as quickly as NTs. So we are subject to sensory overloads.

We also are poor at nonverbal communication: we have difficulty with facial expressions, tones of voice, body language. Sometimes it looks like you NTs (neurotypicals) are communicating telepathically, and it's really frustrating that you expect us to. Socializing is work and very exhausting, so we avoid it as much as possible. I try to avoid real-time communication whenever I can.

Assuming Nicholls isn't exploiting our problems for his own gain (he damn well better not be!), I would hypothesize that he got overloaded and that the photographer was the straw that broke the camel's back. When an Aspie gets overloaded, they experience a survival reaction, just as an NT does. It's just that we get to that point much quicker and with less provocation than you do. It's not a "social behavior disorder." We suffer a real physical condition as a result of a differently wired brain. Our "fits" are attempts to protect ourselves when being overloaded.

The up side includes usually being very smart (as I said), good at detailed work, and very logical. I often tell people I wouldn't want to be cured of Asperger's, if such a thing were possible, because I wouldn't want to give up real logic. (Hey, if the experts are gonna call me "hyperlogical" to my face, I can call the lot of you pseudological!)

That "medical treatment" thing, though, is just plain garbage. There is none such. We are very prone to depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder as side-effects of living in a world made for NTs rather than us and those conditions are treatable, but you can't rewire someone's brain. There is no medical treatment for Asperger's.

[LudwigVan]

15. I may have this.

As much as I'm trying to avoid psychiatric hypochondriasis, I'm becoming convinced I might have Asperger's. I was supposedly diagnosed with "borderline autism" as a young child (back in the 1970s when they didn't know about Asperger's), but my IQ is well above average and I'm obsessively logical and detail-oriented. I'm also highly obsessed with music, and I'm also a singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist (not anywhere as successful as The Vines, unfortunately). I'm also a social disaster and I have trouble communicating. I don't like to look people in the eye when speaking to them, and I don't deal well with displays of emotion.

I also have bipolar schizoaffective disorder, panic disorder, adult ADD, the symptoms of PTSD, and borderline personality disorder. But I was not severely abused as a child. People with autistic-spectrum disorders seem to be easily traumatized, from what I understand.

Thanks for posting this article. I seriously need to look into social/occupational rehab for this, if I have it. I've brought it up to my shrink, but he kinda ignored me.

(It's not like me to talk too much about personal issues, but I felt the need to this time.)

[goddess40]

4. Both of my kids have a Nonverbal Learning Disorder (NLD)

One is border line aspergers, but NLD is also an autistic spectrum disorder. They struggle with the social crap all the time and I'm sure you're well aware of the bully problem that people with Aspergers and NLD deal with every day.

[fugue]

9. Oh, yes, most definitely

My school's solution was pseudo-Darwinian: "She just has to learn to adapt. If she didn't reward the other children with her spectacular reactions, they wouldn't bother her."

I want to go back and throttle every teacher who spouted this line. I remember my graduation day, when some fellow student said something snarky, and I laughed. "Do you think I care? I'm never gonna have to see any of you ever, ever again!" Such a look of shock on their faces; even I could tell. What, they thought I enjoyed being their punching bag for thirteen years?

That's why I could never watch Family Matters. Steve Urkel's life is not fiction, not a joke, and not solved in half an hour.

[buff2]

2. LOL........

Well,that's a good defense they came up with. Anytime you get in trouble,always come up with some kind of a "syndrome". LOL

[fugue]

8. It's not a joke

Read my post (#7).

[derby378]

10. Interesting thread

I have ADHD, which eveyone always calls a learning disorder, and in some ways it is - but it's actually a neurological disorder *some would say neuropsychiatric). Our brains have trouble processing stimuli that encourage focus and concentration due to what may be a problem with dopamine transfer. No known cure, and most of the treatments available are CNS stimulants, especially Ritalin and various amphetamines. (A legal form of meth is also used on occasion.)

[lazarus]

11. I've always felt

that my ADD was a form of autism. We have trouble processing data, too. But instead of filtering everything but one specific input, ADDers tend to just let it all in, and try to salvage something of the mess it makes. :D

It did make me very very very very good at College Bowl, though. Fading in and out of conversations, I learned to extrapolate quickly. So I knew where the question was going much quicker than most people. I just had to go through some rituals to get myself in a frame of mind that I could survive the 30 minutes of the match.

[derby378]

12. ADHD / Autism

I saw one medical journal report that demonstrated that, in the sample population, babies born with ADHD and babies born with autism both have somewhat larger brains in proportion to their size than other babies. But this looks like it may be a fluke. Although Asperger's and autistic patients share some symptoms with ADHD patients, the dominant concept I'm hearing is that ADHD may be more closely related to Tourette syndrome than to autism/Asperger's syndrome.

[CBGLuthier]

13. There are more than a few Duers with Aspergers

Well, at least a couple years ago there were.

I am one of them myself. Wish they knew more about it when I was ounger. It was known but not popularly recognized.


Oh, and Bush is just a effin idiot (for the poster that suggested he has it). Most people with it are very smart, just socially awkward and a few other lovely things that I would rather not talk about. :-)

[Burma Jones]

14. Bill Gates is "supposed" to have Asperger's

My Six year old boy was evaluated for four years for Autism Spectrum Disorders, looks like he isn't on the spectrum, but it sure ain't that easy to tell.