The Anti-Socialite

On the first day of Autism 2006, the Geneva Centre for Autism International Symposium at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, the main event was a presentation by Tony Attwood. As the audience trickled into the 1,330-seat John Bassett Theatre, the image on the giant screen at stage centre was a tranquil expanse of ocean. A man in a suit crossed the stage to organize something on the lectern. Three women in front of me began murmuring. It was Attwood. Another woman went up to the stage and called to him. Smiling, he moved forward to greet her and then folded himself down to the stage floor, his head resting in one upturned palm as they chatted. The murmur intensified, coming from all directions. “He’s even lying down for her,” a woman whispered. Another took out her digital camera. “We’ve got to get our picture with him.”

If Asperger’s syndrome has a patron saint, it is Tony Attwood. Born and educated in England, he now heads the Macgregor Specialist Centre in Brisbane, Australia; is an adjunct associate professor at Griffith University in Queensland; and is considered one of the world’s leading experts on AS. To many, Attwood literally wrote the book: The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome encompasses twenty-five-plus years of clinical experience and research. Having worked with more than 2,000 people (of all ages) with AS, he is a mentor to a generation of occupational therapists and a guru for parents.

Once rarely diagnosed and largely misunderstood, autism — of which AS is a subset, a relatively mild form that generally allows those who have it to function — is now thought to be fairly common. In the 1970s, one in 2,500 individuals might have received the diagnosis; today in the US, it applies to approximately one in 150 children, an increase attributable to better awareness and broader diagnosis. Autism has been reconceptualized from something quite specific into a “spectrum disorder,” a wide arc encompassing classic low-functioning autism — the person locked in his own world — and conditions that are undetectable to the casual observer. Spotting it is akin to birdwatching: you might have to spend many hours before catching a glimpse of a person’s AS tendencies.

In the scheme of autism, a diagnosis of AS is a blessing, but a mixed one, given that we live in such a social world. “Aspy” children, as Attwood calls them, tend to be diagnosed around age seven or eight, just as their socially oriented, neurotypical peers start to notice their difference. My son was diagnosed with AS when he was eight. Nearly three years later, my wife and I are still learning just how powerful and arbitrary the social world is.

I had spoken with Attwood before the symposium. His accent and elocution are not unlike those of C-3PO, the hyper-correct android of Star Wars fame. I told him about my son’s concern about AS: specifically, why does it have to be syndrome ? To J., Syndrome is the name of the villain in the animated film and video game The Incredibles. “Technically, a syndrome describes a pattern that has a detrimental effect on that person’s quality of life,” said Attwood. “Lots of people feel anxious or sad, but it only becomes a depression clinically when it affects that person’s quality of life.” Suggesting that “syndrome” is an improvement on “disorder,” in his book Attwood quotes an American child’s complaint to his mother: “Actually, I’m not in disorder. I am definitely in order.”

Autistic children, in fact, tend to be driven by order. They might line up objects — cars, blocks, dolls — and can be sent into a blind fury if those orderly rows are disturbed. As an autistic or AS person matures, this compulsion for order and systematizing manifests itself in obsessive interests, which often becomes that person’s salvation or damnation. Darius McCollum, a forty-three-year-old New Yorker, has spent a third of his life in prison because of his overwhelming compulsion for all things rail related: in 2005, he pled guilty to grand larceny for attempting to steal a locomotive. He blamed his Asperger’s. Richard Borcherds could have entered Cambridge’s mathematics department at twelve years old. His childhood obsession was building polyhedrons. At age thirty-eight — the year he won the Fields Medal, the mathematics equivalent of the Nobel Prize — he was diagnosed with AS. He is now a math professor at Berkeley.

My wife and I began “explaining” our son long before he was diagnosed. We had little choice: as a two-year- old at the Montessori daycare in London, England, J. was the only child who ran away from his mother when it was time to go home. “He doesn’t seem to like transitions,” one of the caregivers told us. “He doesn’t seem to like transitions,” my wife and I would mutter to each other as we tried to coax him out from under the sofa after he’d been playing at a neighbour’s apartment. He would scream and twist as we carried him — like two screws with an escaped convict — back upstairs to our flat. Once home, he would calm down as if nothing had happened.

He seemed a normal child in many ways. He loved bath time, was a giggling cherub watching a rubber dolphin slide down the tub wall. But there were premonitions of extremes. He absorbed storybooks and could repeat them in their entirety: “The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea in a be-yoo-tee-full peagreen boat . . .” He showed tremendous visual acuity, drawing with originality. He was great with numbers, and had a precocious ability to finish complicated puzzles unassisted. He baffled us.

“He’s sensitive,” people would say.

“He doesn’t do goodbyes.