A theory about Autism and humor

  There is still a lot to learn about developmental disabilities, and people who actually have Autism or similar conditions are often very different from each other and have a lot more aspects of their life and personality mixed in with whatever has made their brain work differently. I want to minimize it and say "made their brain work a little differently," but for some people it is much more extreme than that.

    But some people are mildly autistic, or have some kind of "high functioning autism," which allows them to function almost like everyone else, so they end up with all the usual life stressors but aren't quite able to adapt to everything, which can actually result in chronic suffering that is anything but mild.

    I am saying all that to acknowledge that there is a wide variety of experience, but I wanted to share a theory that I think has some truth for a lot of us who have some kind of developmental difference and have an uneven profile of gifts and weaknesses.  It is common, I think, for people with Autism or Aspergers to have some gift mixed in with their disorder, whether it is a full-fledged savant skill or simply some abilities that are really strong. And I think that many autistic people seem to have some kind of special humor ability or deficit, or both, and I wanted to share my simple theory about what might contribute to the gift, which I think can be common among both girls and guys with autism.  The fact is that some people with Autism are really funny, and I have thought about it and wondered if it might have to do with the uneven intelligence profile that people have.  Many people with Aspergers especially have some extra reading abilities or similar verbal skills, but have major impairment with social ability or other competencies.  And my theory is that as we think of stuff that isn't smart, we have a smarter side to us that sees it for what it is, and turns it into a joke.  Like we are able to genuinely think of both stupid and smart things, and our prevailing mastery and self awareness can turn it into jokes under the right conditions.  I mention the right conditions because I think that this exact situation where we are simultaneously smart and not smart might also make us more hurtable.  We can see our weaknesses for what they are when people hurt us, and we crumple when our awareness makes us have an extra appreciation for the insults people bully us with.

   But a lot of people don't bully suffering people, and with encouragement and love, a lot of us think of funny stuff and crack some funny jokes about all kinds of things that we think of but have learned intellectually are absurd.  When you add that to the playfulness that comes from the youthful heart that is itself the core of a developmental delay, and the obsessive faithfulness that also characterizes autism, it means that a lot of us can pretty perpetually be counted on for joke after joke. It's just a theory, but the fact that people with autism have a lot to share when they aren't mistreated is not a theory, and I don't know why anyone would decide to provoke a group of such sharp-witted people.

The Worst Diagnosis: Depakote

   I have taken Risperdal for 20 years now, and I am very thankful for it.  Trileptal is the other medicine that I think helped me be safe and functioning as a mentally ill person.  I take minimal amounts and still have a lot of symptoms to manage, but I can sit in a room and think all kinds of thoughts and feel peaceful and happy, which is something that for several years I thought I would never do again, even after dying someday.  In fact, for a while I felt so awful that I thought it was too much to even expect having one restful nap before my eternal damnation.  Part of why I felt that way was because I was on the wrong medicine at the time, and I was unable to get even a fraction of adequate sleep on any night at all for about four years.

   I am saying all that just as background information to share the idea for this post which is that I think it could be a good idea for people to see two tragedies when someone is diagnosed with mental illness, and for a lifetime of psychiatric medicine to carry the same weight of grief as the mental illness itself.  Some people are completely opposed to the whole psychiatry field because of all the suffering, which for some has included bad experiences in hospitals.  For me personally, I love going to hospitals and I also have had a lot of safety because of medicine that I did in fact need and did help me in some ways.  But I do want to say that my bad experiences with medicine, my dependence on it that requires responsibility and vigilance, and especially the horrible side effects that always overlap with the benefits, have made me certain that the medicine is in fact as much a part of the life suffering as the illness itself.  This isn't a groundbreaking opinion, and everyone knows that many people refuse medicine for all kinds of reasons.  But I really think that for me it is something new to look back and think, okay, I should see my experience as two illnesses: Schizoaffective Disorder, and medication for Schizoaffective Disorder.  And when I tell people what has happened, I should say, yeah, I have Schizoaffective Disorder, and I have to take medicine for Schizoaffective Disorder.

   I can anticipate people saying that is ungrateful of me, and asking if I would rather be one of the people in a country that locks its mentally ill people in cages and lets hyenas attack them, and I think that I would say yes, that might not have been as bad, and this exact scenario is one of the intellectual limitations of the privilege concept that people these days like to use to spread the guilt and shame that probably causes half these problems anyway.

Mean Dopes and Dopamine

     Well everyone, this blog post is going to be about one of my priorities in life, which has to do with meaning. I just called my Dad to see how he was doing because he started having some dementia after an aneurysm.  He was doing okay and I asked him a question about rental car insurance, which is kind of a dad question to ask, and I felt good about the conversation, even though I still am hoping for the right time to make sure he has a true concept of how great a dad he has always been.  But anyway, as I was sitting peacefully on my couch after the phone call, my mom texted me to let me know that she was fretting about me driving a rental car after not driving for a few years.  Well for my last trip, she fretted about me not renting a car.  So I think that what is really happening is that she is finding reasons to fret.  And though I have always attributed that problem of hers to anxiety, I think it might be a little different.  I think that really she knew I just had some peace of mind and she wanted to take it away, so she sent me a text about worrying.  And her goal very frequently and possibly with every interaction is to take away my happy feelings as soon as I get them, whether it is from reaching long term goals, maintaining friendships, having some kind of stability, or literally any other kind of circumstance or mental work that can result in a positive feeling. I have known this before and thought it was getting better, but I think that the recent relief and break from it was just so I could accumulate enough happiness for her to take bigger chunks away at one time.  Is it bad to share a family problem like that?  I am going to share it, because something I value in life for me and everyone is meaning, and I think people need to understand how all of the meaning thieves out there get away with making people's lives lose all joy and purpose.  It might seem like this whole emotional abuse dynamic, which is mild compared to some people's experiences, might really have to do with happiness and not meaning.  But I do think it is things like this that can erode people's sense of meaning, because basically everything you work for becomes irrelevant in at least one realm, which is your own emotional experience, which is both subjective and objective.

     There are a lot of articles now about dopamine, and some people make it sound like everything in life basically translates into a bunch of meaningless dopamine transactions in the brain.  Well people had this same discussion about serotonin twenty years ago before the doctors and drug dealers teamed up to rape our country with prescription painkillers and heroin, and it can be an interesting topic.  Because if eating a taco can make you as happy as buying a new car, then maybe it is smart to go for the taco.  And if taking an antidepressant can keep you from bar-hopping your life away, then maybe some intervention directly with the brain chemicals is a good option.

     But I think that at some point, some of the complex aspects of reality, human goals, and actual blessings from God have to be seen as something real that has meaningful impact on not just our lives but our hearts and minds.

     I personally think that a lot of Christian teachers also threaten to make things meaningless, too, by saying that all of our joy should come from God, or what they really mean, which is our imagination of God based on their teaching so they can get credit for our heroic stoicism.  It is really sick, and I think it is just as bad as what my mom does to take away my happy feelings. What these teachers do is say you are not allowed to have some happiness from things like hamburgers or safety, so you prevent the feelings yourself ahead of time either through excessive self denial or by controlling your mind to reject the psychological rewards from good living.  But I think that those teachers are wrong, and that calling all enjoyment and responsibility "idolatry" is a rather ungrateful way to live. Hopefully it is just a phase for most people, and they aren't completely robbed of all blessings in life like friends and jobs and good food and books, but I do think a lot of people are swindled pretty thoroughly before they figure out that the preachers are sustaining their own dopamine levels by controlling everyone.

     To me it is not just about feelings, but about meaning, truth, and reality that gets blocked, with the greatest part of reality being God himself and his great love.  All these dopamine robbers I am talking about are basically forms of abuse, and all can originate with people who might have seemed trustworthy at one time.  The preachers will say they have taken nothing, the bad doctors will say they just took a few drops of brain chemicals, and the emotionally abusive family members will say they were actually giving you something, but to me there is a loss that is too great to be measured. To me, the loss is more than just brain chemicals or a life that wasn't worth experiencing anyway.  The cruelest people of all have figured out that you can block out so much more of the world by torturing people at close range.

Honestly I just want to recommend the spinach dip

This could go on any of my blogs, but I have decided to put it on my mental health blog.  It has to do with how I just ate some of the yummiest food I have ever had but also just read some news that reminded me of people suffering, and not just suffering, but suffering because of evil and lack of service and wisdom.  And it makes me feel a little bit bad about eating some yummy spinach dip right now.  But I think that I am going to have some peace about it because basically one of the things I am sad about is how thirteen medical centers got bombed by Russia and Assad's bad people, and I am going to say to myself in my happy food moments after cleaning my safe but messy apartment all day, that Russia is not going to take me down with those people.  Sometimes I do think it is good to share people's sorrow, even down to actual on-site sacrificial living that makes people experience literally the same plight of anyone with certain pain or hardship.  But I think that today I will be one less targeted soul that Russia gets away with hurting, and I will be happy about having such a yummy meal.

A Revolutionary Therapy called "Sanity"

You know how they have therapies called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and other mental health strategies like "mindfulness?" And things like "psychodynamic" schools of thought or very specific concepts like "radical acceptance?"  Well I have an idea for a new therapy called "sanity." It is where you just decide not to be mentally ill.  People say I should not joke about that and people are hurt all the time by authorities who do no believe in mental illness or people who think you can will your way out of depression, or even some mental health people whose therapies actually boil down to just telling people to stop being crazy.  But I do think it is funny to just invent a therapy like that, which actually could help a little bit if it is combined with other treatments like medicine, or counseling, or teaching a cruel society to stop hurting everyone and driving everyone to the brink of madness.

Hypermoral, hyper-religious

One of my mental illness symptoms is hyper-religiosity, which I have truly managed as well as I could, no matter how much people might still point out that I am annoying and uptight sometimes.  I know I am, and I know that my scrupulosity is a fault as much as it is a burden and source of pain. But I was thinking today that some of my excessive moralizing might have served a practical purpose, and as much as I have had to fight it, I have also had to use it.  I have a theory that it isn't just part of my brain on overdrive, but it might be something I have had to do to try to counteract other weaknesses that seem like character issues.   Both my mental illness and the medicine I take cause lethargy and reduced motivation and alertness, so I really have to convince myself that chores are important in order to exert any energy whatsoever.  I mean I practically have to view everything as some integral part of the whole world's salvation or at least my own survival and behavior record to even get up from a chair and fix some cereal.  And I am actually wondering if this might be a theory about schizophrenia, which sometimes includes extreme negative symptoms of apathy and inertia, as well as grandiose delusions for some people.  I mean maybe the herculean effort that it takes to get out of bed does make people think they must be some kind of important hero.  I do not know if that is how the delusions form, but I just today started wondering if some of my hyper moralism and excessive religious thought is from building too much strength as I have had to continually tap into my moral reasoning and religious faith in order to do any basic chore at work or at home. The fact is that there might be a reason why people like me imagine ourselves getting a reward on Judgement Day for merely considering doing a load of laundry, or find ourselves quoting the band of brothers speech on the way to the coffee shop.

Advice: People who don't live in glass houses should throw stones.

   I am currently finishing compiling a book and want to be done but have one more blog post to add to my mental health blog. I just want to say something that I recently figured out, which is different than some of my thinking was for a while.  What I am talking about is self-improvement advice that is designed for people with healthy minds.  There are a lot of sayings about how everything comes down to having a good attitude, and there is writing that praises cheerfulness, and advice about efficiency and not wasting time and all kinds of suggestions for people to be successful literally in every moment of their days.  And over the years, I have read some of these books, and some of these facebook posts, and heard some of these sermon references and thought, okay, that is great, but they clearly just don't understand.  They just don't understand what it is like to truly be human which I define as crawling into a corner crying every day.
    But I recently grew a little bit in my thinking, and realized that it is a little bit self-absorbed of me to think that everyone else who is striving to have a meaningful life and do good or even great things needs to tailor every message to those of us who have debilitating mental illness.
    The fact is that people who have strong minds should also play to their strengths, which literally could be everything they do, and they should be free and inspired to achieve all they can and boldly fling any perpetual good attitude in this oppressive world's face.  All of us are dependent on those superstars, and why should they wallow in the self-pity of others.  It is absurd, and when I read the encouraging advice that is for them and even might seem insensitive to my own ongoing loss that comes with depression and okay, psychosis, then I will be happy for them and be thankful that they are giving their all.  It is not fair for me to think less of people who waste their sanity and then also look down on people who have the luxury not having to waste anything.  So when people say on facebook that attitude is everything, or that making their bed is the key to a successful life, I am going to be thankful that I live in the same world with those people, and that they have included me to the extent that I can overhear any of their conversations about their clean and good habits that allow them to accomplish the most extreme human achievements, like writing thank you notes, having friends ride in their cars, and having clean dishes to eat off of.  That sounded sarcastic, but it isn't sarcastic, which probably matches some great advice out there that I don't know about because it wasn't posted on a Starbucks cup or Coke can.

Big Picture Strategies

    This idea is, like a few other posts, something that could go on the theology blog, but I am putting it on the mental health blog because I think that it could especially help people who have trouble with some of their goals and skills of living because of mental illness.  And sometimes some of the troubles people have are because of their mental illness and they don't know it, like feelings of laziness and undone chores, or habits that people can't seem to break.

   But anyway, in my twenties, I felt like such a failure all the time and there were so many things that I just couldn't fix.  For instance, my car was messy for all the years I had a car, and I could rarely have passengers. I also have had trouble eating well and often found myself eating fast food or frozen meals that I didn't really want instead of taking the time to cook, or sometimes, I felt like I splurged on groceries to cook when I should have eaten a frozen meal.  I mean some of that is just always feeling like I could never do anything right when really it was probably okay to just eat whatever I could. 

   But anyway, I mention those examples because those categories where people like me feel like we can't ever get anything right do add up and make us feel like we can't accomplish anything.  And having OCD just makes people more scrupulous about everything, including religion and socializing.

   But I found that especially because of working and going to school, that what I would call "big picture" interventions or some kind of large framework activity, totally changed my life, helped me be a generally more productive person, and took my mind off the details.  It is as simple as saying that I kept a job and did some school programs. Maybe it would be better to say it that way than making it sound like some kind of advanced mental health strategy, but I do think there is something about the structural nature of what helped me that is good to share for people who get trapped trying to improve their lives in perpetually microscopic ways that never quite work out.

   What I am saying is that some of those microscopic things get worked out automatically when there are bigger goals that people actually care about, like art, or writing poetry, or being part of a sports team or writing group, or doing some kind of volunteer work.  And I also found that some of my smaller self-improvement goals really were impossible, and I let them go.  I was more able to accept my imperfections (which actually are pretty significant) because I had other stuff going for me.  And I think a lot of people might say, well, hmm, I think it might have been better to go ahead and keep a clean room or eat less sugar or read the Bible in less haphazard ways, but I want to say that really there aren't that many critics who really do have other people's foibles and faults on their list of things to worry about, and nothing has helped me more than signing up for school and going to classes and making a few bigger decisions that result in some of my life schedule already being decided for a while.  The big goals also help distract me from depression and suicidal thinking, and while so many people don't have money for extravagant education , or access to a broad selection of arts programming that they can be a part of, it is likely that there is some kind of thing, whether it is church or volunteering or a mental health group, that can be worked in to people's lives so they set their alarm at 10 am for a purpose instead of setting their alarm at 6 am to try to prove to themselves and to the wind that they are still disciplined.

Good mourning

A friend of mine's stepmom once said that she thought that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder should be called Post Traumatic Stress "Order" because of course people would have nervous breakdowns from such horrible experiences. And as much as I do think mental disorders mostly truly are disorders and medical conditions, I occasionally go ahead and let myself think about life and conclude that any amount of broken mindedness and broken heartedness is not only appropriate in this sad world but possibly the only right state of mind.  I mean, for people to read the news and somehow live on without severe depression must be some kind of mental illness that they should be institutionalized for.  And I even see a case for thinking that the most outrageous delusions and hallucinations might arise from a very accurate assessment of a reality that is too tragic to accept at face value. I don't mean to sound like I am wishing panic attacks on people, because of course I am not, but I think that every now and then it might be good for everyone to go ahead and admit that it does seem like a lot of the people in the mental hospitals are the ones who really seem to "get it" and understand life with all its heart wrenching ways.

A helpful OCD and psychosis intervention

   I am putting this post on my mental health blog even though to me it really could be on the theology blog.  This post is about one of my strategies that helps me get through situations when I feel like I fall short of important standards in front of everyone.  A lot of behavior details matter to me, and I do think that small interactions can be very important and very representative of people's character and regard for other people.  But I do have some crazy neurosis and psychosis, so when I go wrong on a little detail and say the wrong thing or don't stick up for my faith and beliefs, or give a false impression or forget something important, I feel terrible and also feel ashamed in front of imagined onlookers who probably have their own goals to think about. It is a recipe for torment, but I have found a great mental and spiritual solution that works almost every time to help me accept my imperfections.  The thing that works is simply taking a few moments to think of letting someone else get the honor that I would have gotten for keeping certain standards.  You know, for everything I get wrong, there are people who would and who do get it right, and who don't bail on people and don't let people get picked on in their presence, and who do a better job of reporting suspicious packages at the subway. So when I fail, I have found that because I am so driven to be perfect, I actually can understand and feel happy for other people who actually achieve that vision, and I can successfully console myself by thinking about someone else getting some kind of glory, and some kind of reward, and some kind of credit in our world or even on the actual Judgment Day in heaven.  Some of this could be material for comedy, but to me it is a serious thing deep in my heart and I am thankful to be able to get such relief for every failure and to know that some of the service in the world and the good deeds from each other that we all rely on and sometimes take for granted are actually not that easy. And failure is a reminder of the cost of all the successes, and a comforting guarantee that I can look forward to other people's rewards as much as my own.

Lowerarchies

    In my early years of mental illness, I was in agony all the time but was able to hide a lot of my illness to the point where a lot of people just thought I was some kind of selfish loser with a bad attitude.  I always kind of wished that I had less pain and more visible symptoms so I could get credit for being mentally ill but felt better.  My illness now is a little bit like that, and though I am definitely heartbroken about a lot of it, I would like to say that I was kind of right about some of the way I thought that it might be nicer to have a more obvious illness with less pain.  And my symptoms now are very crazy schizophrenia symptoms that are considered by many to objectively be the worst mental illness that a person can have.  But as a person with that privileged status, I would like to say that any mental illness and even heartbreak that isn't mental illness can zap people as much as any other category.  Depression and anxiety seem so normal, almost like healthy human emotions, but they can both be entire disorders that devastate people beyond comprehension.  I have had all kinds of different depression feelings before, and some different kinds of anxiety, and I just want to say that they are not lesser mental illnesses in any way than the stuff that makes me talk to myself and hit myself in the middle of a job interview. And I still think no matter what I say, people will never understand how painful depression can be, and how debilitating anxiety can be, but I will still say that if people tell me they are so sorry that I have schizoaffective disorder and a whole mess of other symptoms, I might genuinely say sometimes, that "at least it's not PMS."

Dogs Know

   I am putting this post on the mental health blog, because I do not mean for it to be argumentative.  It is just something that I want to say about animals and people. And I am not just sharing an opinion, but speaking from years of experience as a person with depression and anxiety, and as a person who aspires to eventually do some pet therapy with my pet guinea pigs.

   A lot of people like to talk about how animals have an extra sense about things, and can sometimes perceive when something is wrong, or when there is a person who means harm.  Well it is true and family dogs save the day all the time, and service dogs defend their dog owners from bothersome encounters very often.

    But I think that healthy people who don't have a deep experience of chronic rejection and emotional pain may not realize that dogs do not know everything, and just because a dog barks at you doesn't mean that you are a bad person.  And telling everyone that this is the case may really hurt people.  Some people already feel like bad people when they aren't, and when some grumpy dog barks at them, that's all it is.  The dog has not discovered the true nature of anyone's character.  And there are mean dogs who attack children in neighborhoods every day.  And who is the bad person in that scenario?  Usually a bad neighbor who didn't give a flip about anyone else's safety, though of course sometimes there are genuine tragedies and accidents.

   Especially in my early years of depression, I found myself feeling a fear of being unliked by dogs many times, and feeling that based on other people's belief that dogs are the ultimate judge of character, and that if a dog growls at me then everyone has the right to conclude that I am really a bad person.  In reality, the dog might just sense my fear... of seeming like a bad person... because I am a good person who is taking a risk by being near an animal in a social situation.
   I am not making a big deal of it, but I have never heard anyone call people out on this whole gleeful suggestion that dogs make the final call on the state of people's hearts.  It is something that healthy people who aren't scared of having their feelings hurt by a dog take for granted, and it is something that no one understands until they have had social status so low that to be merely ignored by someone's dog can be the final proclamation of their guilt and worthlessness.

Hyper Abuse

    Ok everyone, here is the post that everyone has been vigilantly waiting for: a post about vigilance, and maybe even hyper vigilance.  Hyper-vigilance is a type of anxiety problem and a symptom of trauma. A lot of people talk about it in the context of PTSD when something horrible has happened and from then on the people who suffered are constantly on the lookout to protect themselves from anything else like it.  But I want to say that a lot of people are in chronic stress situations that do warrant some kind of unreasonable vigilance, so people's anxiety can be both appropriate and inappropriate at the same time.  I consider myself to have been in situations like this for decades at a time, and I may never really understand why that turned out to be part of my life.  For me, it was the stress of being mentally ill and keeping a retail job where any wrong move or bad word could cost me medical insurance for the rest of my life, and result in homelessness, death, or bankruptcy, and in my mind, cause a subsequent loss of the ultimate privilege of pleasing God with a productive Christian life.  Other people find themselves in situations that I think extract even more of a constant vigilance, such as caring for children with special needs, or caring for children at all in such a dangerous culture and world.  It is wearing on people in ways that I think no one else ever understands, even when other people are living their own lives of hyper-vigilance.  And I think that it can be confusing when there are official mental health symptom labels that by definition suggest that maybe some vigilance isn't justified, though most people assessing those symptoms usually do have some clue about the true suffering. 

   But what I am saying is that people are misunderstood when the unreasonableness of the persecution or the excessive responsibility makes people think that the emotional reaction of total fear or constant alertness is what is unreasonable.  Frankly, church people make this mistake very often, and I also think a lot of mindfulness people who lead meditations where they literally say things like "you have no problems" and "everything is how it is meant to be" are even worse than the bad Christian counselors. But the fact is that you are supposed to be scared when a giant python is squeezing the life out of you or your loved ones, or when a society of thousands gang up on you to take everything you have as soon as you acquire anything, or when an evil government holds your people hostage and grants little moments of relief in exchange for a gradual compromise of everything you believe in.  Some evil warrants sheer terror, and some people are terrorized not just in horrible events but in their everyday lives for years.  People who say that there's nothing to worry about are unworthy of what has been preserved by the monitoring and endurance of depressed people, and many of us have been so burnt by our own brain chemicals that we simply don't have any energy left to feel sorry for the shamefully ignorant people who told us that it was a sin to be anxious.