I'm not sure how widely this has been reported, so I won't name them, but one of Britain's best-known poets has recently 'come out' as having Asperger's syndrome.

Has anyone any thoughts or knowledge on the subject of poetry and the autistic spectrum. I'm mildly autistic - only self-diagnosed, I admit, but I scored very highly on a test for low-level autism and the behavioural patterns of the low-spectrum are very familiar to me. It's fine by me - I'm comfortable with who I am and don't have (m)any of the more socially limiting problems further up the spectrum.

I think poetry is something that low-spectrum and Asperger's people can do well - the brain works differently and thought patterns are also different leading to striking originality. I've encountered Aspies (a term which those with Asperger's use for themselves) in schools and their sometimes awkward behaviour (which is largely just a 'different' behaviour which we find awkward) is often coupled with rather brilliant creativity.

The passions of Aspies mean they have a powerful idiolect and a sense of personal iconography (a badge to sew high on the poetic arm) unparalleled in non-spectrum individuals. The downside is usually a difficulty with refocussing to rewrite and knowing how to police their indulgence.

I've had an Asperger's student on and off for the past year. She's fascinating and endearing, though at times frustrating. Her work always needs cutting and editing, but it always contains striking ideas and unusual and winning constructs, conceits and locutions. It might be the case that, just as some people further up the autistic spectrum develop amazing art skills, those with Asperger's are suited to writing poetry. I'd be interested in any opinions or information on this.

Some of you probably know that one of my twin boys is autistic, possibly Asperger's, and the other is suspected now of something similar by his teachers (we were home educating them both before this year).

When I was reading up on the topic, as you do, I realised that I exhibit many classic 'autistic' behaviours and symptoms myself. It's usually males that suffer from autism, but it's not exclusively a male problem. It just tends to come from that 'side' of things ... you know, being a touch obsessive about objects like cars, trains, etc. or ways of behaving, like always having to do things in a certain order or always following the same route to work etc.

There are also odd mental blocks about certain things, which can clear in an abrupt and mysterious fashion. For instance, I couldn't read until I was about nine, in spite of great efforts by my parents and teachers. But then I immediately started reading the most unlikely stuff for a nine year old: Arnold Bennett, for instance, and Keats. Indeed, I memorised the entirety of Ode to a Nightingale one afternoon (and can still recite most of it) because it just seemed like the obvious thing to do.

But how that relates to the way I approach poetry now is less clear-cut. It's true that I tend to follow particular routines when settling down to write. But who doesn't?

I imagine that Asperger-style attention to detail, especially at the far end of abstruse, would be useful in poetry. But tapping into the emotional core of a poem might prove challenging for a poet with autistic tendencies - at least head-on. My son copes with that side of things surprisingly well though, so perhaps it's a question of degree. Or early conditioning. We've spent a long time encouraging him to discuss his emotions, and he's much better at doing so now than when he was younger.

I hate to use the dreaded word therapy in the context of writing poetry, but perhaps poetry would be genuinely therapeutic for someone in that position ... it can be a way of addressing delicate emotional issues in an oblique, metaphorical, almost covert way, after all, where prose would be far more direct in most cases, and therefore more disturbing.

Roddy, what was this test?

It's a fascinating topic, Roddy.... to my shame I don't know so much about autism and creative writing but I did spend a lot of time researching the connections between poetry and schizophrenia for my dissertation back when I was a psychology student.

In particular, I was interested in this provocative paper by two researchers at Newcastle:

http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/daniel.nettle/n...eedings%20b.pdf

See what you think. I don't think I understand science well enough to judge the evolutionary side of the argument (in particular the bit about 'mating success': surely even if poets and artists have more sexual partners it doesn't mean they have more children!?) but it's an interesting paper.

For the dissertation itself, I ended up focusing on social representations of poetry and stereotypes that non-poets have about poets (particularly the image of the 'troubled writer'): it became quite a different project, because I didn't feel as if I had enough of a scientific background to deal with some of the bigger questions about schizophrenia.

There are still so many unanswered questions about creativity and mental states, I reckon someone could make it their lifetime's research!

Katie - there's a couple of online self-diagnosis tests you can try:
--- http://www.rdos.net/eng/Aspie-quiz.php
--- http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html

My Aspie scores were neurotypical (I lack those particular poetic genes, I suppose)

Helen - that's a fascinating study. An analagous case could be blood disorders like thalassaemia, where a little of the disease gives the person a greater resistance to malaria, but too much kills.

Roddy - Your hypothesis sounds good - though I suspect mild Aspergers may be one of several triggers that makes a person more prone to committing poetry.

On a tangent, I've noticed that there seems to be a much higher concentration of Aspies in the conlanging community (people who like inventing languages) than would be expected. It makes for some wierd flame wars on the conlanging forums.

Thanks Rik - I've been reading up on this lately, not for the first time in my life, & not on my own account...

Essentially autism seems to be roughly a matter of where you fall on a spectrum with "empathy" at one end and "systematic thinking" at the other; very near-end characteristics are hard to distinguish from "normal" male-pattern behaviour, and of course there are borderline cases where a person might or might not be on the autism spectrum.

Language is, of course, a system. Poetry is highly systematised language. Writing is the act of ordering, and applying pattern to, one's thoughts and feelings.

Artistic activity tends to attract mates? If I'd read that twenty-five years ago, I would have given a hollow laugh. But as I met my wife at a poetry workshop, perhaps there's something in it after all.

As for the identity of the poet, it's in the public domain, reported in the Guardian here. It's Selima Hill.

The principles of Evolutionary Psychology pre-suppose that our minds are still products of our hunter gatherer pasts, being that the amount of time that's elapsed since the agricultural revolution is around 10-13,000 years, it's not a large amount of time when compared to the hundreds of thousands of years of hunter gathering that preceded it. Therefore if a human trait is a functional adaptation it doesn't necessarily mean it should be a useful trait in today's society, but more so that it gave the edge to our hunter gatherer ancestors.

Anyway, I've done one of the online tests and been diagnosed "very likely an aspie", I guess that explains my anorak obsession with narrow subjects and unsensitive behaviour at weddings.

Someone who shall remain nameless often suggests that I'm autistic, because I'm pretty bad at reading non-verbal signals (ie. knowing when someone's body language is telling me to not go there, move out of the way, apologise etc.) I don't think I'm in any way autistic, however; I'm just socially inept.

To what degree is there this 'spectrum'? I'm very sceptical of any claim to being 'mildly autistic' since autism is a little like synaesthesia, OCD and schizophrenia, in that the better known descriptions of the affliction cause people to go, "Oh, that sounds like me!" even though they've never been and never will be diagnosed with it. Sure, you can have mild cases, but those would still be authentically autistic* and I worry that appropriating the word to describe similar symptoms in undiagnosed people might lead to widespread misunderstanding.

But then mental illness is a difficult area which I know precious little about, so I may be just splitting hairs. I'm just wary of a kind of 'mental illness tourism'. The idea that Asperger's sufferers are better suited to writing poetry conflicts with the little I have read about it, which suggests that they would typically have a lot of difficulty with abstract concepts that are governed by fluid laws and systems rather than absolute ones (hence why they have difficulty with social development), seeing things from other people's point of view and reading between the lines, all of which I would have thought are fairly important when writing poetry. That's not to say they can't write it at all, of course, and maybe there's something about poetry that makes it safer and less confusing than social interaction. Maybe poetry can be, in a way, a process of making the chaotic and abstract into something orderly and concrete.

(* according to wiki, diagnosis requires "at least six symptoms total, including at least two symptoms of qualitative impairment in social interaction")

Jon, if you read Simon Baron-Cohen (here) on what autism is, he says it is based on the balance, in a person's mental processes, between empathy and systemising.

And yes, it IS a spectrum, because a person can be mildly skewed towards systemising and away from empathy, or overwhelmingly so. The deciding factor isn't how much they lean to either end, it's the differential between the two. I know a child who's been diagnosed with "ASD", or Autistic Spectrum Disorder. (As it happens, some people are also much more synaesthetic than others.)

Because it is a spectrum, diagnosis is an inexact science, balancing factors between these two extremes. Of course there are severely autistic people who will be easily diagnosed - people who are low-functioning or whose traits leave no room for doubt. There are many others for whom it's not so easy to decide whether to give the way their brain works fits this label or not. It's not at all uncommon - as the condition is hereditary in many cases - to find an adult man who never thought of himself as autistic being diagnosed on the back of the diagnosis of his child - and the reason for this is that people understand autism now much more than they used to. One person this has happened to is the Australian poet Les Murray.

In fact, Baron-Cohen's thesis is that autism is nothing more than "extreme male brain" (male being the label for a set of features that are regarded as more prevalent in males - of course the same features will exist in female brains, in differing mixes; no one male brain is higher in every one of these characteristics than any given female brain. Just clarifying!), and that it isn't - at the near, high-functioning end - a "syndrome" at all, just an extreme characteristic. (What it never is, is a form of mental illness, or a disease.) You wouldn't say that just anybody with poor social skills was autistic. You'd want to look at what was poor about their social skills. I'm willing to bet that, if someone was very judgemental of other people's behaviour, for example, there might be an element of autistic systemising going on - and that the person was angry with them for not behaving as they "ought."

And language, of course, as I said, is a system.

And yes, of course, as with any sort of popularly-understood psychology, people will and do go around saying, "oh my God, I must have that" - these days it's ADD or dyslexia, in the thirties everybody had a "complex."

Well, first of all (as Katy has just pointed out), autism is a disability, not a mental illness. The spectrum, in my opinion, also shouldn’t be used to describe people who only have a few mainly undiagnosed characteristics linked to autism.

My six-year-old daughter is autistic (properly diagnosed). Her brain is wired in a different way to anyone else I know. She is also ‘high-functioning’ – to say the least. It may be that she actually has Asperger Syndrome, but that probably won’t be diagnosed for a few years. I’ve heard people describe her condition as ‘mild’ but I’m not so convinced. I think her intelligence cloaks her difficulties, makes them less obvious. It also makes her very self-aware.

Certain traits might help some AS people to write poetry. I say “some” because the spectrum can involve a complex mix of traits in different people. Other people with AS may be entirely unable to write poetry.

Many AS people are much more interested in minute details than in plot or narrative, and this can be useful for writing poems, especially those which don’t rely on linear progression.

Many will also find patterns in everything, and that includes words, sounds, textures, lines, connections – that should help with poems. However, they may detect patterns that few other people are likely to see for themselves. As many poets make weird connections in any case, this shouldn’t be a problem.

I was told that people with AS lack a sense of humour, but this isn’t often true. I’d say the sense of humour often centres on slapstick and on quite sophisticated forms of wordplay. My daughter already does this. She deliberately substitutes correct words with inappropriate ones, which sound funny (sometimes she uses rhyming or slant-rhyming words), and she finds this hilarious. This clearly gives scope for poetry.

Difficulties in connecting to abstraction might leave poetry (as Jon suggests) as a way to explore what otherwise might be hard to understand. Kids with AS use play as one method to gain insight into the world because, in play, they can control their world and bring it into focus. Perhaps adults do the same with poetry – they discover their world through it – and I’d include neurotypical poets in that too.

Les Murray has Asperger Syndrome. Andy Philip pointed me to this poem by Murray a few weeks back, which I think is just brilliant, and describes autism in a way I never thought writing ever would or could. I think it's about one of his sons, who is also autistic.

God I love Les Murray. That is wonderful. Rob, I'm so jealous of you.

Yes though I'm wary about a distinction being formed that mental illness is somehow more socially than physiologically based than spectrum conditions. True to some extent but we are still in the infancy of diagnosing, treating and socialising and accepting these various problems. Some may think of schizophrenia as a disability, clinical depression as a mental illness.

The specific and unusual problem I have suffered from in the past - the subject of my long sequence Roddy Lumsden is Dead is depersonalisation (DPD). Second time I was diagnosed with it (c1997) I was accused by the psychiatrist of being such a textbook case I had evidently read a textbook and was adopting the condition, which was rather annoying to me, yes, familiar with the symptoms but wishing them gone. I believe DPD, diagnosed still as a mental illness, is innately connected with autism (or at least, for me it triggered autistic behaviour, some of it pleasurable, some of it creative) rather than clinical depression or bipolar disorders. The problem is that such conditions are variable in their level of effect, which Rob's daughter's condition will not be to the same extent.

I have occasionally suffered from depersonalisation, at one time very acutely. In my case it was connected to panic attacks and other anxiety symptoms, and a year of psychotherapy more or less sorted it out. It was both terrifying and, in an odd way, rather inspiring. My doctor at the time said, yes, I was neurotic, but if I was going to be a creative artist, as I wanted to be, then some form of neurosis was probably necessary, and she was right. I suspect I push myself into that kind of state when I need to give my writing a jolt - in particular, disrupted sleep patterns will do it. As for writing about the crisis itself, I've tried many times, and was just about to have another go when I read your post, Roddy.

Inspired by this, I've just drafted something myself which I'll leave up for a day or two, about the sensations which seem to be a mix of DP and the autistic, which I still encounter often, in a mild way. I wanted to point out that when mild and not accompanied by high anxiety, this can be pleasant, not unlike a drug experience. The full-on thing, complete with a loss of normal self-awareness, is terrifying, however. Perhaps I should explain that the places in the poem are not figurative or metaphorical but actual places where these feelings are induced.



DPD

A place of some power. A back-way corridor.
A tile run for my amateur camera to set out
its amygdala dolly zoom, one life spooling,
my low-spectrum screen idol throwing shapes,
becoming part of the process, of the pattern.

Another place of power, where I lock the door:
white-tiled walls, red-tiled floor and a skylight:
just that one word gifting me a pleasant quease
like the curiosity that chums the plateau phase,
the brain and brawn rattling up well together.

A seat of power from which I count the ways
or scan the knots in wood, unweighing damage,
chasing diagonals in a twelve by twelve display
of anything, when picture is no longer image
but colour, number, hunger, my life no more

a gaudy story being told, but wondrous blur.

Someone's going to have to elaborate on this distinction for me, since 'mental illness' is a controversial term in itself. I take it to loosely mean any serious psychological malady because outside of that I'm not sure you can *uncontroversially* describe anything as a mental illness.

That's not a spectrum of autism though. That's a more general spectrum of which autism or autistic behaviour forms a part, in the same way that a spectrum of clinical depression is not the same thing as a spectrum of chemical inbalance that starts with mild gloominess and goes on to serious clinical depression. At some point an imbalance between systemising and empathising becomes autism and it's not autism before that. I'm not sure we're in disagreement about that, but you may have misunderstood my initial misgivings - I didn't suggest there wasn't a spectrum, but asked to what degree there is this spectrum - by which I only meant to suggest that we can't go round saying we're mildly autistic just because we have an imbalance between systemising and empathising or display a symptom or two.

Sorry to be pedantic. I'm also not sure that something being an 'extreme characteristic' automatically disqualifies it from being a syndrome. I mean, research into this is in its infancy, as Roddy says, and there are bound to be terms that overlap as well as muddy areas.

Brilliant poem Roddy. You employ a variety of vocabularies very successfully here. And I think 'place of power' captures very well the ambivalence of mental illness, well, not even mental illness, but just psychological states we consider negative or threatening ie. grief, anger &c. Really enjoyed reading this. I think anyone who's spent too much time on Facebook or MySpace will also appreciate the depersonalising effect (I use this term generally here) of 'social' networking in these lines...

my life no more

a gaudy story being told, but wondrous blur

Autism is classed as a disability because it is a condition, without a cure, as opposed to a mental illness which is by definition a disease and can be treated. Further debates about the term mental illness don't really affect this initial distinction.

You're not the first person to take exception to my self-diagnosis as 'mildly autistic' (something I should point out I don't 'go around saying', as you can imagine). There are other terms for very low-spectrum autistic experience, but I'm not keen on them and they are less explanatory. I have not experienced many of the behavioural symptoms which Jane and Rob's kids will, of course, but this isn't like an indecisive person defining themselves as mildly schizophrenic, or the claim that 'everyone's a bit mad'. For me, identifying myself as VLS helps me to understand myself.

Although we talk of a spectrum, it is more about a dealt hand than a number on a scale. My powers to empathise and communicate seem to be neurotypical, while other aspects of my behaviour fall close to or into the area of Asperger's. It doesn't make me an Aspie, but nor does it negate what partly shapes my personality.

I'm still not sure I fully understand this distinction. The mental health community is - according to my limited second-hand knowledge, much of which comes from reading around last year's mental health bill - very guarded about classifying any psychological disorder as either an illness or a disease, precisely for the reason that a disease implies that something can be treated and cured, as opposed to 'managed'.

I know wiki isn't always the most reliable source, but in the very first sentence of its entry on 'mental illness' it ties it to disability. Then on the autism page it defines autism as a disorder but notes that is debate as to whether it is a 'condition' or a 'disorder' and that in autistic culture there are those who seek a cure. I'm just not convinced yet that there is this thick dividing line between the two, not in the same way there is between physical disability and physical illness.

Well, I'm not trying to make any firm rules or put my foot down, simply because I don't have the knowledge or insight to confidently do so. 'Take exception' seems like too strong a phrase for what I'm expressing. I do have some scepticism towards medical diagnosis (self or otherwise) as a way of forming an identity, just as I am similarly sceptical towards the activity of tracing one's ancestry for similar purposes. Maybe part of it is envy because these options aren't available to me (just as any kind of regional identity seems to evade me, other than being English, and just as my middle classness is so banal as to be meaningless).

I take the point about the difficulties of pinning down exactly what might constitute a mental illness, and I don’t believe mental illness comes primarily from social factors. However, the point I was making was simply that autism isn’t a mental illness. I don’t think any experts on autism see it that way. It’s present from birth and stays for life. It’s classified as a disability. As for the precise distinctions that Jon is confused by, they also confuse me and I wouldn’t really want to go there…

A useful site for good information on autism and AS is at the National Autistic Society.

In this thread, we’ve been emphasising positive traits evidenced in some (a minority, it’s worth pointing out) people with AS because we’re looking at the link between AS and writing poetry. However, the negative side of autism is another story. It makes life stressful, confusing, frightening and extraordinarily frustrating for those with Autism/AS and for those who care for them. If a ‘cure’ emerged tomorrow that would get rid of the AS, I wouldn’t hesitate to give it to my daughter, even if that meant the world might possibly be deprived of a talented and creative mathematician or writer. Her happiness is more important to me than that. As it is, we encourage her to develop her talents because it’s good for her self-confidence and happiness. She has more than enough going against her.

I expect most people with autism/AS would also jump at the chance of a ‘cure’. But perhaps some wouldn’t if they had successfully overcome their difficulties over the years and feared the loss of any specialised talents they had developed. I know some people talk about embracing their autism and being proud to be different etc. Perhaps I’ll see things that way someday, but at the moment I find it impossible.

Oh, and Roddy, I liked your poem too. I found it quite unnerving.

Perhaps this is a more material distinction between disability and mental illness, rather than whether it can be treated or cured. The way I thought of it, autism is a learning disability, while something like schizophrenia is not, but both come under the broad (but controversial) term of mental illness or mental disorder because, as the wiki definition starts out implying, the term is a very, very loose one that describes a very large range of mental problems, from disabilities through to breakdowns. I really don't think any proper distinction in terms has much to do with whether something can be treated or the implication of treatment in words like 'illness' and 'disease'.

I like "wondrous blur" particularly. It takes some courage to use the word "wondrous" in a poem. There's a superb description - a series of descriptions, actually - of depersonalization attacks in Patrick Hamilton's novel Hangover Square.

I've been thinking further about this subject, and can see why depersonalization should be particularly favourable to writers. I've long been fascinated by Viktor Shklovsky's theory of defamiliarization, which claims that creative writing is an attempt to rid the described world of its familiar associations and show it to the reader as something fresh. To do that effectively, you have to detach yourself from it first, and depersonalization does that for you. Another angle on it is that when writing, say a novel, you have to create a sham world, and depersonalization turns the real world into a sham anyway. The world of your fiction is as real as any other.

For me, it's not about forming an identity, it's about trying to create a map that can guide me around experience, whether that's my own or my clients'. Developing understanding around the so-called "personality disorders" has not just been professionally beneficial, in terms of being able to meet and be with my clients much more successfully, it's enabled me - an entrenched but not wholly typical Schizoid - to begin facing the full complexities of my current experience, and the history that shaped my personality (I have to say I disagree with you Rob - my belief is that mental distress is incredibly bound up with social factors, though there are undoubtedly issues of susceptibility that could be genetic).

Although I've worked in the field of mental health for over fifteen years now, the whole AS / Autism field (which I agree is fundamentally an issue of how we are "made", how the neural pathways happen to be linked up) is very new to me; it's only recently that AS / Autism has really started to enter the general consciousness, with an awareness that there is an issue of spectrum. So yes, there are people at the extremes who get picked up by learning disability services, but there are many more people who are much higher functioning, and who have, when they needed help, ended up in mental health services (where - not surprisingly - their experience has been that they have not been properly understood). A supervisee of mine has a number of Aspys on her caseload, and is married to one, and she has been an invaluable teacher to me. I've come to realise that my mother is quite clearly AS, which has helped me re-shape my understanding of my own experience dramatically.

I agree that Roddy's poem is a cracker - yes, "wondrous blur" is terrifically bold. As for myself, I feel my character style does shape my poetry hugely, though not necessarily in a good way - while the obsessiveness can be good for redrafting, it can - when coupled with (often unconscious) fear of over-exposure - lead to all the life being throttled out of my writing. I can get caught in tight formality as a defence against being what I would call too sentimental - even when I'm writing free verse, I notice a strong tendency to want the lines to be visually around the same length, as if a spontaneous sprawling and jumble on the page will invite some kind of attack.

I experienced depersonalisation over a period of about six months a few years back. It was induced by a prolonged lack of sleep and stress. I felt it was similar to my state of mind following the death of my Father - the depersonalisation being a way of controlling that which was beyond control. I undoubtedly wrote my best poetry during this time, but found the experience so terrifying that I would rather never write another word than go back there. The feeling of being completely insane - while maintaining a perfectly functioning life - induced huge anxiety which fed back into the loop; I can remember saying to my husband over the washing up 'Haven't you noticed I've gone completely mad?' to which he answered 'no'. This reinforced the notion that I was inhabiting an alternative reality. Happily, this has not reoccurred and I would not advise it as a creative state - especially if you are a parent.

Mine was linked to the death of my father, too. I remember exactly the sensation you describe, feeling insane, and not being able to understand how no one noticed anything. One strategy I was taught for coping with it was 'paradoxical intention' - that is, trying to will yourself into the state, the idea being that trying to induce it actually prevents it, giving you some control. But I couldn't do this as I was so frightened of it, so I take your point entirely about not wanting to go back there. On the other hand I agree with Roddy that there are degrees of it, and a mild state can be quite pleasurable. After this subject came up, I was walking through the streets and thought an attack was coming on: there was a kind of grey, grainy quality in the air, and I decided either it was going to rain or it was me. Then I thought, if it's me, I know exactly why it is (another strategy, successful this time, was simply noting what stimuli brought it on and understanding the reason for the attack) and it'll be good for my poem. Then it rained.

reading Roddy's poem, I remembered this ... which I never got beyond drafting because I didn't know where the hell to go with it.

Clarke Kent ran past me at Leeds Station:
square frame, square chin, glasses and suit
square shoes crashing down like pint jugs
in the corners of the Deco Chamber.
Reality rippled like the marble on the walls.

The eyes in the back of my head
saw a world in blue and red
when he supermaned at the platform end.
The multi-screen picture house inside my mind
playing old-time movies in bruised hues

like the raspberry-lavender prints
under my skin. The sack on my back
bubbled with memories,
shooting out spherical cinema screens:
revolving violet dawns and cerise dusks

rising and ducking, passengers
tap dancing on escalators
as the train seemed to steam in
and your head ballooned into view,
bobbing towards me in the clutches of others.

Lacks poetry definitely, but describes depersonalisation and its possibilities perfectly.

This is interesting. I went into a similar state when I began writing about my mental breakdown (erm, one of my mental breakdowns, that is, this one being the prolonged 1999 - 2001 episode); I started writing poems about it, then found myself actually slipping back into it simply through contacting those feelings again. Luckily my life was so much more in balance by then that it took only a small effort of will to control my self-induced depressive state and step outside it again.

Happy days! :D

That slippage is another benefit for poetry - not just memory but the ability to recall the detail of emotion and sense experience. It is well documented that events experienced during drug induced states can only be fully recalled through similar drug induced states; it seems to be the case that the mind makes similar networks across depressive or depersonalised experience. This is fascinating - but the idea of invoking such states worries me.

Jon, I'm not sure how you can say these things about "taking against" (even if it is too strong a term) other people defining their own experience in any way that has meaning for them. Experience is the best teacher; there's nothing like having a few things happen to you to give you the lie of the land.

Research in to autism is not exactly in its "infancy." I can remember having long conversations about this with my mother when I was possibly in my teens, and the "male brain" idea and the "spectrum" came up way back then - though this was pre-internet, in America, so it may be that thinking was in a different place there. I forget why we were discussing it.

Anyway, how can you take issue with the idea of a spectrum? Headaches are a spectrum and fever is a spectrum. You can have a SLIGHTLY elevated temperature, a head that may or may not be a full-blown headache, and you can have a TENDENCY to exhibit certain cognitive or behavioural traits. If you look at the tests Rik posted links to, the scoring - at least on the one I looked at - is "80% of those diagnosed with autism or a related disorder scored 32 or higher." In other words, it's not a definite thing, it's about tendencies. There is no clear point where they go, "Right! Now you have it."

As it happens I am relatively close to a child who has a diagnosis of, as I think I said, "ASD" which means "autistic spectrum disorder." The dr admits it is a description rather than a whole new meaning. It's not a severe case of autism. It was a little bit moot whether they gave the boy a diagnosis or just let him ride itout - it was more a case of getting him statemented I think, to give him access to help in school. (He does exhibit very particular behaviours and traits. And he finds quite ordinary situations socially stressful, often, which means they are stressful in anticipation for the people around him. Anything from parties to going to the supermarket.) So it really isn't like there are always hard & fast rules for this - it's about judgement calls, and perceptions.

A previous boyfriend - we're going back ten years now - had a kid who had Asberger's, and he too was very bright and high-functioning, and also slightly different from other kids & demanding. I think it's a bit rough on siblings.

But rather than argue the toss about definitions, I thought Roddy's initial topic was very interesting - the idea that autistic tendencies can actually bring the creativity out in some way - channel emotional energy into production? Make an outlet for the constant stream of sensory perception? Give the brain something to play with to keep it busy? After all, Elizabeth Bishop said the most important thing is to observe - and that is what people with autism do, they notice things. This is an extraordinarily powerful tool in writing. As well as the patterning. The boy I was mentioning is a brilliant mimic with perfect recall of masses of lines from films (at 6!), in the right accents. Who knows, maybe he'll be writing dialogue when he grows up.

I can see a lot of these qualities in myself, of course - anyone probably could - even the depersonalisation, which is really just unlike me. I took the abovementioned test and scored ten.

Incidentally, my best friend is a psychotherapist who specialises in eating disorders and depression - and used to work in rehab, and before that in the probationary service while she was studying - and I think she'd agree with Alan re the social factors. Autism wouldn't be caused by social or external factors, but any underlying condition could be exacerbated by them, including stress, PTSD etc (which could in turn be exacerbated by a lack of the social perception needed to deal with a situation) - and I believe depression etc can be situational, and self-esteem issues influenced by outside forces eg abusive parents, bullies etc.

Crikey, I just did that first Asperger's self-test and got 154 out of 200, i.e. most likely to be Asperger's. In the second I scored 31, which is also apparently a high score. My husband says it's all rubbish and I should ignore it. But it would certainly explain why I find it difficult to handle being touched or hugged by people I don't know really well.

I wonder whether it makes writing in an imagery-rich way more difficult? I often wonder how on earth other poets manage to come up with particularly original images or phrases, as that sort of writing comes so hard to me.

Though it was perhaps easier for me to write like that when I was younger and more impressionable. The older I get, the less I trust heavily 'poeticised' poetry. Though I'm not keen on this new fashion for quirky, surreal poetry either. I want ideas, but presented in an oblique rather than opaque manner. Ideas and music.

Absolutely. I feel exactly the same way about my son, who is five and a lovely character, but would be far happier, I'm sure, if he didn't have to suffer school kids calling him 'freak' because his speech isn't very clear or because of his odd mannerisms and mysterious sayings. He may be odd, often frustratingly so, but that doesn't mean he can't understand that imposed isolation from 'normal' kids and be deeply hurt by their rejection.

When we first realised something was wrong, it was heart-breaking. You can't help wondering how your child would have turned out without that disability. Now, I'm more philosophical; we can't change it, but we can help him to stay positive and work with it.

He likes writing poetry too. Tonight, about a girl in his class, he wrote:

Iola is beautifuller
than a cake
a princess
an orange.

Finally, the sun!

:D

Well, Jane, it was in Wired Magazine! Oh, wait, that was the other one. Well, yours had swirly pink letters!

But seriously, a test like that, even if it's more of a parlour game than a medical opinion, can be good if it just gets you thinking about how you react to things and gives you some insight.

If your son's poem is anything to go by, imagery doesn't suffer... but anyway Jane, you have imagery in your poems. There's one image I've never been able to wipe from my mind after reading Boudicca...

That's lovely - my middle daughter is Iola and I've never come across another one. I'll show it to her. :D

Excellent, Neen. It makes me feel so much better about him cheerily telling an old lady on the way to school this morning that she looked like Davros (from Doctor Who). When I pointed out afterwards that such comments were rude, he was bewildered. He loves monsters, so why should the lady have been offended?

There's something, I don't know, unsettling about how some writers (no one here) can almost yearn for conditions like Aspergers. I remember when I was young and learning to write (I'm still learning) I thought I'd stand no chance unless I had bipolar, 'cos that's what Lowell had, and Berryman and Sexton and I thought, "I need to drink more, obviously, too." I read that Burgess, a Manchester writer I greately admired enjoyed whisky sours, so I used to sit in my bedsit knocking back a bottle of whisky a night, smashing lemons on the manky formica table by the rusty Belling, thinking, "Ah, I'm writing now." It's a bit embarrassing looking back. Later, loving Carver, I thought, what I need is a brain tumour. It was as if there had to be some supplemental pathology to the experience of writing. It's surely a throw back to all that late Romantic suffering and torment. So now I do have to watch the drink and the tendencies to indulgence and excess it all seems a bit daft. Writing doesn't need the permission of illness and disability to thrive. It mostly needs time, quiet and location. I suspect that I thought illnesses (and excess) augmented writing in some way, that they were enabling, or facilitated the process. It's a dangerous view to take. Most of my writers are healthy; as far as I can tell, there's no improvement in writing that comes with a crushing dependency, despondency or disability. There were a few people I've known who wanted a condition as some kind of validation of their skills or aims as a writer. Perhaps it would seem a form of proof.

Smashing lemons?

Have I missed out on some writerly drinking ritual that might have improved my ability to compose poetry?

I know what you mean though, Chris. I've gone through similar phases myself. But I think it's rather more complex than simply a question of yearning for a 'problem' to confirm you as a troubled writer, or whatever. With some people, you have to ask what came first ... the problem or the writing? There do seem to be identifiable links between writing as a vocation and various forms of mental illness or addiction, and it can't always be fashion that's to blame.

Personally, I don't feel my own personal 'oddness' is a disability or needs addressing in any official way. I've always been like this, and apart from a few unfortunate episodes in my life I've learnt to cope okay. But knowing there may be a cause for my occasionally odd behaviour which isn't necessarily related to my being a 'bad' or socially inept person holds some element of comfort for me.

For instance, having to constantly explain why I don't own a mobile phone and find it so painful to ring people - because I have a telephone phobia - can become wearing. People react with amusement or bewilderment to the idea of a telephone phobia, for some reason. (Seems perfectly natural to me, horrible objects - I can usually manage to answer phones without breaking into a cold sweat, but having to make a phone call myself can dominate or ruin an entire day; even quite a routine call makes me nervous and has to be planned ahead.*) Now I can say, look, I can't help it, okay?

* = The only exception to this is calling home, which is (usually!) far less threatening than calls to friends or strangers.

Heh! Phone phobia. I don't fear phones; I resent them. I refuse to let them rule my life (people will leave a message if it's important), and I get very annoyed by people breaking off a face-to-face conversation to answer their mobiles.

On the wider aspect of wanting a mental health condition to validate my poetry ... I've never really daydreamed about that type of situation: my father was bipolar, my next-door neighbour's eldest daughter is severely autistic and I've twice worked alongside people with pronounced Asperger's and I can honestly say the thought of having any of those conditions scares me. Not even the idea that a mild form of such a condition could help me write better poetry makes me desire them!

Getting a diagnosis of a brain impairment is problematic, too. Until I came across the concept of Prosopagnosia and realising it was describing me (and then all the tests and stuff confirming it) I didn't know I had a problem - I thought everybody was like me. The diagnosis has been a blessing and a curse: a blessing because it feels good to know that there's a reason for my social rectitude and fear of networking; but also a curse because I'm beginning to realise that I'm now using the condition as an excuse for not doing things - like getting involved in the London poetry scene, going to readings, putting myself forward for open-mike spots, networking, etc.

I tried writing poetry under the influence of alcohol - the results were risible. And being allergic to dope has dissuaded me from trying to emulate Coleridge, thank the gods!

Glasgow writer, Jim Murdoch, has two very interesting articles on alcohol and the creative writing process. This is the first part and this is the second part (I thought this was the best section). Sobering stuff!

We're talking about medical conditions (or disorders, or whatever). It's perfectly reasonable to be sceptical about people using such things to 'define' their identities when they're not diagnosed sufferers. I'm very surprised that you don't find that scepticism justified.

As a general rule, I find the idea that people should be able to go around 'defining their own experience in any way that has meaning for them' rather dangerous. Let's throw caution to the wind and go full-out Godwin's law - what about people defining themselves as 'Aryan'? OK, scratch that - all I need to say is that where it crosses the fog-wreathed border into self-delusion it's not a thing to be encouraged.

I don't. I'm not taking issue with the *idea* of a spectrum, and I never was, if you look back to my first post. It's a case of to what extent this talk of a spectrum is appropriate, and which spectrum you're talking about. If you're talking about the autistic spectrum, then people who are not diagnosed as autistic are not on it! Yes, there *is* a clear point where they say, "Right, you have it" and established criteria for doing so. You can argue the criteria is arbitrary, a matter of judgement, but it is there, and relevant.

I'm not sure exactly what you're taking me up on, or what point some of your post goes to (probably not to anything I've said at all) but it sounds like you're trying to argue that anyone who takes one of these rather spurious Internet tests or shows any symptoms at all can go around believing they're autistic, if they feel it explains something about them. If that's not what you're suggesting then we probably don't have anything to disagree about. But the idea that it sheds light on something on its own is not very good criteria. I've been feeling very, very tired lately and suffering from various muscle aches and pains. No doubt self-diagnosing myself with mild CFS would put all that in some kind of context, but it would also be dishonest.

Where am I going wrong here?

**edit**

Took the first test. Apparently I am "very likely an Aspie". Hmm!