Author: Merrick Egber (August 17, 2017) For my next blog assignment, I was given the opportunity to review a novel written by an author with Asperger’s by the name of Lloydd Marshall. A relative of his was interested in promoting his work and so approached the foundation with the intention of having one of us read one of his books, and then to write about it, naturally the task fell onto me.  Mr. Marshall’s promise is in putting out a novel for every week, after sifting through 15 potential candidates I settled on the second novel titled The Hollywood Calendar: A Lover’s Sting.  This book is the first volume of a murder mystery series that intrigued me. So, it is with this article, that I look into the literary mind of Mr. Lloydd Marshall.

Karen Winkler (real name: Megan Hart) is a famous actress on the run from predatory forces that are either controlling her or targeting her because she knows too much and as what follows in these cases, time runs out for her. Sophia Russo is an aspirational actress and politician who was good friends with Karen and the last person that Karen talked to before her death. During Karen’s funeral, part of her management company seeks to make Sophia the heir apparent to Karen’s legacy. What may be the deeper motive to the company’s intentions?  Who were the forces behind Karen’s last days?

The book tries to be more than just your average murder mystery. Due to its subject, Hollywood, the book waxes about the meaning of fame, the blinding lights of celebrity, and the power of glitz and glamour over reality and hard news. It doesn’t completely make its point sharp enough, but what it does is it conveys a sense of relevance over the normalcy of our news cycle. For example, originally Sophia Russo feels very miffed that an interview with her and the rest of the cast for her first big film takes such precedence over the condition of the U.S. President but, she rationalizes this cycle in her head once the President recovers from his collapsed state as doing more harm if that news story took precedence over the interview.

The writing is also very, very good. You feel like you’re a part of Mr. Marshall’s world, that you care about these characters and you may want to even hang out with them if you knew them. The narrative is also well-versed, the jumping back and forth between Karen’s fall, and Sophia’s rise, are well designed enough to keep you on track, and with enough twists and continuity commitments to create a stable rollercoaster of a ride, like any good murder mystery.

Lloydd Marshall has a good amount of talent as a writer. Supposedly, he came up with the idea behind this series while having a crazy conversation with his brother on the way to Barnes & Noble. So a single conversation gets turned into such a good novel, and all in the process of a week, well done!

Author: Merrick Egber (July 19, 2017) On a moonlit night, on June 19^th, 1986, a child was born to a couple. Like the hit playing on the radio before my arrival, the first “Invisible Touch” had happened. While I was moving through the pre-existential cosmos, unaware of a new stage in my life as a being of humanity, never would I think that I was born with anything that separated me from the masses of people.  If I was, these were parts of my ingrained personality not to be confused with anything explained by neurologists.

When I was born, autism had evolved from a niche condition confined to the child and rested by independent-minded practitioners. You could even say that I was born in the proper decade to have someone like me. By 1980, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) had finally listed “infantile autism” on their DSM III manual of mental disorders, which was a very big deal. While people would talk about autism, as something relevant and legitimate, here was the foremost authority on psychological behaviors and conditions listing it as relevant and legitimate. A breakthrough had been had!  By 1987 “infantile autism” just got shortened to “autism”, it was the time of revolutionary thinking in the field of psychiatry that “autism” wasn’t just something confined to only children but that adults could still have it too.

A year later, pop culture caught up to this new phenomenon in psychiatry with the movie “Rain Man” starring Dustin Hoffman as an autistic savant, still known as the term “idiot savant” at the time. Barry Morrow, the primary screenwriter for the movie, met this mega-savant, Kim Peek, who had FG Syndrome, not autism, and Barry promised to share his story with the world. Dustin took Peek’s personality, altered him to become much more autistic and through that became one of the first recognizable images of the condition to the world. While it has been stressed that savantism isn’t a natural byproduct of autism, and that Dustin Hoffman’s character is more caricature than empathetic, it at least shines a light that there is more going on in a lower functioning autistic’s brain than what society may have perceived.

None of these breakthroughs, however, would impact my family.  When I was very young, I had developmental delays in my motor skills, and while I had some typical symptoms of autism, I would hear about an autistic child taking the semi-circle around to an object instead of a straight line.  I would think “that’s me”, but none of the professionals knew what was going on with me. The closest to finding out was a psychiatrist who finally labeled me as having PDD or having “Pervasive Developmental Disorder”.  PDD is now recognized as part of the autism spectrum and has to do with socialization and communication difficulties, which was what I had going on with myself, autism without the exact label.

Back then, due to the new-born diagnosis of autism, I had to live the life of a neurotypical. I was usually in schools and programs that had me interact and socialize, be one with the neurotypical world. Even after autism was recognized as a special education listing in 1991 by the U.S. Government, and my form of it, Asperger’s Syndrome, was recognized through the translations of German psychiatrist, Dr. Uta Frith, in 1994.   I was still not aware that I had anything disorderly about me. Sure, I went to some special activity classes to help me with my autism, but I guess I saw it as just something that many kids may have to do, not to do with any potential deficits. It never occurred to me that I was a spoke in the wheels of a revolutionary new awareness in psychiatric circles around the world.

Flash-forward to the tenth anniversary of Asperger’s Syndrome becoming a legitimate diagnosis in 2004.   I had graduated from High School, and was ready for the next major moment of my life. I had always wanted to live elsewhere, but I was given one condition; I would have to enroll into an ILP (Independent Living Program). This was also the same time, since it would have to come up very soon, in which I was told by my parents that I had Asperger’s Syndrome. While I was given the news, it was becoming a boom decade for autism. The Autism Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network (ADDMN) was created by the CDC (Centers for Disease and Health Control).  In 2000, fueling the rise in research which also included detecting autistic behaviors of children, a year after my diagnosis the organization, Autism Speaks, was founded.  By the end of the decade, the first movie about Asperger’s Syndrome, Adam, came out. It was also the same year that Ernie and Liezl Els’ started their Els for Autism Foundation.

Thankfully, this was probably the right decade to learn about my diagnosis. Ever since the 80s, advocacy groups that treat autism not as a disease but as a meaningful part of one’s life have sprung up. It especially reverberated in the 2000s, when organizations sprung up advocating that autism should not be cured but instead should be respected, as a mental “difference”. Now, it’s a lot easier to say that about someone like me with Asperger’s Syndrome than someone who is more “classically” based, that is having deeper deficits in social and communicative thinking, and thus many of these organizations and the people who head them are much more based in the world of Asperger’s than they are in mainstream autism. Having said that, though, the idea that what I’ve been diagnosed is not a curse, but more of a blessing and also that of a “different” personality sounds very welcoming, due to my initial reaction to the diagnosis, which was of shock and terror.  This is because I went through life as everybody else, to learn that I wasn’t like anyone else I knew at the schools I went to, for example, made me feel like I was limited in some way and unable to be what I wanted to become.  Thus to have learned, a little bit, about that perspective contemporaneously was very welcoming.  I even joined the self-advocacy group, Aspies for Freedom, for a little while when I was given information about the possible networking sites that I could be a part of, what an irony that that was a springboard for autistic pride day which happens a day before my birthday (June 18^th) every year.

Which brings me to the lowest part of this article. Ever since my diagnosis, I hardly treated it as anything worthy of validity, and interest. While I did accept it, and didn’t shy away from utilizing it when I had to, it never seemed to play a major part in my life. That all changed in December of 2012, while the world didn’t end in that month, I felt like my world started to.

It was the Sandy Hook Massacre perpetrated by Adam Lanza, a gunman who went crazy and shot up an Elementary School in Connecticut, before killing himself. Due to the natural outrage over somebody killing 20 kids, and the unresolved conclusion of the incident, not only did Adam kill himself but he also destroyed his hard-drive leaving very little clues behind.  Although the obsessively detailed list on mass shootings was a giant clue as to “why”, people felt the need to blame something for such a horrific act, and I don’t know which one hurt more, the idea to blame certain types of video games, or to make commentaries on Asperger’s Syndrome, which Adam was diagnosed with. As noted in an earlier blog, I love video games, and to constantly read about banning video games, small towns plotting to destroy “violent” video games, Super Mario is a “violent” video game series, most NES games are “violent” video games, and people talking about industries self-censoring violent imagery as a defensive mechanism when gun control becomes the topic of the day, was sort of a little much to me.  But the Asperger’s Syndrome also deeply affected me.

It was reading about assumptions made about people with autism, and Asperger’s Syndrome. The idea, that Asperger’s and violence is seemingly “well-connected” almost like being different personality-wise will always create a “violent” monster, like the “creepy” old man who ends up being a loving individual but we expect all people to behave the same and the rest to have something “wrong” with them. I do believe that all people can improve, that people with social and communication difficulties should be given the proper treatments and care by professionals so that they’ll feel better in the real world, but I don’t believe that people with autism, especially Asperger’s Syndrome can suddenly, with an amount of help, be the same as those without.  There are people out there who would feel offended by those conclusions. Now, I don’t deny that Adam had been diagnosed with Asperger’s, he had a special interest in mass shootings, given the media portrayals and the myths and legends that all stem around the subject.  It’s sort of like the public fascination with serial killers, but instead of using his statistics to write a detailed book about mass shootings, he decided to become one himself.

But that wasn’t the only thing that rocked the world of anybody with Asperger’s who paid close attention to the news. A few months later, the diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome was eliminated from the DSM V, almost mysteriously. What the APA said, at the time, was to just melt it into the overall autistic spectrum. Interestingly enough, in the beginning of December the APA met to discuss the removal of the diagnosis. Their reasoning was that it would be easier to make a diagnosis due to the severity of the disorder.

My response? If Autism is a wide spectrum, labels should serve as checkpoints to understand what a person really is. Asperger’s is generally, if not always, high-functioning, or attached to high-functioning autism, and so there’s little to no diversity in such a term describing somebody, it is also generally thought of as a disorder that isn’t characterized by the same impairments in socialization and communication that other parts of autism have. No matter what, I will still claim myself to have been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, and I think that that hasn’t changed with any of my peers. Defying the APA? Possibly. It isn’t like they haven’t been wrong before, and I’m not sure how much credence using the label has in psychiatric circles nowadays but I would say that it hasn’t changed a darn thing with me.

So, I hope that you were OK with such a long conclusion to such a set of voluminous articles, currently, at the Els for Autism Foundation we’re making a part of the history that just might be recorded in a future article about autism history. Follow us, like us, find out about us!

Full disclosure: The author of this piece is Jewish.

Author: Merrick Egber (June 20, 2017)  With a tip of the hat to Alex Plank, my journey through the history of autism began when I saw John Donvan and Caren Zucker being interviewed for their recent best-selling book called “In a Different Key: The History of Autism”, through Alex’s web series called Autism TV. It was then, that I felt fascinated by studying the history of a condition that I never bothered to do any deep research on before. When was it first diagnosed, who were the first champions of the new diagnosis, for example, I needed to know.

While learning about the origins of the autism diagnosis, I found out about the doctor, Hans Asperger, whose namesake is the condition I have been diagnosed with. During the early 1900s, eugenics was all the rage, and in a specific region of Europe, eugenics became the mandated governing policy by a guy with a silly moustache. Eugenics, for those who don’t know, was a school of political thought ruled by intellectuals who saw the disabled as “useless eaters”, and racial and ethnic minorities as “genetically impure”.  It was one of the trending facets of what we call the “Progressive Era” which lasted from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. Common “solutions” were sterilizations, the banning of marriages, and mass institutionalization. Dr. Eugene Bleuler, who was mentioned in part I of this blog series as the doctor behind coining the terms “autism” and “schizophrenia”, happened to believe in this philosophy and practiced it on his schizophrenic and autistic patients.

Yet one of the most controversial aspects of Dr. Hans Asperger’s life is in how much he endorsed the German Nazi program. While Dr. Asperger stated, and has been defended on the idea that he was never a fan of the Nazis, in Donvan and Zucker’s book, with contributions by Herwig Czech who is prolific at uncovering the level of collaboration between the psychiatric establishment and the Nazi regime, they have argued that Dr. Asperger was an enthusiastic cheerleader for Hitler. Even one of the most recent defenders of Dr. Asperger’s legacy, Steve Silberman, who wrote “Neurotribes” about the neurodiversity movement, found himself a little bit shaken-up by the revelation that Dr. Asperger condemned a girl to death who had encephalitis. It’s also been theorized that Dr. Asperger’s championing of certain autistic patients was due to these kinds of beliefs on the disabled. After all if he wasn’t a cheerleader, why wouldn’t he be as interested in the lower functioning types as in the higher functioning ones?

After reading article after article, I’ve come to a conclusion:

I believe that Dr. Asperger probably felt that he needed to keep his job, but within the limitations of his skepticism towards the Nazi movement, as there is no record of him ever joining the party itself. His zeal in pursuing his goals in assisting his patients is why there are records of him going above and beyond what is typically thought of as a loyal assistant to the Nazis, for example signing every paper with a “Heil Hitler” which was never required for any psychiatrist in his position. It may have even helped in the founding of the school (mentioned in part 1 of this blog), a breakthrough in the psychiatric sciences. I think his guilt in being loyal to Hitler’s ideas is why he denied the darker side of his past to a point of believing himself to be one of the strong dissidents to Hitler’s regime. I also believe that a strong counter-argument is why couldn’t he leave, but it wouldn’t surprise me if his studies were so regionalized and locked-in that he couldn’t just pack up and head to another country such as America to continue them.

Unlike doctors Bleuler and Asperger, Dr. Kanner, being a Jewish immigrant who left Europe and never looked back, had no attachment to eugenics or to Nazism. Still, this was during a time when any unusual neurological or mental disorder, due to their evasive origins and no known cures, led psychiatrists proposing all kinds of hypotheses to the origins, or potential cures for such a malady, and Dr. Leo Kanner had his, related to autism.

In 1943 and 1949, Dr. Kanner published two articles describing a pattern that he had noticed as a probable cause of autistic behaviors in the children he had worked with. The parents themselves, were usually cold and distant towards their children, and thus it was theorized that the children’s behaviors came as a result towards this kind of parenting. An especially important line appeared in his ’49 paper stating that the children were “in refrigerators that did not defrost”. While another line in the same paper “genuine lack of maternal warmth” helped to create the “Refrigerator Mother Theory”, which suggests that the only interactions between mother and autistic child was one of provider and needs-wanting individual.

This theory was popularized, and the term sometimes credited, by one Bruno Bettelheim of the University of Chicago, who wrote books about the subject. In his 1967 seminal book “The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of Self”, he compared autistic children to Jews in a concentration camp, and the parents compared to camp guards. Since Mr. Bettelheim was a Holocaust survivor, that kind of dramatic analogy was lent greater credentials. It should be noted that during that in 1964 Dr. Kanner eventually rejected the “Refrigerator Mother Theory”, even writing the foreword for the first major publication called “Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and its Implications for a Neural Behavior” by Bernard Rimland, co-founder of the Autism Society of America (ASA) challenging it. Yet, Bruno never gave up on espousing his theory on the true cause of autism, giving magazine interviews, going on talk shows, and being rewarded through a fellowship to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, in 1971. Later that decade he received two National Book awards for “The Uses of Enchantment”, a Freudian look at fairytales. It was only after his death, in 1990, when it was realized that the good doctor turned out to be a good fraud. Not only did he have no actual expertise in psychology, only taking three introductory courses in college, one of his greatest tales, in meeting Sigmund Freud, was a hoax, and the book I just mentioned was found to be a plagiarized work. Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped reports of psychiatrists still referring to it as the cause of autism, and in France, a group of filmmakers made a controversial documentary called “The Wall” stating that this theory was extremely prevalent in that country.

As far as my belief, I don’t believe in the “Refrigerator Mother Theory”. I do believe that certain environments may produce symptoms of autism, but I think that autism is such a part of one’s character that one does not become autistic, but rather one has it already ingrained. That is, the genetic theory is the most plausible to me.

So, I’ve gone into some details about the early history of autism. In my next blog, I’ll talk about how the disability’s diagnosis has been re-evaluated as more enlightened research and processes have come into being and I will examine, the more recent history of the diagnosis, and maybe find a few good things about today.

Author: Merrick Egber
(May 2, 2017)
photo: Dr. Leo Kanner

In 1911 a Swiss psychiatrist known as Dr. Eugene Bleuler made a startling discovery. While studying individuals with schizophrenia, a term he coined, he noticed that many of those same patients had related symptoms that he hadn’t diagnosed before. These patients seemed entirely withdrawn, oblivious to the people around them, and completely self-absorbed. Finding a way to describe them, he stumbled upon the term “autism” derived from the Greek word “autos” meaning self, in this case wholly self-absorbed. This is my two part blog that focuses on this journey of autism from a symptom of schizophrenia to a federally recognized  disorder—in 1991. In order to be aware of the present, we should also be aware of the past.

In the many years that followed Dr. Eugene Bleuler’s discovery, autism remained categorized as a version of schizophrenia for a sub-group of patients. In 1926 it was claimed that Soviet neurologist, Grunya Sukhareva, was the first to extract autism from schizophrenia. Dr. Sukhareva even used the term “autistic psychopathy” years before Dr. Hans Asperger (whom I’ll get to later) did to describe his patients. But the man who made the theory popular was Dr. Leo Kanner, an Austrian psychiatrist who ended up in the United States, due to poor conditions in his adopted homeland of Germany. Shortly after his arrival in 1935, Dr. Kanner wrote the pioneering book “Child Psychiatry”.  It was this book that stoked the curiosity of a family from Forest, Mississippi, the Tripletts. The Triplett’s oldest son, Donald, had gone through many unusual symptoms that the family couldn’t figure out.  The father wrote a very long essay to Dr. Kanner and he agreed to meet with Donald, who became known as autism’s Case #1.

What Dr. Kanner found out from Donald was groundbreaking in the world of psychology. Up till that point he thought that autism was a part of schizophrenia but now he wasn’t sure. Donald didn’t have delusions, nor did he experience “voices” or other hallucinations that were typical symptoms of people with schizophrenia. Donald was living in his own world, but it wasn’t separate from the reality he really lived in. In fact Donald, now in his 80s, has acknowledged that he didn’t cry when his mother died in 1985, because he “just didn’t react” not because he was oblivious to her death. These new findings, along with observation of several other patients similar to Donald, had Dr. Kanner propose a new theory that autism, instead of being a relative of schizophrenia, it was of its own being.  He ended up calling it “infantile autism”, since his preoccupation was with children who shared those traits, and he published an article on his new theory called “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact”.

Around the same time, in the mid to late 1930’s, another Austrian psychiatrist laid the groundwork for deeper insight into the world of autism. Dr. Hans Asperger, whom Asperger’s Syndrome is named after, had met with patients diagnosed with “autistic behaviors” but were of a wider group and variety from the ones Dr. Kanner had seen, and had expressed greater interest in the most high functioning patients. While these patients exhibited many symptoms of autism, their symptoms were seen as benefiting them, not disabling them. Since he was not a child psychiatrist, he followed many of these patients through their successful careers, including the Nobel Prize in Literature winner, Elfriede Jelinek.  Of these patients, he was convinced that “autism psychopathy” played a part in their successes. In fact, he even started a school for those with “autism psychopathy” but the school was destroyed and the co-founder killed during World War II bombings.

While one would expect such research to be crucial to the total understanding of autism, none of his work was translated into English and it took a year after Asperger’s death when the English speaking world learned about his research through British psychiatrist Lorna Wing, who published an article about him in 1981, calling his more specialized diagnosis as “Asperger’s Syndrome”, and coining the term “the Autism Spectrum”.  But it took a decade later, for German developmental psychologist Uta Frith to put out the first translated works of Dr. Asperger, which ended up making Asperger’s Syndrome official as a universal disorder.

In the second half of this blog, I will convey the impact of the new diagnosis of a neurological disorder during a moment in time when the practice of eugenics, a political ethos built around genetic purity and the warehousing of the disabled, was popular.  This became the governing ethos of a vile nation state during the 30s and 40s. I’ll also discuss whether or not a counter-intuitive disorder like Asperger’s Syndrome was turned into a political gambit by its very own namesake. And lastly, I’ll share information on the first popular “root cause” of autism, the Refrigerator Mother Theory, which has been discredited. Hope you had a lovely Autism Awareness Month in April, and stay tuned for more history!

Author: Merrick Egber
(March 30th, 2017)

I was given a well-liked book, In My Words: Stories of an Autistic Boy, to review. Following 22-year-old Robbie Clark, the book chronicles the growth of an autistic individual from birth at a Baton Rouge hospital to his current life in Huntsville, Alabama.

It’s a short book – 109 pages – with vignettes prefaced by emoticons, a direct summation of Robbie’s book and his life, all dressed up in light blue, with the paradox of the constant emotions that run through Robbie’s days, in a kind of clutter. Featuring a foreword by his father and perspectives from both his parents and sister, Emma, sprinkled throughout the book, it is a pretty good primer on getting into analyzing how autism affects people.

How does autism affect Robbie? He can recite any factoid about the Academy Awards, off the top of his head, and like Owen Suskind, the star of the Academy Award-nominated Life Animated, has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of Disney movies. What I’ve gotten from the book, itself, is that Mr. Clark sees these things as parts of his personality, but not exact definitions of his character. Many of the stories point out that, from the beginning, he was more interested in being treated like anyone else, than just as another autistic individual. While he had moments of popularity and love, it wasn’t an easy ride to get from misunderstandings to a point of living freely in the world that he built.

Perhaps my favorite story in the book, “P.E. in School”, relates to the idea that sometimes people may have misconceptions about those with autism. It is a simple story, but one with a good build-up and even a twist to cement the importance of the event. In it, Robbie refuses to attend a gym class, because two boys constantly pick on one of his friends, and while that may be empathetic enough, the story further twists to show that those same boys liked Robbie and would usually pick him for their team.  Clearly, not everyone has a lack of empathy, and Robbie’s story is a great example of this misconception. I remember, years ago, when researching what it was like to have Asperger’s Syndrome that the symptom of “lack of empathy” was something I had seen plenty of times.

While the best option for him would’ve been to show up to class and stand up for his friend to demonstrate greater empathy. How many boys, in the same situation, would’ve demonstrated a commitment, especially given the way autism affects communication? How many would have refused because of loyalty to a friend?

I have two suggestions for the book. First, Robbie did have a few friends, the stories would benefit from having one of his friends describe what it was like to be around him. Second, although unusual for this type of book, I believe it would have been useful to add an index or table of contents, so people could find and reflect on specific vignettes more easily, especially as this is an important collection of short biographical anecdotes.

I did have a short Q&A with the author, who divulged a little about the present and the future. Currently he works with his father, Rob, at The Ledges, a golf facility in Huntsville, and he has recently gone on the road to do speaking engagements with his mother, Maggie. He has been to three speaking engagements so far: Huntsville, Baton Rouge, and Clearwater Beach, Florida, all of which really pleased him. He loved the large audience at the Baton Rouge event, 400 strong. While it was a brief segment, and his debut speech, the audience roared with approval once Robbie and Maggie finished their speech. He also told me that he loved how beautiful Clearwater Beach was.

As far as his job at The Ledges, it is very satisfactory work for Robbie, who has been employed there for almost a decade, longer than anyone else currently on staff.  He has nothing but compliments about his co-workers. He also likes how adaptable they are to his touring schedule.

For Robbie, the gist of his experience with autism is to be thankful for what you have, not for what you haven’t, and to concentrate on whatever drives you, completely to take advantage of your situation.

So there you have it, Robbie is a talented young man with autism. His book is about how he manages to overcome some myths about the disorder. For around $4 for a digital copy, and $15.30 for a hard copy, you can start your journey with Robbie and see where it takes you. It is good to be inspired.

You can purchase In My Words: Stories of an Autistic Boy by Robbie Clark on Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble. Best of all, Robbie has confirmed that he has a second book in the works.

Author: Merrick Egber
(February 21, 2017)

On April 28^th of this year, Els for Autism is going to help celebrate the end of Autism Awareness Month by hosting the inaugural Autism Innovations & Global Impact Conference: The State of the Science which will see a team of leaders all devoted to explaining the current state of the union on autism. One of our presenters, who is hosting the VIP dinner, is a shining star of sorts, not just with what he can talk about regarding autism but also how he utilized his condition as a springboard for opportunities for everyone, including himself, who seeks to be heard, or understood, when it comes to Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

His name is Alex Plank, founder and owner of Wrong Planet.net, a forum for those with Asperger’s Syndrome, a variant of autism, which has become the largest web forum for autism. This past Wednesday I was given the opportunity to have a 30 minute interview with him when he toured the Els campus.

Now, typically, when doing an interview I just keep to the script, even if it hurts, with very little room to improvise or to concentrate on the answers of the person being interviewed, almost like a robot. With Alex, for the very first time in my short interviewing “career”, I felt like I could finally be myself. What went from an interview turned into a conversation, as I could relate so much to a person who I could’ve been friends with years ago as we have the same condition, Asperger’s, the same birth year, 1986, and were born very close to each other – he in Charlottesville, Virginia and me in Columbia, Maryland – but we finally got to talk to each other now. While it is usually inappropriate to talk about the growth of a simple interview, for me it was a big deal as it allowed us a greater connection than if it was just some random neurotypical.

Alex Plank was first diagnosed with Asperger’s at the age of 9, a year after the U.S. government officially recognized the variant of the disorder, around that time young Alex was being bullied a lot and had a hard time reading social cues and making friends, since his direct approach of asking people to be his friend led him to rejection after rejection. Like Alex, I didn’t have a large group of friends, and as I grew, instead of eating lunch in the cafeteria I would eat it in my next classroom, or I would spend time in a small classroom for autistic kids, “Hannah Moore School”, studying and maybe having lunch afterschool, while Alex would be beating his guidance counselor at chess, “He wasn’t just doing it to make me feel better” adds Alex, though he also added, “I hope”. We also found it easier to bond with the teachers, and the adults, on a school’s campus than the students themselves because of our interest in things that the adults could relate to more than the kids.

When he found out about his diagnosis while going through his parent’s documents, he felt ashamed, like he was somehow defective. As the years have gone on, he has come to understand his strengths and weaknesses. While he had to self-teach himself all kinds of social cues by studying others at his alma mater, George Mason University, the innate “obsession” or hyper-focus abilities that autism gives a person facilitated his starting Wrong Planet at the age of 17. He does believe that while focusing on academics is a laudable life skill what will shape your world will be something that relates to those inner “obsessions”, in his case computer science and movies which have helped him succeed in jobs.

So, the big question you may have is: How did Alex start Wrong Planet? Throughout much of his life, Alex Plank didn’t know anyone like him, and it was especially almost impossible to connect through the magic of the internet, it was long ago enough that Wikipedia had only one server, so he and a forum mate, Dan Grover, talked about how they should create a web site meant for people with Asperger’s Syndrome to find each other, with the name coming from the both of them feeling like they are “aliens from some foreign planet”, living on the wrong planet.

What does he want to do for the future? While he wants to create better quality resources for people to use from his web site, he is especially interested in maximizing the social climate for Aspies by facilitating offline social events, and conferencing so that social functions like dating, and just hanging out, could have a purpose besides an online forum.

Besides Wrong Planet, Alex has worked with the visual medium and has used his reputation as a way to speak at different public events. In 2010, as a side-project for Wrong Planet, Alex started a web series called Autism Talk TV. The 26 episodes typically deal with educational topics for those with autism, expert and authoritative interviews, and even a few appearances by native co-hosts, Kristen Lindsmith and Jack Robison (son of John Elder Robison who wrote, “Look Me In The Eye”), who both have autism themselves. From 2013-2014, he had worked as a consultant, and briefly acted, on FX’s “The Bridge”, a TV series about a detective with undiagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome who has to solve crimes. He has also appeared in multiple documentaries including “Shameless”, a French documentary about the misunderstanding of autism in that country, but what I really wanted to know was his perspective on the big blockbuster movie, “The Accountant”, where Ben Affleck plays an Aspie anti-hero.

While he liked the “absurd, off-the-wall movie”, his biggest disappointment was that there was nobody with autism credited for the making of the movie, but rather a bunch of doctors, even the Aspies who Ben Affleck claimed helped the film for him, were uncredited. To Alex, (and to me), doctors and specialists will never work in the same way that people with actual autism, because while they may treat those with autism, they can never know what it is truly like “to be someone with autism”. He also responded to the portrayal of Affleck’s character by saying that it is a myth that people with Asperger’s are cold, and devoid of any interest in social interaction.

As far as public appearances, many of which can be seen in videos on the web, Alex has given many keynotes at conferences for ASCEND and the Autism Society of America, and even DJ’ed at an all-autism wedding. What can he give audiences that many conference speakers cannot?

“I’m very tired and fatigued from these autism conferences where it’s dry and you hear the same stories over and over again,” he commented. Alex wants to overcome the typical doldrums of the circuit by enlivening his speeches with humor and fun, “making light of really bad situations by making fun of them.” He will also use his expertise in Hollywood to go over how autism is treated in the media, and how important it is for people to understand it. In a past year with “The Accountant” and academy award nominee, “Life Animated”, I think that his message couldn’t be more relevant.

So that was my interview with Alex Plank, if you have any personal experiences with the man, leave a comment, or any stories about Wrong Planet, and if you just wanted to read my writing, again, make sure to follow the blog.

To register to attend the conference and/or to meet Alex Plank at the VIP Dinner on April 28th, go to: elsforautismglobalconf.org