Author: neilg63

Categories
All in the Mind

A Curious Exchange on Gambling

I belong to the school of thought that views happiness as a state of emotional equilibrium in which one's desires and material expectations are socially and environmentally sustainable. Should one feel unable to attain the required dose of desires in a highly competitive setting, this can indeed lead to too much misery. The broad theme I'd like to develop is that the mass entertainment industry would be more aptly named the misery industry. One does not need access to official statistics to claim that the gambling, booze and video-gaming industries, all growth sectors under New Labour, are responsible for many severe cases of emotional disturbances, in which short term thrills are soon offset by long term compulsive obsessions, bankruptcy, ill-health (lack of exercise, substance abuse) and depression.

I contacted Dr Mark Griffiths, professor of Gambling Studies at Nottingham Trent University, to enquire about the nature of his research. I had read his name in a letter to the Guardian newspaper (praising government policy) and in much Internet research on the psychological effects of gaming (either gambling or video-gaming, especially of the violent first-person shooter kind). Not surprisingly, though in true academic style erring on the side caution, Dr Griffiths works were nearly always cited by those defending the industry.

On 4/6/06 2:05 pm, "Neil Gardner" <neilgardner63@f2s.com> wrote:

Dear Mr Griffin (horror of horrors I used the wrong name and inadvertently downgraded a professor to a mere esquire),

I am writing a book about the psychosocial causes of the new generation of psychiatric labels, chiefly AS, OCD, ADHD and Tourettes. Although there may be genetic markers for the emergence of the traits associated with these new categories, I would dispute that they are primarily genetic in origin, but may develop as a result of chiefly environmental and some other physiological factors.

Childhood exposure to electronic media has increased dramatically over the last 20 years, broadly speaking the same time-frame in which these new mental disorders have gained prominence in the public psyche. I am not suggesting a direct causal link between ADHD and excessive exposure to TV or violent video games, but the latter certainly affect behaviour with dramatic effects in some vulnerable and emotionally deprived individuals. More important recent economic and technological changes have led to new patterns of socialisation with greater emphasis on presentation or smarminess.

Many contend that the entertainment industry merely responds to public demand, e.g. people like gambling, so business responds by offering gambling opportunities. Call me naive, but within 10 minutes walk of my flat in Cricklewood London are 3 William Hills, 2 Paddy Powers, 1 Gaming Centre and a Bingo Hall. Prominent adverts for gambling sites appear on billboards, buses, high-profile news Websites and in my e-mail inbox. As a Java/PHP programmer and database engineer I have been contacted to work on several gambling web sites, something I have refused. So if addiction to gambling had no environmental causes, then why would advertisers spend literally millions on attracting new gullible punters?

I note on your site:

Some of our research and consultancy is conducted in conjunction with and supported by the gaming industry as well as from academic research grants. We can offer our research services to investigate any of the areas outlined above.

Very few organisations (if any) can offer the depth of psychological knowledge on gaming that we can offer. We can carry out primary and secondary research, provide consultancy expertise, and promote staff development and training through helping staff understand the customer and their working environment and through brand development by raising their awareness regarding social responsibility.

Translated into plain English, this means "We will furnish research to support conclusions that serve the PR interests of the gaming industry" or rather if your gaming magazine/website wants some pseudo-scientific evidence to deny the psychological effects of 9 year-old kids playing Halo 2 on their X-Box 4 hours a day, we'll be happy to comply. The usual techniques deployed are:

  1. Downplay the extent ofthe problem (e.g. only late teens play "Kill Your Neighbour 3")
  2. Identify other causesof the psychological side effects associated with gaming
  3. Stress the positive aspects of gaming.
  4. Stress the choice available to consumers (e.g. X Gaming Company also produces a child-friendly ping pong simulator)
  5. Ridicule all research emphasising the adverse effects of addiction gaming
  6. Deny that it is addictive.
  7. Identify other related pursuits or games which may be addictive or psychologically damaging (e.g. fruit machines or online paedophile imagery, the former caserefers to outdated technology and the latter to a taboo almost universally condemned by public opinion, but if imagery of child sex corrupts, then surely imagery of hedonistic violence would do the same)
  8. Pepper your report withpreviously erudite terms that gaming journalists can quote to arguetheir case e.g. Many first-person shooters have been found to have a 'cathartic' effect on gamers (do a quick Google for the word cathartic and you'll find it re-quoted on thousands on gaming web sites).

I would welcome evidence that British academia is not, as would appear from your Web site, for sale.

Neil Gardner

And here is Prof. Griffith's highly professional reply:

On 5/6/06 08:10 am, Mark Griffiths <Mark.Griffiths@ntu.ac.uk> wrote:

  1. My name is Griffiths not Griffin
  2. I am both a Dr and a Professor and definitely not a Mr
  3. I have spent 20 years researching problem gambling and problem computer game playing and have never downplayed potential problems (see attached CV)
  4. Your interpretation of our unit's work couldn't be more wrong.
  5. Type in my name and addiction to computer games or gambling into Google and you will find 100s of hits
  6. Your e-mail is potentially libelous and I am passing it onto our legal department

Well readers can do the Googling for themselves and then do a little discrete research into their funding. A typical comment by the media-savvy professor is his remarks reported on the BBC Website in the aftermath of a school killing by a Manhunt-obsessed teenager:

"Research has shown those aged eight years or below do in the short-term re-enact or copy what they see on the screen.

"But there's been no longitudinal research following adolescents over a longer period, looking at how gaming violence might affect their behaviour."

This basically admits excessive or under-age gaming may cause some adverse effects, but essentially downplays their gravity and passes the buck over to parents or other potential causes. By using terms "longitudinal research" the professor belittles the fears of millions of readers unaware of what he means exactly. Now consider his piece in the British Medical Journal heralding video-games as a form of anaesthetic to distract children suffering pain. This must be an exceedingly marginal benefit, as other forms of hypnosis could also be used, e.g. imagery of a soccer match would have a similar effect in a football-obsessed child. But it convenienty allows the much-quoted researcher to once again downplay the adverse effects of obsessive video-gaming, noting merely that they are "prevalent among children and adolescents in industrialised countries" but without considering the huge disparities in prevalence within the industrialised world, e.g. Compare the prevalence of video game addiction in the UK or Denmark with that in Italy or Spain.

Indeed the CV Prof. Griffiths kindly sent me says it all:

GRANTS/CONSULTANCIES AWARDED

Dec 97 (BMG)£1500Effects of violent video games
Jan 98 (Interlotto)£5000Social impact of online lotteries
Mar 99 (AELLE)£2500Lottery addiction in Europe
Aug 99 (Action 2000)£500Millennium Bug Apathy
May 02 (British Academy)£5000Online multi-player computer game playing
Oct 02 (British Academy)£5000Computer game playing and time loss
Dec 02 (Intel)£1000Online computer game playing/spatial rotation
Feb 03 (British Academy)£5000Online computer game playing/addiction
Mar 03 (Centre for Ludomania)£1500Technology and gambling
July 03 (British Academy)£5000Aggression in slot machine playing
Oct 03 (RIGT)£45000Psychology of Internet gambling
Dec 03 (Herbert Smith)£1500Internet gambling
Apr 04 (Camelot PLC)£30000International Gaming Research Unit (Core funding)
May 04 (UQAM)$2500Slot machine gambling/Interactive technologies
July 04 (RIGT)£16000Coping skills in problem gamblers
Sept 04 (888.com)£1500Transferable skills in poker
Dec 04 (Paddy Power)£8500Social responsibility in Online Gambling
Jan 05 (Wace Morgan)Gambling addiction (Case study research court reports)
Jan 05 (Claude Hornby Cox)£1500Gambling addiction (Case study research court reports)
June 05 (Norwegian Government)£2000Gambling addiction
Jul 05 (Nat Lott Commission)£10000National adolescent gambling prevalence study
Aug 05 (Ultimate Poker)£3500Online poker identities
Nov 05 (Norwegian Government)£4000Slot machie addiction in Europe
Jan 06 (RIGT)£10000GamAid/GamStop evalution
Jan 06 (ALC)£8000PlaySphere evaluation
Feb 06 (RIGT)£240000Adolescent gambling (with Tacade)

Highlighted are organisations that are either in the gaming industry or spurious regulatory and research institutions funded by the gaming industry (e.g. RIGT, Resposnibility In Gambling Trust). It may seem odd for those of us who live in the real world that Prof. Griffiths should dedicate so much time to investigating the dangers of slot machines, when other more modern technologies pose a much more imminent danger to the psyche of millions of young people today. The very fact that such individuals are heralded as experts should ring alarm bells.

For fear of stating the obvious here is my reply:

On 5/6/06 11:18 pm, "Neil Gardner" <neilgardner63@f2s.com> wrote:

Dear Dr Griffiths,

Thanks you for CV and in particular for the list of grants you have received. I am intrigued as to why you would want to seek libel action against an e-mail? In my experience a person would only seek such action if a) they fear losing credibility (and why would you if are prepared to defend your findings intellectually) b) they are being smeared by the mass media. The second option hardly applies. Why not just let your work stand on its merits and let others investigate the funding and bias of your research?

I clearly believe that certain sections of the entertainment industry are at least in part responsible for a good deal of misery and psychological problems. But I would hardly expect the industry itself to fund research that would severely restrict its operations. What would you say if our opinions on the safety of tobacco were informed by research co-sponsored by tobacco multinationals or if the safety of methylphenidate were evaluated by research funded by GSK? (and I don't even support a smoking ban - as a rule I'd regulate big business rather than private individuals)

(1) My name is Griffiths not Griffin
(2) I am both a Dr and a Professor and definitely not a Mr

Is that of any great importance?

BTW did you write a letter to Guardian a few weeks backs commending the government on its new Gambling Regulation Act with key terms such as "responsible gambling" and stressing new restrictions on fruit machines (which IMHO is an extremely marginal problem)?

You may disagree with my assessments, but please don't libel me. The very action, as any psychologist should know, is a sign of weakness.

Categories
All in the Mind

Who Needs Psychiatry?

Most human beings have undergone moments of emotional disturbance and have at times engaged in unwise and irrational behaviour due to inexperience, extreme stress or intoxication. Our unconscious may have created sensory illusions, echoes of past ordeals. Many of us have felt the need to withdraw, if only temporarily, in a world of our own. A sense of insecurity, guilt or just personal fascination can lead us to obsess with actions, issues or objects. We may even sink into a mire of introspective self-worthlessness, known to others as depression. In some of us these tendencies may prevent us from leading our lives in a way that others may consider normal or functional.

If somebody behaves in a dysfunctionally irrational way, there may be two kinds of explanations. The first, and intuitively most obvious, is that something out there, whether a recent occurrence or a distant childhood memory, has altered his or her state of mind. Alternatively the brain itself could be defective. It's not quite that simple because drugs, medicines and food can change our metabolism and alter our mood. More to the point our brains rewire in response to environmental changes, especially during our formative years, but by and large we may seek either psycho-social (also known as environmental) or neurological causes of our troubles. Neither psychology nor neurology can exist in isolation. The former deals with the software and the latter with the hardware, which unlike computer hardware, may be subject to a process of continuous adaptation known as neuroplasticity.

Some behaviours are not only subjectively dysfunctional or culturally inappropriate, but immoral and dangerous to the rest of the community, e.g. If a person became convinced that all red-haired men were evil and proceeded to murder all such individuals in his neighbourhood, it would be perfectly correct to detain the perpetrator and thus protect the wider community. Psychologists may wonder what traumatic events caused the murderer to commit these heinous acts and neurologists may wonder if his brain had an inherent defect or had been afflicted by a physiological disease.

A short definition of psychiatry would be the study of pathological behavioural patterns or according to the Free Online Dictionary, the branch of medicine that deals with the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental and emotional disorders. A psychiatrist treats an aberrant behaviour as a disease. A complex of associated behaviours is then classified as a disorder. A psychiatric diagnosis is thus nothing more than a synopsis, albeit in erudite language, of observed symptoms, indeed the word clinical often preceding labels such as depression means just involving or based on direct observation of the patient. Surprisingly few people labelled with behavioural disorders have had their clinical diagnosis confirmed by PET or fMRI brain scans, but if any abnormalities were detected only an experienced neurologist would be able to make sense of the data. Nobody receives a psychiatric diagnosis based on the results of a brain scan and yet confusingly many victims of traumatic brain injuries and epilepsy manifesting conspicuous deficiencies in parts of the cerebral cortex allegedly responsible for reasoning and socialisation lead very successful lives free of psychotic episodes.

Psychoactive drugs rightly attract a great deal of controversy, but surely if they did help alleviate the worst symptoms of emotional distress and prevent extreme antisocial behaviours, the professional category responsible for their administration would be psycho-pharmacology.

Some see psychiatrists as the last line of defence when other law enforcement and social care professionals cannot deal with extremely abusive, dangerous or self-destructive behaviour. Psychiatry differs from psychology in defining aberrant behavioural patterns as endogenous diseases, which may have environmental triggers but are nonetheless inherent to the affected individual. Many parents and other close relatives go along with the psychiatric model because it absolves them of all responsibility. Schools, social services, police, state and corporate entities all tend towards psychiatric explanations for the same basic reason.

Don't Blame the Parents

This has long been the rallying cry of the burgeoning mental health industry, myriad charities, public and private sector institutions very much in the public limelight. Whenever anti-psychiatry raises its dissenting head, its advocates are vilified and often likened with Robert D Laing, and accused often in highly emotive language, of blaming parents. This misses three essential points:

  • Parents are only part of a child's environment and thus cannot be blamed for numerous other factors such as heightened social competition, mass consumerism, peer pressure, pervasive media etc.
  • Parents may themselves be victims of childhood neglect and adult stress, with a serious sense of inferiority, social alienation or addiction to hedonistic pursuits such as gambling.
  • If we stress the psycho-social causes of personal problems rather than endogenous biological causes, parents, and other close relatives and friends, have a greater role to play in rehabilitation. Many become depressed or experience psychotic episodes precisely because they lack full integration with their family and community. Even where neglectful or abusive parents are a large part of the problem, they may, except in the most extreme cases of abuse, be part of the solution.

So let's abolish psychiatry altogether. In some cases we may find answers in neuroscience, but in most we'd better take a good look at each other and wonder what we as individuals or as a society have done wrong to make an increasing number of us go insane.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Managing Public Opinion

The Strange Case of Twelve Islamophobic Cartoons

Over the last week the publication of a cartoon portraying the prophet Mohamed as a terrorist has dominated the Western European media sparking a phoney debate about freedom of expression from the very people who misled us about the recent invasion of Iraq. On one side we have the ultra-PC brigade preaching the virtues of tolerance and feigning sympathy with the Islamic community. On the other we have a motley crew of Guardian-reading libertarians, a few even prepared to support the publication of the offending cartoon, others just defending the theoretical right to do so. While it may be reasonably argued that propaganda and disinformation can have murderous consequences, static cartoons hardly constitute the main causes of ethno-religious intolerance. Long before the appearance of this sketch Fox News, Sky News, the BBC and CNN had through slightly more subtle means persuaded millions that we face a growing terrorist threat from Islamic extremists. The Danish cartoon, assuming its author hailed from that land, merely caricatured mainstream US and UK propaganda, daring to portray graphically what journalists had refrained from stating explicitly.

As rights cannot exist without responsibilities, freedom of expression cannot thrive without a culture of mutual respect devoid of intimidation and emotional blackmail. It is quite possible to challenge orthodoxy on any subject in a cool, calm and collected way. If we believe either moral or scientific right is on our side, then surely any position is intellectually admissible. Whether sexual orientation is genetically determined is a matter of science. Whether some sexual orientations may be deemed immoral are matters of ethics that tend to evolve gradually and belong to a set of shared values. The trouble is sometimes scientific truth can alter our ethical worldview and our moral outlook can prejudice our interpretation of science. If it could be proven that genes more common in one ethnic group were responsible for antisocial behaviour, racists could cite science to justify discrimination, while others may seize on such data to redefine antisocial behaviour.

Sadly we don't live in a hypothetical Voltairean debating society where all personal perspectives are afforded equal opportunities of expression. Never has so much psychosocial power been vested in so few media organisations, controlled inevitably by a handful of corporate and state entities. They have the power to set the agenda, swing moods and whip up fear, almost unparalleled in history. One can give a totally misleading account of a situation simply by omitting or circumventing a few key facts, e.g. journalists may discuss the Iraqi election results without considering how much, if any, control the winning candidates will have over their country's resources. Broadcasters may also suggest the culpability of a whole ethno-religious group simply by showing scenes of jubilation in the aftermath of a brutal terrorist attack. Pundits may set the limits of permissible debate by misrepresenting unacceptable views and defining them as extremist, fundamentalist, dangerous or hateful.

Thus we are faced with a false debate. Should we support the publication of undeniably offensive picture and denounce Islamic fundamentalists burning the embassies of Scandinavian countries or should we join the chorus of media pundits urging further restrictions on free speech to protect our tolerant multiracial society? British politicians and newspapers can then be portrayed as beacons of common sense and moderation by their refusal to bow to either concocted extreme.

Intellectual freedom has never been the same as abstract freedom of expression. All viable societies have some form of social etiquette. A Finn would do well to cover himself appropriately when bathing at a public pool on holiday in Egypt. Likewise an Egyptian tourist should not complain if confronted with mixed gender nudity in a Finnish sauna. When in Rome... The Danish cartoon may incite little more than a chuckle from a reader sympathetic with the official UK/US line. Most are exposed to countless hours of gore, soft porn and slapstick comedy on TV, most of which is either fallacious or deeply prejudiced. Few British teenagers have seen the offending images, but millions have been exposed to countless hours of gratuitous interactive violence and a constant diet of self-righteous pro-war propaganda. Many may believe US and UK troops represent a force for progress in the Middle East, but prefer not to reconcile their rulers' military strategy with hard economic facts. Overt expressions of hatred usually backfire. They convince nobody, but those who have already been thoroughly brainwashed through years of insidious conditioning. Suppose I wanted to spoil the reputation of a colleague. Merely engaging in childish pranks that others could easily discover would only work in a climate of contempt for the targeted person. A more rational, and dare I say, common approach would be to discretely spread rumours or set a bait for your rival to rise to, while pretending all along to be his friend.

A widespread misconception is that power elites hate specific subsets of the population, whether ethnic groups, religions, classes, genders or followers of alternative lifestyles. In truth their sole concern is the maintenance of power and the stability of the infrastructure that keeps it in place. Historically ruling classes have engendered loyalty through nationalism and religion, affording privileges to sections of the working class whose affiliation suits their medium-term needs best. While many in the armed forces may have been conditioned to believe they are fighting for God, Queen and Country, the real elite owes no allegiance to an omnipresent deity or the citizens of their land and only rely on heads of states as temporary figureheads often representing long-superseded notional entities whose emotive importance lives on in the collective psyche. The emergence of supranationalism, often called globalisation, has changed the rules. While millions of ordinary British citizens perished in the industrial revolution and conquest of new lands, they were nonetheless afforded privileged status over rival ethnicities. As the British population grew rapidly, their rulers could offer them plenty of new terrain to exploit and tap resources from the colonies. Subgroups with an incomplete allegiance to the great imperial project, such as the Irish, were often disadvantaged, but the ruling class merely exploited their subjects as vanguard forces in a long-term project of global domination.

So why should the elite care if we subscribe to traditional Islamic values or the liberal values of 1970s Western Europe? Do they mind if we worship pop idols or Mohamed or if we believe homosexuality is a positively cool genetic trait or a deviant behaviour? The truth is they don't care, but are quite happy to manipulate our strongly held views on these subjects to destabilise society and frighten us into accepting yet more control over our lives. The same forces that have consistently destabilised the Middle East to secure control of oil there, also manipulate our attitude to Islam, by promoting migration and pendantic political correctness, and simultaneously incite anti-Western feeling in much of Islamic world. The dark forces of the military-industrial complex that would dearly like to seize control of Iranian oil and gas reserves before China gets its greedy hands on too much of it must be rejoicing at scenes of enraged Middle Easterners burning the embassies of Scandinavian countries. First it deflects attention from the true centres of imperial power and second it focuses attention on a peripheral issue of purely emotional significance. Would you rather your neighbour make the odd rude joke about your lifestyle or greet you politely every day while plotting to have you evicted, made redundant and tortured?

People throughout the Islamic world have every right to boycott Western good to express their anger about Western imperialism, but why target Danish, Norwegian and French goods? Why not target US and UK banks?

This whole debacle is above all a media event. The original series of a dozen cartoons appeared in September 2005, but the story only exploded onto the international scene in January 2006. Surely some Muslims living in Denmark would have been alerted to its existence, but apparently initial reactions were muted. Just as Jack Straw can claim the moral high ground by voicing his disapproval of the cartoons, other pundits can join the chorus condemning flag-burning Islamic fundamentalists, with apparently nobody caring who controls resources in their countries. Presumably it's okay for London's Metropolitan Police to shoot dead a Brazilian electrician suspected of being an Islamic terrorist. It's fine to detain without evidence British citizens suspected of sympathising with alleged terrorists. It's also perfectly normal to spend hours every day immersed in a virtual world of gun battles. But if one breaks absurd rules of political correctness, whether defined as Islamophobia or homophobia, then one can only expect instant police action and mass demonstrations orchestrated by media barons.

Categories
All in the Mind

Today’s Hate Hour

"Today we're dedicating our hate hour to an evil man, suffering from a chronic psychopathic sexual disorder. He deserves only contempt and should bury himself under the nearest rock. This man was caught viewing paedophiliac images on the Internet. We don't have any evidence linking him to real-life sex crimes, but are in no doubt that anyone casting their malevolent eyes on images deemed paedophiliac will sooner or later commit such a crime. It is imperative that we apply the preventive principle to avert any repetition of the Soham murders. Indeed as a precaution all teachers who have not been certified as "non-paedophliac" should be witch-hunted out of schools."

This is more or less the tone of media coverage over the Paul Reeve case. As soon as the key terms "child pornography" and "Internet" are mentioned in the same breath, we suspend critical analysis. These key words represent the ultimate evil and any measures, however draconian, should be taken to protect our children from sad depressed lonesome weirdoes glaring at pixelated renditions of underage sex. How could anyone sink to such extremes of depravity and how could anyone forgive such perverts? These are questions we are asked to address.

No doubt in the coming weeks Channel 4's hate season will feature a documentary on a purported paedophile gene, causing some chemical imbalance and remedied by a new variant of Risperidone or Zyprexa. Next we'll hear calls for early intervention. I've already seen posters depicting a teenage male baby sitter and a caption suggesting he's a paedophile. Maybe some of your neighbours are closet paedophiles. Go on, spy on your neighbours, you know just in case!

Then the omnipresence of depravity dawned on me. If child pornography is such a unique evil (and definitions please, lest the police sequestrate photographs of my three year-old daughter playing on the beach), then why not arrest the director general of Channel 5? In depressed moments late at night I have occasionally briefly switched over to this channel, now available to most TV sets in the UK. My random sample would indicate a certain obsession with documentaries on the porn industry including footage of a famous North American porn star claimed to be under 16. Next why not arrest the owners of Wanadoo Internet or the predecessors Freeserve? When I had an account with this ISP and was stupid enough to use Outlook Express with inline images enabled (I've since switched to Firefox and Thunderbird on Linux with most spam pre-filtered into my online spam folder), I was deluged with spam. First it was Prozac, then Viagra spelt in numerous creative combinations of comparable characters, then adult sites, farmyard sex and worse, which I personally find exceedingly distasteful. I tried to delete these unwanted HTML-enhanced e-mails, but often images would briefly appear on my screen. These bitmaps are actually stored in your temporary Internet cache, even if you delete them straight away. I used filters and disabled images, but eventually dumped Freeserve, frustrated that some genuine e-mails had been blocked. Many porn sites can be accessed within two clicks from many high-profile news and sports sites. Just click on any link to a gambling site and chances are it will sport a link to an adult site, which in turn will cater for all tastes, mature, hetero, homo, bi, teen and early-teen and not quite teen yet. With all the media outrage over kiddie porn you'd expect the government to clamp down on the porn industry, but that's not quite the case. In 2004 the UK government granted its friends in the entertainment business licences for the provision of adult content, a euphemism for hardcore anal, oral and multiple-orifice frollicking, on 3G phones and terrestrial digital TV.

That child sex abuse can have severe long-term psychological implications is beyond dispute. It seem a bitter irony that the same establishment promotes the bio-genetic model for personality disorders like schizophrenia rather than looking at environmental factors closer to home, despite a wealth of evidence linking child abuse in various guises with psychosis later in life. But there must be a distinction between gaining pleasure from viewing or interacting with virtual reproductions of depravity and committing such acts. I'd argue that exposure to media trivialising or desensitising us to various forms of depravity, be it sexual abuse or physical harm, does make us more likely to commit such acts in real life, but only if we are otherwise psychologically unstable and believe we can get away with it, i.e. there are no counteracting social forces. Thus it is argued that people can play first-person shooters six hours a day, but never dream of killing in real life. This begs the question as to why such games need to feature blood-soaked murder, rather than other pursuits that test your hand-eye co-ordination and strategic skills. If you like target-practice, you need not fantasise targeting a human being, you can play darts instead.

Likewise one can consume large quantities of porn, of dubious taste and realism, perfectly legally. Rape of over 16 year-olds is still, as far as I can tell, a crime in this country. I suppose rape of an under-16 year-old is a more severe crime, but rape of anyone is a crime nonetheless. Besides promoting the notion that anyone not particpating recreational sex at least twice a week is erotically deprived in need of more partners, sex toys or drugs, the media encourages everyone, especially women, to flirt proactively and be obsessed with their body image so they attract the right calibre of partners. So what happens if someone fails in the shagging race and cannot control his libido, but is exposed to perfectly legal media telling him both gang bangs and first-person shooting are positively cool. So if kiddie porn promotes child abuse, then all pornography promotes rape. And if you think all legal pornography portrays acts between consenting adults, think again! Much shows re-enactments of unrequested penetration with the victim first repelling her assailant and then revelling in it.

We are supposed to believe that someone who has not only been cautioned by Police for the crime of viewing a depravity and admitted such a caution to his employers, would overstep the mark by abusing his position as a PE teacher by actually fondling teenage students in a sexual way! Suppose Mr Reeve had been a Manhunt addict instead, would he want to kill his students? I don't think the grotesque violence portrayed in Manhunt would help stabilise any psychological weaknesses he may have had, but 99.9% of teachers would be in no doubt what constitutes immoral behaviour in a changing room and most enlightened enough to realise that nudity is not, per se, sexual. The harsh reality is that it's getting harder to recruit teachers who can deal with the level of intimidation and defiance exhibited by many students in UK secondary schools and teachers are increasingly targets of false accusations. Indeed in some cases the alleged victims, and we're talking about 14 and 15 year-old girls here, have taken the initiative on male teachers on whom they have a crush, encouraged by gossip in girly mags, peer pressure and fantasies of wealthy boyfriends.

Anyway I'm off to the police to hand myself in as a potential serial killer for having endured "The Terminator II" during a long-distance bus journey. I will then ask to be placed on the sex offenders' register for having viewed multiple-orifice copulations in Playboy at the tender age of 14. I haven't raped or killed anyone yet, but you know just in case!

Categories
Power Dynamics

Multiculturalism would be a good idea

To paraphrase Gandhi "Multiculturalism would be a good idea".

Cultural diversity is a wonderful idea and as a speaker of 5 languages with bilingual kids, as someone who's been the sole white guy in a provincial Zambian town, the sole non-Indian in a suburban Delhi apartment block, steered clear of gringos during a trek across Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile and Argentina and spoke Italian habitually for over 8 years in Italy, I might understand real multiculturalism better than most.

Nonetheless, I'm aware many would disagree. They hate cultural diversity, are instinctively intolerant of backward peoples who wish to retain their time-honoured customs, vernaculars, religions, worldviews and mores. Why do the French still insist on speaking French or the Brits still talk in feet and inches, don't they know we've all gone decimal now?. Many in the chattering classes who bleat about diversity and equality (ever heard of diversity training for the police?) are often the same people who'd like to ban smacking in the home and intervene abroad to change sexual customs. For them ethnic diversity means choosing between an Indian and Italian restaurant or between Reggae and Salsa music.

They think we should all boogey to the same international beat, shop at the same Walmart or Tescos, buy the same DVD movies, video games, watch the same set of TV programmes, attend the same business management courses, adapt to the same form of groupthink conformism and even use the same operating system with the same Office package or go on the same package tour holidays, drive the same cars, in short aspire to the same lifestyle. Parents who don't embrace mass-marketed Anglo-American world culture in favour of alternative or more traditional values are often blamed if their kids are bullied at school.

The globalist agenda is antithetical to the very notion of cultural diversity. By multiculturalism they do not mean a patchwork of diverse cultural groups living harmoniously side by side, but a new world order in which a global supranationalism supplants all other mini-nationalisms. The new ways hardly represent a potpourri of Bangladeshi, Kenyan, Chinese and Bolivian culture with an admixture of French and Russian, they reflect a new culture promoted a planet-wide leviathan steamrollering traditional values everywhere.

Yeah, why not immerse yourself in US junk culture at Disneyland Paris? Why not give Iraqi police officers sexual diversity training? Why not teach Iranians the wonders of business-friendly liberal democracy?

As Joe Strummer of the late 1970s punk group, The Clash, sang, in one of his more thoughtful phases, "I'll salute the New Wave and I hope nobody escapes

Categories
All in the Mind

We Care about those who disagree

Samantha Stasy is a loyal Labour MP who genuinely cares about the physical, emotional and mental wellbeing of her constituents. Every week she holds a surgery providing local electors with a forum in which to air their grievances. "I believe it is essential to stay in touch with our electors, listen carefully and help them overcome their problems or refer them to professionals who can."

Samantha: "Hello, Mrs Contrary, I've read your e-mail, taken on board all your comments and fully sympathise with your predicament."

Mary Contrary: "Let me explain my disagreements with your government and your voting record."

Samantha: "I'd love to discuss the hard decisions that we as politicians have to take and fully respect your opinions, but I think I know where you're coming from. I joined CND as a student myself back in the 1980s, attended a few SWP meetings and went on my fair share of demos. At the time I genuinely believed in the righteousness of the cause, but with help and support over the years I've begun to see the error of my ways."

Mary Contrary: "Don't you think that voting for an invasion that has caused at least 100,000 deaths and was as any rational analyst would conclude motivated by oil is one mistake too far?"

Samantha: "I must say conspiracy theories are getting wilder these days. I voted to end a brutal dictatorship and allow the Iraqi people to benefit from the democracy we take for granted."

Mary Contrary: "What about oil?"

Samantha: "This seems to be a common theme among the antiwar brigade. Yes, we hope that the Iraqi oil industry can return to its previous levels of efficiency in line with international environmental regulations, and are putting in place an economic framework in which ordinary Iraqis can benefit from resources in their own land."

Mary Contrary: "Ms Stasy. I don't need to hear this nonsense. You know all oil proceeds pay off debts that Iraq built up in the 1980s and in practice go straight into the coffers of US and Israeli multinationals with lucrative reconstruction contracts."

Samantha pauses to take notes 'Patient may suffer from mild form of antisemitism, consider holocaust awarenesss training'.

Samantha: "The mind boggles. I'll have to check out the exact facts about which contractors are responsible for the reconstruction of Iraq, but I'd compare the current situation with post-war Germany. There we had to temporarily take over some German institutions in a process of denazification, essential in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Only last week a constituent whose grandparents perished in this genocide lamented the lack of awareness in the young population today of these unspeakable crimes against humanity."

Mary Contrary: "Don't you think it's cheap to use the Nazi holocaust to justify crimes committed by your government today? We oppose all tyrannical regimes!"

Samantha: "Oh well, that's what the pacifists said in the run-up to the Second World War. Had we listened to them, we'd enjoy none of the freedoms we take for granted today and you and I might not be talking in this surgery today!".

Mary Contrary: "Look if anyone is appeasing tyranny and genocide, it's not us! It's you guys who support the Bush Junta."

Samantha: "Mary, you seem to be getting paranoid about tyranny in this country. All we want is to work closely with our international partners, NGOs and businesses to bring about a fairer more caring society. We know it's tough and there's a lot of disinformation, conspiracy theories and hate speech on the Internet. Listen there's a group that meets locally for people like yourself who suffer from paranoid delusions. A good friend of mine, Dr Hamish Thotpol, runs the group. Members are encouraged to air their grievances and take part in constructive acts of benevolence, e.g. they organised a bus to the Make Poverty History concert in conjunction with Nokia. They also offer help and support with various therapeutic solutions to make you feel better about yourself!"

Mary Contrary: "Are you suggesting anyone who disagrees with your party line is mentally ill?"

Samantha: "No not at all, just that when we feel depressed about society and paranoid about all these hidden agendas from the likes of John Pilger, we might benefit from talking with professionals who can help us refocus our minds on the things that really matter, like our families, jobs and independent life."

Mary Contrary: "Stalinist b###h!"

Samantha: "I'm terribly sorry I couldn't help you."

Ms Stasy takes a note of Samantha's contact details and calls the local mental health monitoring unit. "Hello, one of my constituents is suffering from an acute form of Paranoid Conspiracy Theory Disorder and I feel she may benefit from a visit from a community psychiatric counsellor. I've recorded our conversation and will forward all correspondence."

"Oh, PCTD. Any hint of antisemitism" asked the friendly helpdesk assistant.

"She did mention Israel in a negative light" the Member of Parliament warned.

"Sounds ominous. And what about oil?" enquired the youthful psychiatric services support consultant, readjusting her headset in a Delhi-based call centre.

"Yes, she seems obsessed with the subject!" remarked Ms Stasy.

The call centre operator confidently uttered her well-rehearsed line "Thank you for passing on this information, Ms Stasy, we'll see what we can do to help."

Categories
All in the Mind

The Arbitrary Extension of the Autistic Spectrum

Over the last twenty years we have witnessed a semantic shift in the concepts of autism and the wider autistic spectrum. The former may assume three broad definitions:

  1. A mental condition devoid of a theory of mind with which to relate to other human beings. In this sense we all start life in an autistic state and gradually develop progressively more advanced theories of mind. Early attachment with one's primary care-giver and bonding with real-world friends clearly play a crucial role. However, alienation, severe depression and other traumatic events may cause individuals to regress to a more autistic state.
  2. A severe pervasive communication disorder affecting the early progress of key developmental milestones, in which an individual fails to empathise with or respond emotionally to other human beings as members of the same species or community. It is accompanied by a severe intellectual handicap in 70% to 80% of cases. This kind of classic Kanner's autism affects a very small minority of children. However, recently we have seen a rise in regressive autism, in which children develop normally for the first 24 to 48 months and then regress into an autistic state (as per definition 1). In some cases regression has been known to occur at even later stages, however, it is reasonable to conclude that such a deterioration in a person's emotional and social intelligence stems from an underlying neurobiological abnormality. Even if we include the latter group the percentage, according to statistics furnished by the National Autistic Society, of people with high-functioning or low-functioning autism does not exceed 0.2% of the UK population. This is admittedly higher than official autism rates in many other European countries, but individuals with such severe impairments would be classified as in some way learning disabled in all countries with advanced health and social services.
  3. A pervasive personality disorder affecting socialising patterns often accompanied by obsessive interest in a narrow range of circumscribed subjects, relative lack of empathy, relatively poor soft skills, tendency to work alone rather than as a team player, lack of expressiveness in one's body language, idiosyncratic mannerisms, depression, hypersensitivity to sensory inputs etc.. This spectrum usually includes Asperger's Syndrome and Semantic Pragmatic Disorder, but is often extended to include even vaguer labels such as ADHD, Tourettes, Social Anxiety Disorder and schizophrenia. We cannot ignore the conspicuous fact that numerous individuals have been diagnosed with two or more of these labels at different times in their lives. Unlike autistics as per definition 2 people in this category have all reached essential developmental milestones within the normal range. They are thinking, talking, emotionally responsive human beings whose behavioural traits blend into the mainstream. Indeed many question whether the behavioural traits associated with these labels should be considered in any way pathological, and thus worthy of treatment, at all.

As someone who has been diagnosed with AS myself, I know from personal experience that the psychological problems that lead affected individuals or their close relatives to seek diagnosis are very real. Many live very isolated lives coping with long-term unemployment and extreme social alienation. Any caring society should reach out to such vulnerable people. However, the growing autism and Asperger's support sector is unanimous in concluding that:

  1. People with personality disorders as per definition 3 belong to the newfangled autistic spectrum.
  2. The underlying cause of their problems is neurobiological, i.e. They have different brains.

These assertions are recycled in countless books, magazine articles, medical abstracts and Web sites, despite the fact hardly any of the 380,000 (according to NAS statistics) people diagnosed with AS have ever had a PET or fMRI scan. The evidence cited to support the theory that AS-individuals have a clearly identifiable brain structure different from that of so-called neurotypicals is at best fragmentary and inconsistent, but more important refers in most cases to genuine autistics (HFA or LFA). They also fail to explain how some individuals have recovered emotionally and socially from severe traumatic brain injuries or account for the latest research into the emerging field of neuroplasticity, which shows how the frontal cortex regularly rewires itself in response to environmental stimuli. Thus it should not surprise us if individuals with a given set of behavioural traits yield analogous activation patterns in the orbito-frontal cortex during an fMRI scan, as results for the same individual have been shown to vary in response to mood and recent personal experiences.

Heterogeneity of AS-diagnosed Individuals

Before we can generalise the behavioural or alleged neurological differences associated with Asperger's individuals, we need to ask whether they form a homogeneous group in any meaningful sense. Most affected individuals are diagnosed on the basis of clinical observation. I know of one specific instance in which an individual was diagnosed after a single one-hour session. Increasingly diagnosticians consider AS to be the high-end of the autistic spectrum, so a sizable number of individuals, who would previously be labelled as HFA or regressive autistics, are labelled AS because they can talk.

Misdiagnosis: The Case of Joe

As a community support worker in a project aiming to provide individuals with a learning disability with some work experience, I came into contact with a young man, who I will call Joe to respect his confidentiality. At the time I had recently been diagnosed with AS myself and was particularly keen to develop a rapport with Joe. His speech was limited and greatly simplified, he seemed relatively oblivious to conversations going on around him, his expressions of key social concepts were extremely simplified (e.g. “My dad builds bad houses†meant "my father is an architect whose work may have been criticised"). Admittedly he had islets of ability, notably in trains and aeroplanes, but at the age of 23 was for all intents and purposes illiterate and despite the best efforts of numerous special education teachers and social workers he had only very basic numeracy. He could, however, perform some tasks, such as working a badge-making machine, extremely well and had showed interest in sealife and dry-stone dyking. However, sometimes his support workers would mislead others by overstating his abilities, e.g. He had attended an electronics course at a local college and had learned to solder components onto a printed circuit board, but had no idea of the functions and relationships of the components. His masterpiece exhibited by an eager support worker was little more than a plastic board with a neat artistically arranged pattern of transistors and resistors. Joe required 24 hour support and showed no interest at all in socialising with or even remembering the names of colleagues. How could such a person be diagnosed with AS and placed in the same category as nerdish university professors or sufferers of social anxiety?

I later learned more of Joe's background. He had apparently regressed rapidly from the age of seven and had suffered repeated epileptic convulsions as a teenager. For many years he would not talk at all. I know nothing of his medical history, but it is to be assumed that he had been administered barbiturates and benzodiazepines with side effects known to induce severe retardation.

It is thus quite possible to select a group of AS-diagnosed individuals with severe emotional deficits for fMRI screening and then conclude, erroneously IMHO, that others with apparently less severe symptoms, conform to the same neurological pattern.

Two Very Different Phenomena

I believe we are faced with two very different phenomena, whose similarities are only apparent on the basis of cursory clinical observation.

  1. Neurobiological autism, i.e. Caused by a fundamental brain abnormality. It should be stressed that there is an enormous variation within this group and many genuine autistics are not only talented, but have progressed to write books and lead successful careers (Donna Williams and Temple Grandin come to mind). Also as the onset of autistic behaviour varies considerably there are likely to be many subgroups with different aetiologies, e.g. regressive or late onset autistics are less likely to have an inherent genetic defect.
  2. Psychological disturbance of culturally defined normal emotional and social development: This encompasses by far the largest group of people classified within the broad autistic spectrum. The associated idiosyncratic behavioural traits, labelled autistic, AS, ADHD etc.., result from a complex interaction with environmental, somatic and psychological influences.

Possible Causes of Psychological Asperger's

For want of a better term I will stick with the label Asperger's, a loose term for people exhibiting the behavioural traits outlined in the DSM-IV. At this stage it should be noted that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is a publication of the American Psychiatric Association, but is a common reference in a number of other countries, notably the Anglo-Saxon World (UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and regions with close to the Anglo-Saxon model such as Scandinavia. AS entered the DSM at the same time as ADHD and diagnosis only became common in the mid to late 1990s following considerable media exposure by various advocacy groups. Many psychologists have already questioned the validity of ADHD as a psychiatric label. Others have long challenged the very concept or neurobiological origins of schizophrenia or more recent constructs such as bipolar disorder. AS-diagnosed individuals cover a wide spectrum of behavioural traits that clearly overlap with those associated with other psychiatric labels.

It is important to distinguish somatic and minor neurological adaptation that may affect an individual's sensory perception or relative ability to perform complex tasks such as playing ball games, dancing or multitasking in an environment with conflicting sensory input on one hand, from fundamental neurological difference that completely inhibit a person's ability to form relationships, communicate or relate to other people in a characteristically human way. E.g. Many visually impaired people suffer forms of social alienation, but nobody would suggest that blindness in itself stops people from forming meaningful human relationships or causes clinical depression. The latter symptoms arise because normal social interaction is inhibited by a sensory impairment. Likewise a person who has suffered severe facial burns is expected to take time to adapt psychologically to people's duplicitous reactions to their disfigurement. As long as these differences are clearly identifiable and labelled as disabilities, other people can learn to compensate and often overcompensate.

  1. Dyspraxia:Many, but by no means all, AS-diagnosed people have various degrees of dyspraxia, namely a deficiency in hand-eye co-ordination, a slightly delayed reaction time or just plain clumsiness. This is likely to have a neurobiological basis. As a child I tried to join in football games, but simply kept missing the ball. At the time I put this down to a weak left eye, but obviously some people have better fine-motor co-ordination than others in the same way as some are more musically talented than others, but we'd only define people with a severe motor impairment as in any way disabled. Also only a minority of dyspraxics would meet the diagnostic criteria for AS. We may merely state that there is a relatively high correlation between dyspraxia and AS. Dyspraxia affects our ability to participate fully culturally important pursuits such as ball games and dancing, making us appear uncool and choose other more individual pursuits, isolating ourselves from a key part of mainstream social life and depriving us of opportunities to learn team-playing techniques so important in today's socially competitive society.
  2. Minor Disfigurements: Many AS-diagnosed people have minor aesthetic disfigurements, severe teenage acne, eating disorders etc.. IMHO AS-like behavioural traits often develop as a reaction to social rejection or an inferiority complex.
  3. Cultural Mismatch: A very large proportion of the AS-diagnosed individuals I have met are in some way culturally mismatched, i.e. come from a family background somehow out of tune with the prevailing culture in their neighbourhood or school. Of fifteen adults who regularly attend the Edinburgh group, at least two attended private schools and thus have atypical accents for their locale, three (including myself) moved to the area recently from elsewhere in the UK, one moved from Germany and was diagnosed here (and seems intent on converting some of us to his brand of Christianity), most of the rest come from middle class backgrounds. Indeed I'd say only 3 or 4 come from ordinary working class backgrounds at all, who incidentally tend to be the least vocal at meetings. IMHO AS-like behavioural traits tend to develop as a reaction to cultural alienation in the absence of a strong sense of community. This may explain why relatively few members of non-white ethnic minorities have been diagnosed with AS. I have come into a contact with a Hong-Kong born, ethnically Chinese, young man diagnosed with AS, but his cultural affiliation is most definitely Anglo-American.
  4. Modern Lifestyle: AS-like behaviour is only identifiable in regions that have adopted a high-consumption economic model in which most people are employed in the tertiary sector with a prolonged adolescence and a high percentage of young adults attending further education. In regions where most people are involved in the primary or secondary sectors (farming or extraction and crafts or production) the relative social handicaps associated with AS are neither apparent nor considered pathological. Some people are considered to have different characters with different relative strengths and weaknesses. We cannot ignore the psychological effects of radical cultural changes in the space of a few generations. Only a generation ago, the whole media universe (TV, video-games, computers, mobile phones etc.) played a relatively peripheral role in the development of imagination, creative play and social relationships. The diagnosis of a new series of personality disorders in children and adolescents has coincided with a significant rise in exposure to a virtual world of electronic media and a breakdown in traditional family life.

Often these factors coexist or become self-perpetuating, e.g. Someone with a very low sense of self-esteem as a result of a cultural mismatch or relatively mild form of dyspraxia may not care much about personal appearance and hygiene and is more likely to adopt a couch potato lifestyle, with resulting eating disorders, obesity, acne etc.., for fear of rejection in the real world. Among the many secondary traits associated with AS, an Edinburgh-based autism consultant stressed sleeping disorders, yet failed to mention that insomnia has huge cultural variables. It seems obvious that sleeping patterns would be disrupted by long-term unemployment and addiction to television, computers and video-games. Also conspicuously absent from her speech was the fact that a known side effect of the medication prescribed to sufferers of AS, chiefly Prozac, Effexor and Paxil, is insomnia. The same can be said of the steady gaze considered characteristic of AS.

The Psychiatric Establishment and the Learning Disability Agenda

First let us distinguish three concepts:

  1. Neurologically determined intellectual impairment: This is commonly known as a learning disability and replaces mental retardation and mental handicap. While there are certainly many borderline cases, and undoubtedly many of cases of regression, this infers a fundamental and irreversible cerebral abnormality and should not be confused with low personal achievement due to environmental and psychological factors.
  2. Severe psychopathic personality disorders: Whatever the causes, the behaviour of some individuals is clearly antisocial. We need to examine why there has been a concomitant relaxation of the criteria used for such disorders and a rise in the number of depressed or socially alienated people seeking some form of psychological help or referred by others to psychiatrists. Although definitions vary considerably, psychopaths are thankfully a relatively marginal phenomenon. Most people would only kill under extreme duress or after prolonged operant conditioning, e.g. army training.
  3. Psychological problems aka mental health problems . These affect us all to varying degrees at some time in our life.

First it is my opinion that the first category only applies to a very select group of individuals who need our help. Second the emergence of the autistic spectrum concept has enabled a considerable blurring of these categories both in the public mind and more disturbingly among psychologists. Most of the literature about Asperger's Syndrome emphasises that affected individuals lie in the normal to high IQ range. However, most people referred to the NHS psychologist who diagnosed me had some form of learning disability, i.e. an IQ < 70. This term means different things to different people, e.g. it may apply to dyslexics with above-average IQ's. It is commonly confused with learning difficulty, e.g. A child with a mild visual impairment has a learning difficulty because she might need to sit closer to the blackboard or need reading books with extra large print. Clearly the PR machine of the autism sector emphasises that AS means autism without a learning disability, but the psychiatric establishment thinks otherwise. It classifies AS as a form of social blindness that severely impairs an individual's ability to interact responsibly in a social environment. It thus follows that to protect an AS-diagnosed individual from the consequences of his own actions, he needs special help and support, often a euphemism for control.

Again the autism sector seldom mentions schizophrenia or bipolar disorders, while the psychiatric establishment, with whom the former collaborates very closely (with individuals moving from one sector to the other), considers schizophrenia either as part of the autistic spectrum (cf. Lorna Wing) or at least closely related. There have been a few high profile cases of young men diagnosed with AS who have committed heinous acts. In one recent case a teenager murdered the daughter of two of his parent's closest friends. In another a man murdered his wife because he suspected her of having an affair with a colleague. The inference is thus that AS individuals, though usually just a little eccentric, are particularly prone to psychopathic behaviour and thus need more help and support before they contemplate such acts. By failing to distinguish the vague concept of “people who some psychiatrist has labelled with AS†with the more psychologically valid concept of “people who manifest a clearly identifiable set of behavioural traitsâ€, we are being lulled into accepting a huge expansion of the autism/AS sector and through the backdoor, of the psychiatric establishment. This latter aspect should be of particular concern to us in view of new legislation for compulsory screening for personality disorders and mental health problems in the United States.

Next we need to ask who this sector is really helping? As previously outlined, I know of two organisations in Edinburgh (Autism Initiatives and IntoWork) who have incredibly low staff/client ratios. IntoWork helps people on the spectrum find a job. Based on their performance so far (and I know many of their staff and clients), it would make more economic sense to use the funds allocated to this organisation to artificially create jobs for their clients. The autism sector keeps stressing the need for advice and information. I ask what use is incorrect, inconsistent and/or scientifically unproven information? What advice can a trained autism advisor give that many other socially aware volunteers could not give? In the end what each individual needs is a chance to meet new people, form friendships, complete education and get meaningful and adequately well-paid employment. Often the setting up of various “Asperger support groups†only ghettoises individuals who are already both vulnerable and isolated. All too often they are recruited to raise autism awareness (spread the message), thereby advancing the careers of their support workers.

Explaining the Enigma

The Asperger's enigma cannot be understood in isolation. If we believe that Aspies have radically different brain structures, then the psychiatric establishment may have a point. The real evidence on the ground I've seen so far shows clearly that the AS-diagnosed form such a heterogeneous group with such a wide variety of personalities and behavioural traits that any attempt to map their brains and identify neurological patterns would prove meaningless. Even a cursory look at available research reveals conspicuous inconsistencies with many themes common to the identification of other psychiatric labels or mental health problems, .e.g. It is extremely doubtful that relative serotonin levels could explain autism, yet leading autism experts such as Richard Howlin recycle such notions.

If over the next few years we witness a further proliferation of new personality disorders, I feel we should be extremely sceptical at the real agenda behind this movement. Also note that estimates for the incidence of AS, SPD, Tourettes, ADHD and Schizophrenia vary considerably. In some school catchment areas in the incidence of ADHD has already reached 1 in 5, in others it barely figures. Likewise some statistics suggest as many as 1 in 100 people have been diagnosed with AS or other related conditions, but many autism advisors suggest the figure is much higher. Again the same NHS autism co-ordinator, has publicly stated that as many as 10% of adults have AS. Where do they get these statistics from? Yes, a very high fraction of people share to varying degrees some of the traits outlined in DSM-IV, but what exactly does that prove if hardly a single trait is mandatory for diagnosis?

Do all aspies freak out in the presence of bright lights and loud noises ?
Apparently not I have met an aspie in Edinburgh who loves discos and noisy pubs and incidentally has no special interests to speak of, just a record of antisocial behaviour and joblessness.
Are all aspies blind to subtle facial expressions?
Again this varies a good deal, I'd say only relatively so and in some cases not at all?
Are all aspies loners by choice?
In my experience this is rarely the case, most actively seek friendships and become depressed precisely because of their social failings?
Are all aspies unaware of social etiquette or other people's feelings?
Only in so far that many are so depressed or alienated that they cannot identify with their peers, but given the chance most will soon develop empathy, especially for other like-labelled individuals.
Are all aspies scared of travelling to new locations?
Some are relatively stay-at-home types, but many I've met are intrepid travellers who would just like a companion.
Are aspies anticonformist?
Some are, but then some are positively conformist, often turning into faithful recruits to new causes, such as autism awareness.
Why do so many apsies think they belong to the autistic spectrum?
Because they have been taught so and failure to extend solidarity to a small minority of genuine autistics is simply politically incorrect. For many aspies autism simply defines their true selves. Some even talk of my autism as if it were a cherished attribute or possession. Some will celebrate autism as a positive trait and liken their struggle against discrimination to that of ethnic minorities. However, while we should all oppose discrimination against people with different personalities, the analogy with racism ends there. First people of black African descent form a clearly identifiable ethnic subset of the human species. Second no self-respecting black rights activist would campaign for "biologically inferior wogs" to be provided more help and support to overcome the natural superiority of the master race. They rightly challenge all claims of racial superiority and point to the socio-environmental causes, the legacy of slavery and imperialism, of their comparative lack of achievement in multicultural countries like the United States. Being focused, intellectual, frank or even hypersensitive to sensory disturbances are all great qualities. What is wrong is a society that labels such traits as pathological.

The problems faced by most people diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome will not be solved until we remove confusing psychiatric labels and dissociate culturally mediated personality traits from cases of severe intellectual impairment or severe communication disorders. We need to look at our society, not at biomedical solutions to personal problems.

Categories
Computing

Non-Web Formats

The Internet is a collection of interlinked documents distributed in open formats compatible with the greatest number of heterogeneous operating systems and devices. The World Wide Web's standard text markup language is HTML, which has undergone numerous revisions since the Internet's rapid expansion in the early 1990s. XML, in many ways a descendent of the more complex SGML, is the default standard for data exchange between diverse systems. Almost any kind of data can be marked up and accurately described using a specialised dialect of XML. Applications range from MathML for mathematical notation, RSS for news feeds, MusicXML for faithful representation of music, CML for chemistry to SVG for scalable vector graphics. Recently HTML has morphed into XHTML combined with cascading stylesheets to separate style from content and customise formatting for different devices and media. All Web browsers render HTML and most modern browsers reproduce XHTML with CSS reasonably well. More important not only do all Web editors output HTML, but so do most word processors and desktop publishing applications. Besides numerous user-friendly Web tools can be downloaded free of charge to enable almost anyone with access to a computer to produce their own Web pages without learning a single HTML tag.

So why does the Internet abound with PDFs and Microsoft Word documents? Both are proprietary binary formats, although Adobe developed the Portable Document Format to allow cross-platform compatibility and has been keen to allow other vendors to provide a PDF export option. PDFs are admittedly often the only realistic way to reproduce complex formatting on diverse systems. Until Scalable Vector Graphics and CSS3 with multi-column layout are fully implemented in mainstream Web browsers, PDFs will remain the only practical solution for the accurate reproduction of the output of desktop publishing applications via the Web. But surfing the Web is not the same as slowly contemplating a glossy magazine, it's about navigating through a web of hypertext pages to gain fast access to related information.

  • PDFs are nearly always much larger than equivalent HTML pages, sometimes 10 to 20 times larger just to include a few small logos or photographs.
  • Software used to convert word processor and desktop publishing files to PDF (notably Acrobat Distiller combined with MS Word or Publisher) converts most graphics, including custom frames and borders and often non-standard fonts, to bitmaps further boosting file size. In reality only graphics applications like Illustrator, InDesign, FrameMaker, Freehand or Corel Draw can produce polished graphics taking full advantage of PDF's vector graphics rendering capabilities.
  • Embedding fonts further increases file size, by 30 to 40KB per font.
  • PDFs are designed to reproduce formatting, not semantic information and structure.
  • Adobe Acrobat Reader is a memory-intensive application, which even in the era of 3GHz CPUs can take over 45 seconds to load, cause computers to crash or force the user to close the browser in which it loads.
  • PDF files interrupt the general Web experience. Inexperienced users are confronted with a radically different interface without the usual navigation features and even the back button will not work if it loads in a new window.

Most programs used to write Web content can convert text more easily to HTML than PDF. Most notably Microsoft Office applications lack a native PDF conversion capability (you'll need to buy Adobe Acrobat Distiller or Jaws PDF for that feature), but will save to HTML, albeit Microsoft's implementation thereof. OpenOffice and Corel PerfectOffice will let you save any document in both formats and even Adobe InDesign and PageMaker have HTML-export facilities. So if you think PDFs are better, why not let users choose. If they just need information, most will stick to HTML, but if they genuinely wish to view or print the full splendour of your artwork they can wait a few minutes to view your graphics-rich PDF. One should never need to download a PDF just to read a bus timetable, the agenda of a meeting or even a lengthy report. HTML is a much more versatile and lightweight way of distributing textual information. Savvy readers can easily adjust text-size without needing to scroll horizontally or change background colours.

Even worse is the profusion of Microsoft Word documents, especially in public sector, research-oriented and academic sites. In many portals, a site-wide database search returns a list of relevant Word, Excel and PDF documents. To view the actual content you need an application capable of reading these binary formats. At fault is usually the content management system, members of staff are simply allowed to upload documents, so they publish their files in their original format. All too often one reads statements like for the minutes of the last meeting please read minutes67.doc. Although even in the non-Microsoft world one can view 99.9% of Word Documents in OpenOffice, it means starting a memory-intensive application just to load a file, many orders of magnitude larger than an equivalent HTML document, and in the vast majority of cases with no formatting that could not be easily reproduced in standards-compliant XHTML with CSS. More important very few users will need more than the information contained in the document.

Myths and Excuses

Claim 1: HTML documents print badly.
Truth: HTML documents using absolute-sized tables for layout without a print stylesheet print badly, often extending beyond the page width. Sites built with separate print stylesheets can easily reformat a page to hide menus, headers and footers and print only the main body, neatly spanning the printable width of a page. Browsers like Mozilla Firefox can interpret many advanced CSS2 printing properties and let users customise the way a page prints.
Claim 2: PDF Files are accessible:
Truth: Just add 30 sec. to 5 mins to the average download time and factor in the inconvenience of another application starting in the background.
Claim 3: Publisher files can be distributed as PDFs:.
Truth: First you need an extra application such as Adobe Acrobat Distiller to communicate with Microsoft's PostScript driver to do that. Second the results are often very unprofessional with pixelated bitmaps replacing smooth curves. Third the resulting file size is often ginormous even if you select Screen-optimised.
Claim 4: Everyone has Word
Truth: Many users are not using a computer (e.g. Web TV or 3G phones) or have restricted access to external applications e.g. in a library or Internet Café. Word is also a hugely overpriced application and since Word 2000 requires product activation, limiting use to a single machine. Most other Word processors will open MS Word documents, but often tables and textboxes are poorly aligned. Word is simply not a Web format! Indeed Microsoft only belatedly introduced hyperlinks in 1997 (Word 95 required an add-on utility for this functionality).
Claim 5: What about Document Exchange, such as application forms that people need to return in the same format?
First in many cases HTML forms let users with only a Web browser, complete complex and well-structured application forms. Emerging standards like XForms (supported by OpenOffice 2.0) will greatly enhance the ease with which visitors can submit information to and interact with Web sites. Second, any HTML page can be literally cut and pasted into a word processor, edited and saved as HTML. Third, admittedly some complex table and multicolumn structures are still hard to render in HTML, but since the late 1980s we have had a cross-platform word processor format, RTF or Rich Text Format, that will faithfully reproduce all textual content, including tables, indices, headers, footers, as well as embedded graphics with full support for styles. Indeed even MS Word uses RTF to convert to earlier versions of Word. Unless you want to impress employers with WordArt, rtf files will load fine into any word processor. Besides the future lies clearly with XML.
Claim 6: Staff are not trained in HTML!
Truth: Most users of word processors are not trained in ever-changing binary formats like MS Word either, which are conisderably more complex. They simply type, apply headings, bulleted lists, highlight, add a little colour and change fonts. How long does it take to teach someone to select Save As HTML from the file menu? You can even get macros to automate the task completely and insert the HTML output directly into e-mails, rather than annoyingly attaching a bloated Word document.
Claim 7: I need my spell checker!
Truth: These days, spell checkers are integrated into most applications that process text, e-mail clients, desktop publishing suites, word processors and HTML editors. Besides once you've used your favourite word processor to verify your orthography, you can save your document as HTML.
Claim 8: HTML does not support WordArt
Truth: HTML is about conveying information. All headings should be reproduced as text enclosed in heading tags and not as frivolous graphics. Of course you can add fancy text as an additional graphic, but you'll find much better tools than MS Word for that purpose. Currently this means using PNG, GIF or JPG bitmaps, but when major browsers support SVG, many Web pages will begin to resemble the creations of high-end desktop publishing programs, while being simultaneously viewable in text-only mode.

Structural Formatting

Most users of word processors just use icons and drop-down menus to change fonts, sizes and colours or occasionally add bulleted lists and tables. By contrast, strict HTML, and even more so XHTML, insists on structural mark-up. A heading is simply not a line of text with inline formatting to change its appearance. It is an element marked up as a heading. The same goes for other structural elements like paragraphs, lists or tables. The structure tells us how the elements relate. Let us consider two simple examples. First, we wish to generate a table of contents. If we have marked up all headings as a hierarchical sequence of headings and subheadings, many applications (including OpenOffice and even MS Word) will automatically generate a Table of Contents for us. Now consider a search engine trying to make sense of millions of words in thousands of documents on the Web. How does it rank documents responding to the search terms snails and evolution? Clearly thousands of documents will contain both terms, but if these terms appear in identifiable headings they will be ranked much higher. An article containing both in the main heading would be ideal, e.g. The Evolution of Snails, but an article containing evolution in a main heading and snails in a subheading would also rank high. Now suppose a hastily converted article contains evolution of snails in a normal paragraph element, to which the word processor applied inline formatting to make it stand out. The search engine would just ignore the inline formatting and treat it as a normal line of text, thus giving it a much lower ranking. As a rule word processors will only convert lines of text that look like headings into real HTML headings if you use styles. Fortunately, this feature is easily accessible in all leading word processors, though completely ignored by most casual users.

Modern Web sites like to maintain a consistent look and feel with stylesheets. Additional inline formatting added by many leading word processors (most notoriously by Word 2003) not only considerably boosts file size, but overrides the default stylesheet limiting HTML's inherent versatility. In this case, one should save as plain or filtered HTML. With the spread of content management systems for most large Web sites, more and more regular Web editors use HTML editors embedded within a Web page requiring only a Web browser. These may use a Java applet (which most Web browsers support), Javascript, Active-X (supported only by Internet Explorer) or XUL supported only by Gecko-based browsers like Mozilla Firefox. The latest generation of embedded XHTML editors ensures that any formatting applied by the user is automatically converted to standards-compliant code compatible with the web site's stylesheet.

In sum, technology has already rendered proprietary word processor formats obsolete on the Web. They only persist thanks to the domination of one well-known multinational and its grip on corporate, academic and public-sector users.

Categories
Computing

Reclaiming Word

Screenshot of OpenOffice Writer 2.0 running on Mandrake Linux

If you own a computer, you probably have some form of word processor. Whether you need to type a report at work or a letter at home or maybe just a short shopping list, chances are you think you need Word or rather Microsoft Word TM . How could we possibly manage without WordArt, ubiquitous in nursery schools and on church noticeboards worldwide? Don't messages look so dull if left in a dated serif font? Isn't it just wonderful that we can highlight text in bold and change its colour? And just in case we make the odd typo, we've got a spell checker to boot.

Now use a pocket calculator or the free one that comes with your operating system to do some simple maths. Each Microsoft Office licence costs between £90 and £400 depending on the package (Standard, Student, Professional, Business, Developer) and applicable discounts. For sake of argument let's assume an average spend of £150. Now let's just take the population of the prosperous world, around a billion, and assume one in eight (1/4 of the working population) require an MS Office Suite either at home or at work, that's a whopping £18.75 billion straight into the coffers of one leviathan every two to three years just for software that was developed by numerous teams of programmers over the last 30 years. Indeed every single major feature available in Word and Excel was pioneered by other programs such as Word Star, Wordperfect, Lotus 1-2-3 and Corel Draw long before Microsoft took the market by storm in the mid-1990s. Computers may now be much faster with superior graphics and the interface has been jazzed up, but mail merge, spell checking and multicolumn layout have been with us since the late 1980s. The processing power of your average PDA or even mobile phone is greater than that of a 1988 word-processing typewriter complete with a 10" monochrome monitor and a revolutionary 3.5" floppy disk drive. I once calculated that 300 pages saved in WordStar 4 could fit onto one double-density 720KB floppy. We can now store the contents of 80 floppies onto one 128MB flash memory card.

Bloated Word Documents

I recently received the contents of a web page as a word document, all 26 megabytes of it, a long download even in the age of broadband Internet. The resulting web page with around 300 words and 6 pictures occupies around 120KB on the remote server. An extreme example because unedited digital pictures had just been imported into Word and manually resized and aligned. The other day I received an e-mail with a Word attachment advertising a conference, word count 158, character count 1157, byte count in excess of 1,600,000, all for one mediocre logo. Had the information been cut and pasted into an e-mail, it would have added 2KB at most! The document contained no formatting that could not be easily reproduced in any half-decent e-mail programme such as freely downloadable Mozilla Thunderbird.

So what if Microsoft makes a fortune from its monopoly? Isn't Word just the most user-friendly text editor out? You might have guessed it, but I'm typing this rant in OpenOffice 2.0 and as a seasoned MS Word user I've yet find anything that OpenOffice cannot do just as well as its premium-rate competitor.

MS Word's essential features have hardly changed since version 6. Word 97 saw a new file format causing temporary incompatibility with a large pool of Word 6 users. Word 2000 had multiple copy and paste and Word XP has belatedly embraced XML, albeit Microsoft's implementation thereof. But let's face the facts, your average Word user does not know how to use styles, autocorrect, autotext and automated tables of contents, let alone craft advanced XML projects. Yet every single one of these features is now available in OpenOffice Writer and version 2.0 has enhanced MS-Office compatibility.

Millions of documents are formatted day in day out with little more than the dropdown font type and size selectors, bold, italics and underline. Creative users will play around with WordArt, insert an image from the ClipArt library, embed a digital photo or paste in one acquired from the Internet. Advanced users may insert the odd table, add hyperlinks or even spread text over multiple columns. But only a small minority of Word users have more than scratched the surface of the programme's potential and neither should they? If you're not a technical writer, legal secretary, translator or web developer, why should you care if the heading of your report is merely set to Arial size 24 or is actually set to heading 1 (style dropdown)? Now imagine you need to create a table of contents after drafting an 80 page instruction manual with 64 sections, 257 subsections and 2429 footnotes and your boss will probably ask you to make many more post-edits. If you had structured your document with hierarchical headings, the task could be automated and the TOC would automatically update when the page number of a new section changed.

Format Wars

Back in the early 1990s it was customary to specify word processor formats. As a technical translator, I'd often receive files in WordStar, WordPerfect, AmiPro, Word 5 for the Mac as well as Word 2.0 and Word 6.0/95. To this list, we may add the tools used by publishers and graphics professionals such as PageMaker and Quark Express and let's not forget the programmable typesetting language Tex and the more user-friendly LaTex, used by academia and publishers especially in the Unix/Linux world. All had irksome interoperability issues with formatting, accented characters and macros. Not surprisingly many agencies insisted on the cross-platform RTF standard (Rich Text Format). By 1997 Microsoft had for all intents and purposes nixed all serious competitors and used their new-found strength to impose a new de facto standard. Millions of Word 6.0/95 users will recall the compatibility woes they endured with the first batch of Word 97 files. Even after downloading a converter from Microsoft (in the days of 14.4 and 28.8kbps modems), the results were often unreadable or required time-consuming reformatting. It took Microsoft two patches to get its Word 97 to Word 6.0 converter working properly. Indeed it probably took two more years for Word 97 to establish itself as the dominant format. But those who argue that the Word .doc format is here to stay and is essential to collaboration and interoperability have a surprise in store for them. In 2006 Microsoft will in effect ditch their own de facto standard by making the new XML-based format the default save option (in my experience fewer and fewer run-of-the-mill Word users are familiar with features such as "Save As" for converting to other formats). Want to know why? Well why not read Microsoft's official reasons straight from the horse's mouth (Microsoft Office Open XML Formats Overview). Evidently XML-based formats are not only more transparent, but partially corrupted files are much easier to recover, because XML is human-readable and lends itself much better to parsing by third-party programmes. Wow, that's what the guys at OpenOffice have been arguing for years. Both the new OpenDocument and the older SWX formats are XML-based, storing text, style and pictures in separate XML files embedded in one jar-compressed file. Microsoft's new format uses Windows-centric zip-compression, but the essential idea is the same. Word 2000 and 2002 users will be able to download an update to read the new XML-based format, but millions of extant Word 97 users will soon find their product totally unsupported by the Redmond Giant. They could download OpenOffice 1.1.5 or 2.0 beta, both of which support MS-Word XML, but sadly many will be persuaded to part with more hard-earned cash for an MS-branded upgrade.

Bells and Whistles

In 1993 I set about buying my first PC with a windowing graphic user interface. "What software can I install?", I asked the owner of a local shop and added "I'll need a Word processor, and best of all MS Word", as that's what most of my clients, mainly translation agencies, required. "We just use Corel Draw 3", he replied. "But surely that's just for drawing?" I quipped "No, no it's good for flyers and most correspondence with our customers". Corel Draw 4 even had a spell checker and what's more you could stretch and bend text on a machine with little more than four megabytes of RAM. If you never wrote letters spanning more than two to three pages (multi-page text flow is a bit of an issue in Corel Draw), Corel Draw 3 would do you fine. Now you know where Microsoft drew their inspiration for the inclusion of WordArt in their 1995 edition of Word!

Many myths abound about open-source software. All alternatives to MS Word import and export MS Word Documents. OpenOffice even imports WordArt, but relies on FontWorks and a fully integrated drawing application to create fancy text, drawings and charts. Admittedly some incompatibility remains, but this mainly relates to minor aesthetic and alignment quirks, e.g. MS Word tables sometimes extend beyond a page width in OpenOffice, because Word corrects manual resizing, and OpenOffice does not allow dashed table borders because dashed lines were not specified in the cross-platform universal Rich Text Format (the is probably one of the biggest deficiencies in OpenOffice). Most notably in version 1.0 Word VBA Macros associated with a file will not work, but OpenOffice 2.0 lets you selectively enable Word macros and convert them to its native Star Basic. But then again Word macros are a primary source of Windows viruses and few users know how to apply document-specific macros anyway. The main use of macros is to automate common word processing tasks and both OpenOffice and MS Word let you do that. If anything Star Basic is much more versatile than Microsoft's legendary Visual Basic, has copious documentation and should make the transition from one office suite to another relatively painless.

What about Publisher?

There is one conspicuous omission in OpenOffice: a program that imports MS Publisher files. To be honest I don't understand the attraction of Publisher. With only the full MS suite at my disposal (sadly a common occurrence in Microsoft-only offices), I'd find its core product, Word, a much easier option for most desktop publishing and then simply import graphics designed in other applications, but in OpenOffice one can change backgrounds and reformat page layout for different paper sizes effortlessly and besides the best program I know for 4-fold birthday cards is Corel Printhouse. The main problem for OpenOffice users is opening and editing MS Publisher files sent by others. Alas Microsoft's wizards for exporting to HTML are far from perfect especially if you desire high-definition print quality. If used with Acrobat Distiller (another £60), MS Publisher files can be exported to PDF files, although most graphics tend to be converted to bitmaps boosting file size. My best advice would be to kindly ask a Publisher user to save their file as an Enhanced Metafile (.emf) and then OpenOffice Draw will import it page by page more or less intact and let you edit and save the resulting multi-page document as PDF and voilà. However, if you demand professional results from your publications, then I'd consider either Corel Draw or, for larger outputs and budgets, Adobe InDesign or PageMaker. The latter will even import Publisher Files, produced by amateurs as no professionals worth their salt would use such a graphically challenged application.

The Power Point Paradigm

The features offered by this application, ubiquitous in offices throughout the public and private sectors, say more about the nature of our superficial society than the state of information technology. Indeed the term has embedded itself into our everyday vocabulary to such an extent that for many it may mean an indispensable multipurpose programme (many use it for desktop publishing or drafting web pages) or a projector they may use to display the results on a large screen. In effect PowerPoint draws on the resources of other applications either integral to the operating system or the Office suite, to juggle multimedia and display it in a series of slides rather than pages. Besides adding gratuitous custom animations of text and images floating over the screen, little functionality is native to PowerPoint. In the process, it encourages the dumbing down of messages to the lowest common denominator with no more than seven bullet points recommended on each page, a virtual collection of soundbites. I see some uses for computer projectors in many teaching situations as a replacement for overhead projectors, blackboards and whiteboards, but they don't need Micro$oft PowerPoint to work!

Open Office Impress does almost everything PowerPoint can do, but lacks the wealth of templates supplied with MS Office. For this you'll need to buy Sun Office 8.0 or rely on a third-party vendor. Admittedly I could not work out how to achieve the typewriter effect, but then again you probably just need a downloadable macro to perform this trick. Unlike the market leader, OpenOffice Impress exports to Flash, the de facto web-optimised multimedia integration plug-in. Hopefully, at some stage Web browsers will offer native support for XML-based SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) and SMIL (Synchronised Multimedia Interface Language). Indeed OpenOffice Draw 2.0 will also let you save any graphic as an XML-compliant SVG file. Microsoft may provide a plug-in to enable anyone with Internet Explorer to view PowerPoint presentations within their browser window, but file sizes are way too big. The other day I tried to view a short presentation with 20 slides (which once downloaded displayed fine in Open Office Impress), but occupying 13.8MB. All we need a user-friendly application to resize and export your digital snaps and video clips to this format with text captions and PowerPoint could well prove a passing fad.

The impact of this gizmo has attracted the attention of numerous social commentators. Edward Tufte has even written a book, The Cognitive Style of Power Point.

Database Integration

Originally considered a relative weakness of the OpenOffice suite, version 2.0's offering beats Access any day, offering not only the native dBase format but allowing full compatibility with open-source MySQL and Microsoft Access via ODBC and JDBC drivers, allowing users to update databases on a remote server. You can also import address books from Mozilla Thunderbird, Netscape Messenger and even MS Outlook, within the main Writer interface. If you stick to Microsoft, you'd need their professional MS-SQL Server to do that!

Why do people still use Microsoft Office?

If OpenOffice is so good and alternatives such as Corel PerfectOffice are cheaper, why would anyone want to spend over £100 on MS Office? Microsoft's virtual monopoly on personal computer operating systems and its marketing and PR clout have enabled it to persuade politicians, IT managers and the general public that their product is not only indispensable but migrating to another would prove costly. Their strongest argument is that retraining staff would prove more expensive than an upgrade. But how were staff trained in the first place? Were they trained in word-processing, spreadsheets, desktop publishing, database management and networking or were they trained to use Microsoft products to perform these tasks? In this regard, we could rename The European Computer Driving Licence a Microsoft Product Familiarisation Course. In reality, most users will only notice that some features are accessed from different menus or icons, but it's easy to change default shortcuts to those used in MS Office. It took me a little while to discover that FontWorks (WordArt for Microsoft aficionados) can be accessed by clicking on the drawing icon within OpenOffice writer and then clicking on the FontWorks icon.

Prior to Office 2000, many may have installed a friend's copy of MS Office with the registration key affixed to the CD case. Now all MS products require product activation limited to one machine. This may seriously deter piracy, but has also led to a significant decrease in the number of people upgrading in the real world. There are still far more Office 97 users in the UK than owners of Office 2000 or 2003. Can you seriously justify such an outlandish expense with no tangible benefits over free open-source software? And if you really want to pay, you can always purchase Sun's jazzed up Star Office 8.0 for under £80. If your local council implements a Microsoft-only policy, let them know they're wasting our money to enrich the obscenely wealthy. We should treat operating systems and essential productivity software as a public good in the same way as libraries and schools. Computing is simply too pervasive for us to let one multinational corporation enjoy a near-total monopoly.

Categories
All in the Mind

Is AS really on the Autistic Spectrum or are we just redefining Autism?

The overall message we get from the growing AS/Autism support industry is that we are part of the autistic spectrum and we have a psychiatric disorder, even if the language used by professionals when addressing us is much more diplomatic. I agree we have problems with socialisation and manifest behavioural traits that come under the broad umbrella now labelled as Asperger's.

I take issue with this arbitrary extension of the so-called autistic spectrum to include people with a high verbal intelligence quotient and who have very human emotions. It is kind of like saying "You were bullied at school because you're autistic but didn't know it at the time and now you've been diagnosed help is at hand". The truth is most of us were bullied at school because in a highly competitive society obsessed with coolness anyone who fails to conform to such standards is weeded out. As the saying goes "special needs are just weeds". As we are all so different, how could a label help anyone deal with us better. We are just human beings trying to navigate in today's social rat race and often choosing to opt out. I think the problems we experience are shared by a much larger percentage of the population, but to claim that such a reality represents an extension of autism is to misunderstand autism itself or rather to debase its value as a meaningful diagnosis. This term should only be used for individuals with a classic Kanner's autism developmental pattern and with associated cerebral abnormalities. Those who claim that aspies have radically different brains have misinterpreted scant data as most AS-diagnosed people have never had a PET or fMRI scan and recent studies are showing marked difference between the HFA/LFA (traditional autistic) group and the AS group and disproving earlier assumptions about the size of our amygdala (originally attributed to schizophrenics and psychopaths). The latter group manifest varying degrees of synaptic overconnectedness in the orbito-frontal cortex, but this is the most neuroplastic and evolutionarily advanced section of our brain and it is now known that it constantly rewires itself throughout adolescence and way into our twenties and even thirties. So it quite possible that millions could be manifesting AS-like traits not because we were born that way, but because our interaction with the modern environment led us to develop in a certain, with genetic factors only determining relative susceptibility. There seems to be a move to extend the autistic spectrum even further to include ADHD, Tourettes,OCD etc.. In some parts of the UK ADHD diagnosis has reached 1 in 5 children. So if we believe the psychiatric establishment, 1 in 5 kids has a neurological abnormality and will require drugs (they say medication) like ritalin (a commercialised variant of speed) or risperdal (think crack cocaine) for the rest of their lives alongside a support network, with teachers specially trained to deal with challenging behaviour..

This approach, labelling more and more people with one disorder or another, cannot be right. If something is wrong, let's look at the real causes. If we're told our problems are due to a neurological deviation, then we might believe that we need a label and all the stigma that that implies. By contrast if we conclude that society is at fault then we need to change society. Even small changes seem beyond the powers that be. Examples include reducing class sizes (i.e. replacing special needs learning support workers with real teachers and reclassifying all children as having special needs), putting limits on absurd sensory overloads in shopping centres and leisure complexes (loud music) and de-emphasising coolness. Why not? Because such changes would rock too many boats. Teamwork is the order of the day because in reality it means groupthink conformism. Many myths about AS-diagnosed people are spread by ASD evangelisers. We are supposed to lack interest in imaginative play or socialisation. Nothing could be further from the truth. The imaginative play claim comes straight from textbooks that apply to Kanner's syndrome (0.2% of the population according to NAS stats). As for socialisation, just consider why so many AS-diagnosed people get depressed, because we fail to socialise. If we didn't want to socialise, we would not care if others shunned us..

Dyspraxia and hypersensitivity to sounds are very real, but there is simply no magic dividing line between the AS-diagnosed and everyone else, they both represent continua. It may, however, be the case that dyspraxic or hypersensitive children are more likely to be ostracised and develop AS-like behavioural traits. How can one seriously imagine that the enormous lifestyle changes we have witnessed over the last two generations have not led to major psychological changes in a sizable group of adults? Some such as Richard Restak (author of the New Brain) Peter Breggin (author of numerous books on the dangers of ECT, psychiatric drugs and the ADHD fraud) have suggested that ADHD should really be called TV-syndrome. Why? Because it has been proven that excessive exposure to TV (immersion of a virtual reality not just the other side effects of cathod ray tubes) causes the brain to rewire. Remove someone from a high-tech media-obsessed multitasking information-overladen environment and place them in a more traditional slow-paced focused environment and their brains rewires. Of course we are all different, that much should be obvious to anyone who has met more than half a dozen aspies, but we are also first and foremost human beings.