AUTISM FROM THE INSIDE - LIVING WITH MY BRAIN IN OVERDRIVE
DIE WELT/Worldcrunch
BERLIN - The traffic on this German road moves along in a neat pattern, changed only when a car makes a right.
When it does, Markus Behrendt turns to look out the window. He may only have seen the turning car – a change in pattern – out of the corner of his eye, but it requires his complete attention. His brain is in high gear. He says: “My memory is filled with nonsense,” by which he means all the unnecessary sensory stimuli around him.
The 38-year-old man takes everything in unfiltered: a radio playing, the rattling of dishes, the rustling of newspaper pages – and all traffic noise. All voices sound equally loud, all stimuli equally important. His brain must sort everything it absorbs. That takes a lot of energy.
Markus is autistic. Doctors diagnosed him with Asperger’s Syndrome five years ago. Until he was 33, those around him just thought he was odd. Doctors had always told his parents: "He’ll grow out of it, like other boys." But since he found out about his Asperger’s, many things have become a lot clearer for him.
Five hundred kilometers away, the day is beginning with a potential catastrophe. As she does every Thursday, Maria Meier, 28, was supposed to go riding – except today the stables are closed. Luckily there’s an attractive alternative: going to the mall to buy a new coffee machine.
On a bulletin board, Maria re-plans her day: work, go on a drive, buy coffee machine, drink coffee. In the office upstairs sits Alexander Lietzke who heads the live-in center for autism patients called Wohnstätte Moltke-Haus, in Potsdam near Berlin. He had prepared Maria early for the fact that there would be nohorse riding today. The patients here have all been diagnosed with early onset autism; a deep-set developmental disturbance mostly accompanied by intellectual disabilities and impaired speech development.
One of the ways autism manifests itself is that any change in routine can become a huge problem. Maria is also deaf. In sign language she keeps asking Lietzke about the organization of her day. "This asking the same thing over and over is stereotypical behavior, but it’s really a way of communicating and it gives her a feeling of security," he says. Some days, Meier asks the same question up to 50 times.
Even as a child Markus was very different from this. He would sit for hours in a kind of trance. "I remember those situations. I know what I was thinking in those moments – and it was a lot," he says.
Things took a turn for the worse when he started school. His parents remember that they all went through hell. It started with the walk to school. "My parents walked with me, over and over, for months," – out the door, straight ahead, turn twice. For Markus managing this walk was nearly impossible. He would focus on details and forget the larger situation. If something changed – like the way a bush was pruned – he lost track of where he was. Today he knows that "the autistic brain recognizes differences rather than similarities. It’s called ‘weak central coherence.’" The brain doesn’t register what something is if its appearance changes even slightly.
Back in Potsdam, Maria is attending a birthday party and sits with the others around a table. Her concentration is fixed on the coffee cups at the other end of the table. When the celebration is over, she wanders down to see if there’s any coffee left in the cups. Along with household chores, drinking coffee is her favorite thing.
To read the rest of the story, please click on the above title.
To access the CDR Library catalog, please click on this link.
No comments:
Post a Comment