Sweet Catastrophe

Asperger’s is the new fad ‘issue.’

I never really thought about it before, but the media seems to go through these phases where everything wants to throw the same controversial issue into their movie or television show. A disease to raise awareness, or a social standard to challenge– AIDS, interracial dating, homosexuality. Has anyone else noticed it?

I think Asperger’s Syndrome (disorder, disease, please don’t think I’m being insensitive if I’ve named it incorrectly. I’ve seen it listed a few different ways so I’m honestly just not certain) is next. If you aren’t familiar with it, I’d suggest hitting Google ’cause I don’t know enough about it myself to explain and I really don’t feel comfortable generalizing and saying, “oh it’s like such-and-such” as I hear a lot of people do. Also, to the best of my knowledge, it’s one of those things that actually varies greatly among sufferers as far as characteristics.

Since last year’s Adam (which was a fantastic movie, by the way) I’ve seen it mentioned more and more and today I watched the first episode for the new series Parenthood and one of the main characters finds out his son has Asperger’s and I’m thinking it’ll be one of the side plots.

Obviously, just a guess, but when I saw that today it set my mind off on all the places I’ve heard it mentioned in the last few months and I just think we’ll be seeing it a lot more.

Edit: I’m not crazy! Kristi found an article about it and between the article itself and the comments, they cover all my thoughts on it quite nicely– from the line between raising awareness and drawing too much negative attention, to diagnosing someone who’s just socially awkward (we call that awkward turtle around here lol).