(Very Personal) Editor’s Note:  Fascinated by the cover, and I picked up a copy of New York Magazine in the airport on my way home from a visit with my own elderly father who has cancer and severe Asperger’s Syndrome.   I am the daughter of a man whose place on the spectrum (undiagnosed until just recently) has left him dreadfully alone, and has left me and my mom with lifelong scars that will never heal (although I am doing my best to work with him on mine).   I am also the mother of a wonderful, but often very difficult young man who is on the “-ish” end (who will have a much, much better time with the outside world than my father will ever have).   While not our typical pediatric article, I hope you find the story – which warns about romanticizing a condition in that it minimizes real suffering of those truly afflicted – as interesting as I did.
By Benjamin Wallace
“Is every man in America somewhere on it?” Nora Ephron wondered about the autism spectrum in an e-mail to a friend a few months before her death. “Is every producer on it? Is every 8-year-old boy who is obsessed with statistics on it? Sometimes, when we say someone is on the spectrum, do we just mean he’s a prick? Or a pathological narcissist? I notice that at least three times a week I am told (or I tell someone) that some man or other is on the spectrum.”
Read this Article on the New York Magazine.com