Interview with agony aunt Barabara Jacobs
Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 | Oddpod
Is the Cassandra Affective Deprivation Disorder (CADD)attributed to some non-spectrum partners of Aspies be real? And if so, could it also apply to those on the autism spectrum who feel they are not loved for who they really are? If CADD is little more than a recently formulated syndrome, could it not be confused with things like co-dependency, Masochistic Personality Disorder or even more common in those with personality traits which are more socially needy than those without these traits? And if those claiming to suffer from CADD are mostly non-spectrum women living with autistic partners, what about non-spectrum men in a similar position? Do they experience CADD too? How might mixed partnerships between spectrum and non-spectrum adults avoid culture clashes being blamed as ‘deprivation’? Here Barbara Jacobs and I discuss these issues in the context of the recent Tony Attwood controversy.
4 Comments to Interview with agony aunt Barabara Jacobs
Thanks so much ladies. Down with hate. In with faith, hope and resilience – qualities displayed by human beings everyday!!
FlossyJuly 22, 2009
Loved yout talk. Forget the interviewer’s name (sorry) but she is really interesting! The discussion about alexithymia was so interesting I went and researched it some more. Could you talk some more about this?
Read an article by a lady Dr. Simons about alexithymia and CADD which married the same topics. Can you get her on your show for a talk? She seems more balanced than most commentators.
Flossy
FlossyJuly 22, 2009
Here is that Dr. Simons paper. She implies Aspies suffer CADD equally with NTs (which I have not heard before). Her contact emal at the bottom http://www.maxineaston.co.uk/cassandra/Affective%20Deprivation.pdf
She steers a course midway between dogmatic spectrumites and dogmatic typicalites if ive understood it.
Hi Flossy!
I’ve read the paper, and think it’s just a rewrite of CADD, trying not to position it as a ‘disorder’ which exclusively affects NT women, but they haven’t managed it! They’ve just redescribed AS as having low emotional intelligence, alexithymia, and a low empathy quotient. You’ll also notice that the list of symptoms sounds very female. Harriet (Holly) Simons counsels for CADD in the USA. So it’s the same old same old, basically, just prettied up a bit!
It’s also a very poor paper, academically. Mayer and Salovey were the theorists behind ‘emotional intelligence’(1989). Daniel Goleman was just a journalist who wrote a best-selling book about it (1996) and made some pretty wild claims. If anyone quotes Goleman as a reference, you can be pretty sure that they’re not good scholars.
July 21, 2009