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He wrote a paper on it. His clinic was bombed almost immediately afterward.
His paper was resurrected posthumously (1990, I think). The syndrome made it into the DSM-IV (1994).
Aspies are generally very intelligent (I'm a middling Aspie, and I test at about 144 in IQ), but we have a disruption in one or more of the seven senses--the two you don't hear about are vestibular (that is, the orientation of your body in space) and proprioceptive (that is, the relation of your body parts to each other) senses. For instance, I cannot process visual data quickly enough to drive. I am also affected vestibularly (if you want to reduce me to quivering jelly, put me on a roller coaster) and proprioceptively (I am so clumsy that I'm never without some injury). We just don't process incoming sensory data as quickly as NTs. So we are subject to sensory overloads.
We also are poor at nonverbal communication: we have difficulty with facial expressions, tones of voice, body language. Sometimes it looks like you NTs (neurotypicals) are communicating telepathically, and it's really frustrating that you expect us to. Socializing is work and very exhausting, so we avoid it as much as possible. I try to avoid real-time communication whenever I can.
Assuming Nicholls isn't exploiting our problems for his own gain (he damn well better not be!), I would hypothesize that he got overloaded and that the photographer was the straw that broke the camel's back. When an Aspie gets overloaded, they experience a survival reaction, just as an NT does. It's just that we get to that point much quicker and with less provocation than you do. It's not a "social behavior disorder." We suffer a real physical condition as a result of a differently wired brain. Our "fits" are attempts to protect ourselves when being overloaded.
The up side includes usually being very smart (as I said), good at detailed work, and very logical. I often tell people I wouldn't want to be cured of Asperger's, if such a thing were possible, because I wouldn't want to give up real logic. (Hey, if the experts are gonna call me "hyperlogical" to my face, I can call the lot of you pseudological!)
That "medical treatment" thing, though, is just plain garbage. There is none such. We are very prone to depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder as side-effects of living in a world made for NTs rather than us and those conditions are treatable, but you can't rewire someone's brain. There is no medical treatment for Asperger's.
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