Media Bias Means International Asperger Day Passed Unnoticed

This “special day” was marked by the Social Psychiatrists’ Association of Turkey in Ankara. I do not know how many media representatives attended the event, but only two websites reported the event.

I found out about it from my friend Serpil Aygün Cengiz, who was doing a presentation on the day.

I became curious and did some research; of 136 news items at the local and national level on 18 and 19 February none dealt with this event or this symptom. I assume that both people with Asperger’s Syndrome and those organising the event must have felt slighted.

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Then I started thinking about possible reasons for this silence.  An entry in the alternative dictionary “Ekşi Sözlük” made me realise that the attitude of the public, and as a reflection of that, the attitude of the media run parallel.

The writer of the entry said, “There is a glass wall between them and the world, they are in a room. Those people with Asperger’s Syndrome who have received a good education from  a young age and who were given opportunities see the world as an aquarium. It is as if their personalities sometimes leave their bodies and look at both themselves and other people from afar. For them, the world is smaller than themselves. Then they realise that they are not within the aquarium. They are not like everyone else. They cannot pass through the glass and enter the water. In fact, they are so sad, bored and alone…”

I am sure these words do not quite tell the reality of Asperger’s Syndrome and those who have it.

As my friend Aygün said in her presentation, “today both people with Asperger’s Syndrome and researchers have moved away from considering the syndrome abnormal or an illness. Asperger’s Syndrome (AS) is today considered not a disability but a different lifestyle.”

Thus, this syndrome, which some “geniuses” also have could be considered “just a difference”.

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And it is at this point that we realise that the media has again behaved in a manner which we should question: ignoring difference and not reporting on it.

Serpil Aygün makes a similar observation: “This perspective so much part of culture that we see judgmental ostracising and labelling attitudes not only in works of popular culture in the media, but also in products of high culture. For instance two films featuring characters with AS and shown at select film festivals, Imagination (Eric Leiser 2007) and Somersault (Cate Shortland 2004), both present AS as very problematic. In somersault, AS is used as a metaphor for the loneliness and lack of communication of modernity…Someone watching these stigmatising representations ask themselves, ‘Is being ignored the lesser evil? But is the lesser evil not the worse?’”

Being discounted is one of the worst things that one can do to someone else, particularly if those whose job it is to “realise and make others realise” do it.

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Asperger’s Syndrome is named after Hans Asperger, an Austrian pediatrician (1906-1980). The symptome is often considered a high-functioning form of autism, and Asperger himself spoke of “little professors” among the children he met.

One of his patients was Austrian writer and Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Elfriede Jelinek. (MS/EÜ/AG)

*Information from Wikipedia was added to the article.