Executive Secretary Wife

I’ll go first this time. Before Kirsten met me, she had made a promise to herself that next time, she wouldn’t date someone with mental illness. She just needed a break from all that, for her own sake.

Then she met me. Mwahahaha! It was my black trench coat that did it – but I’ll save all that for another time. As she mentioned in her previous post, prior to meeting her I’d been packaged with several types of psychiatric illness, in varying degrees of perniciousness: OCD, ADHD, Dysthymia, Generalized anxiety disorder, Social anxiety Disorder, and Bi Polar Disorder. Apart from those, I was fine. I’d tried a variety of medications – Aropax, Citalopram, Eplilim, Ritalin, and also at the point of meeting Kirsten, was up to my 5^th year of weekly psychotherapy.

But I wasn’t getting better, because most of these were well off the mark. They were as accurate as an archer with a quiver full of trout. I was autistic and didn’t know it.

Now, how’s this for luck – Kirsten just so happened to have had previous work experience with a boy with Asperger’s (as a teacher aide) and also with a young woman with Asperger’s (as a support worker). Even her education through nursing exposed her to Autism, so she was perfectly placed to do something that most mental health experts can’t seem to manage: recognise an adult with Asperger’s.

There’s a good reason for this; when you have autism on the highest end of the spectrum, you learn through a process of very hard knocks (nothing worse than secondary school), how to curtail your most autistic traits. You learn how to pass off as ‘weird, but otherwise fine’, but the constant effort required to keep this up, knocks the stuffing out of you physically and psychologically. I’ve been speaking in the second person here, I think I’ll stop because it’s pretty uncomfortable.

I think I enrolled – and re-enrolled at university three times, eventually pulling out 3 papers shy of a degree. I was just too tired. Attending tutorials (splitting off into groups, discussing etc.) was like being beaten up by a Silverback Gorilla with nunchaku. So much conflicting noise! In exams, I couldn’t write half of what I wanted to, because I lack (through Asperger’s) certain fine motor skills in my fingers. The more I wrote, the more my hand tensed up into a tight fist until I couldn’t use it any more.

Anyway, I thought it was all my fault. I was the worst kind of loser. As I failed at everything I tried, the worse I felt about myself.

The Asperger’s diagnosis changed much of that for me. I stopped blaming myself, because I realised I couldn’t have tried harder. I have wonderful Kirsten to thank for recognising it in me, and supporting me to the hilt. She actually had to tell me twice, about two years apart, before I fully considered what she was saying.

Because it meant so much to me, I’d like to end this entry with an excerpt from my assessment with Dr Kevin Appleton, one of the only psychiatrists in New Zealand trained to recognise Asperger’s in adults:

‘Cameron attended with his wife. He presented as quite awkward and anxious. His appearance and dress was normal. Manner was slightly unusual. He was pleasant and cooperative throughout the interview. There was no abnormal behaviours. Speech had a slightly unusual prosody. There was no thought disorder, delusions or hallucinations. Mood was normal but affect a little flattened. He was not at all suicidal. Diagnosis: Cameron describes features of Asperger’s Syndrome / ASD dating back to childhood. He also has co-morbid ADHD affecting his executive functioning. This has impacted on work and social aspects of his life. He has also experienced intermittent anxiety/ depression.’

Kirsten had to explain to me that ‘describes features of Asperger’s Syndrome’ is the same as saying ‘He has Asperger’s Syndrome’. I couldn’t tell if he thought I had AS, or if he thought I was just talking like I had it. One last thing that I thought was funny. The part where he said I dressed normally: I was dressed entirely in black, as was he, and as was his next patient in the waiting room.

I don’t know if anyone else thinks that’s funny, but I do.

Kirsten responds …

Ooh, I cringe at the first part of what Cameron has written above, but it’s true. I didn’t want to get into another relationship with someone who was unwell (mentally or physically) and living on a sickness benefit (= disability, for all our American readers). Cameron was also still living with his mother at the age of 30. However, you really can’t help who you fall in love with, and our paths were definitely meant to cross.

I first mentioned Asperger’s to Cameron not long after we’d moved in together and I was getting the full taste of what Cameron’s limitations were = how bad he really was on a day-to-day basis. I remember saying something like, ‘I’d like to see you diagnosed with Asperger’s as I think then you could get help with how to deal with things better, find ways to learn that suit you …’ We probably then looked it up briefly online, but it went no further.

The key moment was about three years later when Cameron’s attempts at a routine had failed once again (everything about life and living in this world seemingly against him) that he exclaimed in distress, ‘What is it that causes me to fall apart when I can’t follow my routine?’ and I straight away replied, ‘Asperger’s!’

This time something clicked and we spent a lot of time looking online, and over a period of weeks read many books together that lead us more and more to the realisation that Cameron was indeed on the spectrum. I recommend all the books we read (listed below), as even if the AS person in your life doesn’t have quite the same situation as the person in the autobiography, there will still be several things you can learn from their story. In every book we read, we recognised more of Cameron’s behaviours, quirks, and difficulties that were actually down to Asperger’s. We also recognised that I had become Cameron’s ‘Executive Secretary Wife’ (as Tony Attwood puts it) as I was the one who was making up for Cameron’s impaired executive functioning.

While the diagnosis has, for Cameron, given him a whole new perspective on his past, and some answers about why he struggles each day, it hasn’t given him access to the support that I’d originally hoped for when I first brought it up nearly ten years ago. There is a gap in the health system for adults with Asperger’s, and not just for those who are diagnosed as a child, but then leave adolescent services at the age of 18 without any follow up. And that’s why this blog is called ‘Help! My Husband Has Asperger’s’ because during really stressful periods I have typed that into Google in desperation, but I haven’t found what we need. Maybe our blog will help bring further awareness to this issue, and also perhaps be of some help to other’s who are also out there in cyberspace looking for help and support.

Books we read (please feel free to recommend any others to us):

• Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s by John Elder Robison
• Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant by Daniel Tammet
• Congratulations! It’s Asperger Syndrome by Jen Birch (NZ)
• Asperger Syndrome – A Love Story by Sarah Hendrickx 
• Asperger’s From the Inside Out: A Supportive and Practical Guide for Anyone with Asperger’s Syndrome by Michael John Carley
• The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome by Tony Attwood
• Also, Mozart and the Whale, a movie loosely based on the life of AHA/AS/PDD’s advisory board member Jerry Newport and his wife Mary, which can also be found in book form.