Asperger's Syndrome and Pop Culture

The popular book and movie Dear John describes a father-son relationship when the father is believed to have a mild case of Asperger's Syndrome. I recently saw the movie and thought it was pretty good. My favorite part of the movie was how the relationship between the father and son played out. In my opinion, that was the best part of the movie. Of course it is a love story between a man and women, but the father-son relationship was more interesting to me. The audience gets to see how the father and son relationship plays out through the course of the son's life. It was interesting getting a visual and kind of seeing what a person with Asperger's Syndrome goes through on a day to day basis. It showed the routines people with this syndrome go through, how people with Asperger's feel awkward in certain social situations, and their lack of communication skills. After watching Dear John the movie, I was intrigued and bought the book to see if it was anything like the movie.

To my surprise, the book was even better than the movie! It goes into so much more detail than the movie and it is a lot easier to get into. The book explains more about Asperger's Syndrome and provides even more detail of the unique father-son relationship. While I was reading, I highlighted a passage I found that describes the difference between Asperger's Syndrome and autism. Part of the passage read, "A person with autism lives in his world, while a person with Asperger's lives in our world, in a way of his own choosing." I thought this was great information and a great way to describe the differences between the two disorders, especially since people usually think the two are the same thing.

All in all, this is a great book and movie. I highly recommend reading and watching the movie, especially if you know somebody with Asperger's. Dear John may really open your eyes and help you understand this commonly misunderstood disorder.

Can Certain Vaccinations Be Linked to Causing Autism?

Recently in my college writing class, we were asked to do a paper on a controversial issue in our world. I decided to choose writing about the link between vaccinations and autism. I researched many different articles and found two that really stuck out in providing me great information about this topic.

The first article I found opposed the link between certain childhood vaccinations being a cause for autism. The article, "Public Health Officials Fear Parental Suspicion of Vaccinations", by Deborah L. Shelton and Deanese Williams-Harris describes the negative effects of parental suspicion of these important vaccinations and provides information to prove that autism and vaccinations aren't related. I felt, though, that it didn't provide enough information proving that there was no link between this disorder and the vaccines. All that the article really stated was that "careful scientific research has found no link between vaccines and autism" (3). I feel as if that isn't enough real evidence to prove there is no link. It also doesn't go into a lot of information about thimerosal, the mercury-based ingredient in vaccines that is said to be the ingredient questioned in causing autism. Although, this article does do a good job describing the negative effects of children not receiving their childhood shots. It provides information about loss of immunity to certain diseases and how certain outbreaks of diseases could result if children do no get their needed shots. Shelton and Williams-Harris also described how the overall choice is up to the parents if the shots are safe or not, and I feel that is a very valid point.

The other useful article I found was in favor of vaccines playing a role in causing autism. "The Promise of Chelation", the article written by Sarah Bridges does a fantastic job describing the negative effects of thimerosal, the mercury-based ingredient in vaccines that is said to be the trouble ingredient in causing autism in children. This article gives great statistics and provides a lot of proof of the negative effects of thimerosal in children. It shows a drastic change in numbers when the shots were introduced to children and how rates of autism increased dramatically. Bridges also states that thimerosal was ordered to be taken out of the vaccines because they were declared unsafe for the children. That is proof enough for me that they played some kind of negative role in the kids' health. Also, this article describes a mercury detoxification process of Chelation that takes huge amounts of mercury out of kids' bodies who received the vaccines with thimerosal in them. After this process of Chelation, the kids had a lot of positive effects!

All in all, although further research needs to be conducted on both sides of the issue, I believe autism is linked to certain childhood vaccines in some way.