Antonio Curkeet-Green understood only too well how the other kids saw him in his early years in high school. He was the “retard,” the guy with the fanny pack stuffed with medication and the scruffy, unwashed hair, who talked way too much about The Lord of the Rings and couldn’t take a hint. Most students avoided him; the mean ones bullied him. He dreaded those hallway trips between classes. At lunch, he mostly hid.
But he knew he would have to face the cafeteria crowd eventually. “It’s like two molecules colliding with each other,” he reasoned. “They are just going to hit in the same path.”
It’s been 16 years since Asperger’s became an official diagnosis among autism spectrum disorders, and Mr. Curkeet-Green is part of a new cohort of teenagers and young adults who now find themselves navigating the always complicated social environment and pecking order of high school and university, facing such challenges as dating and finding summer jobs.
According to a new study being released Monday, Ontario has at least 5,800 students with autism spectrum disorders in high school, and about 1,100 of them can be expected to move on to university – a conservative count, the report suggests, and one expected to increase steadily in the future. And while services for them in high school are limited, they are even more so at universities.
The characteristics of Asperger’s syndrome differ widely between individuals, but typically they include a lack of social intuition, fixation on subjects and rules, and repetitive behaviour. People with Asperger’s often have trouble making eye contact and reading facial expressions, and they may have difficulty dealing with lights and noise (in Mr. Curkeet-Green’s case, pop music left him curled up in a ball on the floor). That makes high school – with all its social nuances – an especially difficult transition.
“When you are a little kid, your parents just love you to pieces, so you’ve got them,” says Susan Alcorn MacKay, director of disability services at the Glenn Crombie Centre of Cambrian College in Sudbury and co-author of the new study conducted for the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario. “But then the [friends] become more important, and every year that goes by without friendship or with rejection and misunderstanding deepens the anxiety.”
Besides being at a higher risk of depression and anxiety, young people with Asperger’s can find their behaviour misinterpreted as harassing or dangerous. They may also be extremely creative thinkers in their area of interest, Ms. Alcorn MacKay points out. “It’s a big loss to society if we don’t give them the resources they need” – such as quiet rooms on campus and a more intensive introduction to university life at the beginning of the year.
“One of the huge misconceptions is that they are normal people who are weird,” says Lynn Koegel, a University of California psychologist who researches autism and co-author of the recent book Growing Up on the Spectrum.
Dr. Koegel runs a centre at the university that provides therapy and counselling to people with autism spectrum disorders, including many teenagers and young adults. Misunderstandings happen easily: She recalls one student with Asperger’s who took a date to a party, got bored and simply went home, leaving the young woman to find her own way back. Last week, she was called in after a fight broke out on a dorm floor between a student with Asperger’s, who felt a roommate was turning up the music on purpose to annoy him, and his roommate, who thought the student didn’t like him because he wouldn’t look him in the eye. “Basically, they didn’t understand each other.”
