Anemone's Research Emporium

Touched with Invisibility?

Anemone Cerridwen
July 5, 2008

I've just been rereading Kay Redfield Jamison's book Touched With Fire, which is a fascinating look at manic-depression (bipolar disorder), and its occurrence in highly creative people and their families, and it's really got me thinking about autism in famous historical figures (and their families). Now, there's been lots of speculation about autism with respect to some famous people, but also much disagreement (and I'm one of the disagreers a lot of the time). Jamison, on the other hand, is working with a well-known and easy-to-describe disorder which just about anybody could spot with a good checklist to work from. Lucky her. Of course, she also knows her stuff.

The manic part of manic-depression seems to make it easy to diagnose historical figures. Jamison describes people who swing back and forth between periods of normal functioning, intense or volatile energy (to the point of dysfunction), and black depression (also to the point of dysfunction). People with manic-depression typically have problems with alcoholism, extravagant spending and debt, unstable behaviour, chaotic relationships, periods of insanity, time spent in mental hospitals or under the care of physicians for insanity or instability, and high rates of suicide. Manic-depression appears to be highly heritable (though environmental factors appear to have an effect on if or how much the disorder emerges), and Jamison describes a history of alcoholism, instability, depression, time spent in mental hospitals, and suicide among relatives of these people as well.

On the other hand, speculation about possible historical cases of autism suffers from two weaknesses. One is that, unlike with manic-depression, we do not yet have a solid idea of what autism is and what it looks like in adults, since there is very little research on autistic adults even today. We also still don't know that much about the range of norms in child development either (e.g. when a developmental delay tends to matter and when it doesn't), since nobody really paid much attention to child development until the 1940s, and it's still a new field. Second, we also really don't seem to know that much about what it might look like in relatives, although we do know it is also highly heritable, and there has been some work on the broader autism phenotype (BAP). I don't know much about the BAP, but what I've seen doesn't seem to have much resemblance to the popular image of autism, and it also doesn't seem like the sort of thing people note in biographies either. Unlike manic-depression, which really puts on a show, well-behaved autism is just not that riveting to watch. If Dionysus and Ariadne and their amazing road show represent manic-depression (as Jamison suggests), then autism is probably represented by the shadowy Hades and Persephone, rulers of the underworld, who don't get out much and are rarely seen.

So instead of an extravagance of alcoholism and suicide, what can we expect to see in the families of autistic people, and in possible historical cases of autism? Well, if the fetal testosterone theory is correct, then abnormalities related to underdevelopment of the left hemisphere (and thymus?) might pop up in historical figures with autism and their relatives: for example left-handedness or mixed-handedness; homosexuality; people with language or communication abnormalities (although who knows what that might look like historically); people with allergies or environmental sensitivities; people with strong right hemisphere gifts, and in general, people who are unconventional. Among relatives, it might make sense to look for a surplus of family members who don't marry or leave home. Incompetence in business (from underdoing it rather than overdoing it) might also be a marker. In my own family, my mother's extended family runs to gay men, famous lawyers/politicians, and gifted women no one knows what to do with, but my mother's father was a Jesuit, then a government employee. My father's extended family runs to highly successful businessmen (you've heard of one if you're Canadian), but my father is an accountant and his father the not-very-savvy inheritor of a family business (successful, but in an inert kind of way). There is mixed-handedness/left-handedness on both sides, but who writes about that in biographies?

There may be fields in which autistic people and relatives of autistic people actually do concentrate, the way manic-depression is over-represented among poets, writers and painters. Autism is frequently linked (possibly erroneously) with high tech, but the high tech industry hasn't been around that long, so it's not likely to be of help in diagnosing people in the past. Science in an earlier, less competitive, era might be a place to look for similar temperaments. Autistic people may also turn up in fields that emphasize nitpickyness over competitiveness, for example some areas of law. Alternately, possible famous autistic people may turn up in fields that do not require collaboration: writing, painting, and music composition are all solitary pursuits; or in collaborative fields that are highly structured and organized, but that allow eccentricities (possibly the film industry in the studio era). Unfortunately, it's most likely that in the past autistic people stayed close to home and worked in family businesses/on family farms, or in workplaces that didn't have high social demands (letter carrier, file clerk) so we're not likely to see many of them in the history books. And for those who are famous, autism, unlike manic-depression, is probably never going to be obvious enough in adulthood for us to be completely sure of a diagnosis.

Of course, we still don't really know what autism is, so I could be completely wrong.

Reference

Jamison, Kay Redfield, 1993. Touched with fire: Manic-Depressive illness and the artistic temperament. The Free Press, Macmillan, NY.