Activist Greta Thunberg has spoken about her Asperger’s syndrome diagnosis after she was criticized over the condition, saying that it makes her “different,” but that she considers it a “superpower.”
Thunberg, the public face of the school climate strike movement, said on Twitter that before she started her climate action campaign, she had “no energy, no friends and I didn’t speak to anyone. I just sat alone at home, with an eating disorder.”
She said she had not been open about her diagnosis of being on the autism spectrum to “hide” behind it, but because she knew “many ignorant people still see it as an ‘illness,’ or something negative.”
Photo: AFP
“When haters go after your looks and differences, it means they have nowhere left to go. And then you know you’re winning!” she wrote, using the hashtag #aspiepower.
While acknowledging that her diagnosis has limited her before, she said that it “sometimes makes me a bit different from the norm” and that she sees being different as a “superpower.”
Asperger’s syndrome was named after the Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger who, in the 1940s, described some of its characteristics, including difficulties in social interaction, nonverbal communication and reading body language.
In 2013, Asperger’s was folded into the wider diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder.
Tony Attwood, a world authority on Asperger’s, has said that people diagnosed are “usually renowned for being direct, speaking their mind, being honest and determined, and having a strong sense of social justice.”
Boys are more widely diagnosed than girls.
Thunberg was diagnosed four years ago.
She has acknowledged that her passion for her climate crisis work was partly down to viewing the world in stark terms.
In July, Thunberg hit back at the Australian News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt for writing a deeply offensive column that mocked her diagnosis.
He criticized her two-week trip across the Atlantic on a solar-powered yacht because, he said that “she refuses to fly and heat the planet with an airplane’s global warming gasses.”
Bolt repeatedly referred to Greta’s mental health, saying that she was “deeply disturbed.”
Thunberg responded by tweeting that she was “deeply disturbed” by the “hate and conspiracy campaigns” run by climate deniers such as Bolt.
On Friday, Thunberg was joined by crowds of US teenagers at a protest outside the UN headquarters in New York City following her transatlantic crossing.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A retired US colonel behind a privately financed rocket launch site in the Dominican Republic sees the project as a response to China’s dominance of the space race in Latin America. Florida-based Launch on Demand is slated to begin building a US$600 million facility in a remote region near the border with Haiti late this year. The project is designed to meet surging demand for the heavy-lift rockets needed to put clusters of satellites into orbit. It is also an answer to China’s growing presence in the region, said CEO Burton Catledge, a former commander of the US Air Force’s 45th Operations
Germany is considering Australia’s Ghost Bat robot fighter as it looks to select a combat drone to modernize its air force, German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius said yesterday. Germany has said it wants to field hundreds of uncrewed fighter jets by 2029, and would make a decision soon as it considers a range of German, European and US projects developing so-called “collaborative combat aircraft.” Australia has said it will integrate the Ghost Bat, jointly developed by Boeing Australia and the Royal Australian Air Force, into its military after a successful weapons test last year. After inspecting the Ghost Bat in Queensland yesterday,
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RSS