ABSTRACT
Wendy Lawson, now an extremely successful writer and teacher with Asperger syndrome, was twenty when she attempted suicide. Her apparent apathy towards life and her desperate confusion (she had just lost her job as a trainee nurse) resulted in her admission to psychiatric hospital. She writes, ‘A deep dark awareness of depression and nothingness over took me. . . . Completely withdrawn and feeling I had fallen into a bottomless pit, I was placed on a program of medication’. She was diagnosed as having schizophrenia, a diagnosis that took her twenty-five years to overturn. It was only after one of her own children was found to have an autistic disorder that she finally received the diagnosis of Asperger syndrome (Lawson 1998).
