The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

pen name. “Human society has been mostly an immoral violent bedlam,” he wrote. There’s an endless cycle
of crime, corruption, disease, and environmental degradation. The answer to consumption is always more
consumption, and society lacks any mechanism for finding a balance between humans and nature. At our
core, we are really just beasts. S.’s conclusion was stark: “Living and participating in society is madness
and criminal.” Unless you are a hermit, in a state of permanent retreat from all others, he wrote, you are in
some ways guilty of destroying the planet.
After his arrest, Knight was examined by a forensic psychologist hired by the state of Maine to evaluate
his mental health. Court documents show that the state considered Knight to have “complete competency.”
The state also offered three diagnoses: Asperger’s disorder, depression, or possible schizoid personality
disorder.
No surprise with the Asperger’s. For a while, every smart and shy eccentric from Bobby Fischer to Bill
Gates was hastily fitted with this label, and many were more or less believably retrofitted, including Isaac
Newton, Edgar Allan Poe, Michelangelo, and Virginia Woolf. Newton had great trouble forming
friendships and probably remained celibate. In Poe’s poem Alone he wrote that “all I lov’d—I lov’d alone.”
Michelangelo is said to have written, “I have no friends of any sort and I don’t want any.” Woolf killed
herself.
Asperger’s disorder, once considered a subtype of autism, was named after the Austrian pediatrician
Hans Asperger, a pioneer, in the 1940s, in identifying and describing autism. Unlike other early
researchers, according to the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, Asperger felt that autistic people could
have beneficial talents, especially what he called a “particular originality of thought” that was often beautiful
and pure, unfiltered by culture or discretion, unafraid to grasp at extremely unconventional ideas. Nearly
every autistic person that Sacks observed appeared happiest when alone. The word “autism” is derived from
autos, the Greek word for “self.”
“The cure for Asperger’s syndrome is very simple,” wrote Tony Attwood, a psychologist and Asperger’s
expert who lives in Australia. The solution is to leave the person alone. “You cannot have a social deficit
when you are alone. You cannot have a communication problem when you are alone. All the diagnostic
criteria dissolve in solitude.”
Officially, Asperger’s disorder no longer exists as a diagnostic category. The diagnosis, having been
inconsistently applied, was replaced, with clarified criteria, in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; Asperger’s is now grouped under the umbrella term autism
spectrum disorder, or ASD.
It was unclear if Knight really did have ASD. A half dozen autism experts and clinical psychologists
reviewed Knight’s story. All of them said that it was impossible to make an accurate diagnosis without
meeting the patient, but they agreed to comment. Thomas W. Frazier, the director of the Center for Autism
at the Cleveland Clinic, felt it was “pretty obvious” that Knight had autisic traits, especially his lack of eye
contact, his sensory touchiness, and his absence of friends. Autism has a genetic component, and Knight’s
family, so private and quiet, could possess what’s known as a broad autism phenotype.
The South African neuroscientist Henry Markram, whose son is on the autism spectrum, has explained
the disorder with what he calls the “intense world” theory—motions, sounds, and lights that most of us
naturally disregard feel to an autistic person like an endless assault, their life a permanent visit to Times
Square. Autistic people take in too much and learn too fast, overwhelmed not only by their own emotions
but by the emotions of others. Looking at a person’s face is like staring at a strobe light; a squeaky