The Challenge of Driving With Asperger's

Over the last two decades, researchers have examined the risks faced by young drivers with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and tried to find ways to help them to learn to drive safely, an issue explored in this week's Science Times. Now those researchers and driving instructors are finding themselves faced with a new challenge: the growing number of teenagers with Asperger syndrome and other forms of autism, conditions defined by deficits in social skills and obsessive interests that can make learning to drive especially difficult.

"Driving is a social act," says Dr. Jamie Dow, the medical adviser for safety issues for Quebec's government-run auto insurance and licensing agency. "It involves obeying rules and cooperating with other drivers."

For young people with Asperger's, both parts of that equation can pose problems.

Obeying rules is generally a good thing, but can be taken too far if rules are applied inflexibly or without taking into context into account. For example, does a "Stop at White Line" sign mean that the line is where you should stop only if you need to stop - or that you should stop every time you come to it?

And cooperating with other drivers involves perhaps the hardest task for people with Asperger's: reading nonverbal social cues. On the road, that happens through the "gestures" drivers make through the motion of their cars - by changing lanes boldly or hesitantly, for instance. Those motions amount to signals flashed from driver to driver so routinely that most people are hardly aware of the messages being sent about intention or mood.

"There's some discussion in the field that driving in traffic is like reading a person's face," said Lissa Robins Kapust, of the DriveWise program at Beth Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. "The driving scene may be friendly, it may be frenetic, it may be angry."

ASPERGER'S SYNDROME AND DRIVING Marc Segar was diagnosed in 1981 with High-functioning Autism at the age of seven. This was later changed to Asperger's Syndrome in the early 1990's. Segar wrote two books called "The Battles of the Autistic thinker" and the "Survival Guide for people with Asperger's Syndrome". Segar eventually passed his driving test but took his own life in December 1997, at the age of 23.

In the latter publication, Segar said, and I agree with every word, "Driving is quite a bizarre skill to learn". He was right. For most people with AS, learning to drive a car, and driving itself, can be very difficult. Some with AS may be able to drive. I have two friends with AS I have met through this website who can. One passed her driving test, at the fourth attempt, in February 1996 eight weeks after her 29th birthday. Scandalously, she wasn't diagnosed until ten-and-a-half years later, five months before her 40th birthday. The other, a close friend from Ohio, USA, passed her test in September 2001, four days after her 20th birthday and eleven months after she was diagnosed. However, there are some with AS who can't drive. There are some who, frankly, never will be able to.