Bobby Fischer's psychiatric condition

Purpose of this post is to try to put some chess history straight... As someone who has had modest contact with asperger victims over recent years I am fascinated by the fact that a) Bobby Fischer showed many many signs of being a classic asperger sufferer, and b) no mention of this is made in any of the biographical accounts of his life. Even a BBC documentary missed it. Admittedly asperger's syndrome (a variant of autism), was little known during Fischer's lifetime, but subsequently it has been well documented and described. (Symptoms include amazing mental focus and ambition, underdeveloped social communication skills, affinity for (the innocence of) animals, passionate and often extreme attitudes to sectors of society and so on, many of which explain subsequent antisocial behaviour.) Would anyone with a psychiatric background be able to add any wisdom or facts to this hypothesis?

rogerthurman@hotmail.com

Dang Roger, now you've got me wondering if I've got it. Thanks a lot.

This armchair psychiatrist agrees that it looks like a combination of Asperger's and schizophrenia.

Anyone with a psychiatric background will hopefully know better than to attempt at a speculative diagnosis of a patient they've never examined.

Around here we tend to leave that to those without a psychiatric background anyway.

As a doctor of sorts, my diagnosis for Dear Bobby has always been "jerkism". 

This is irresponsible. Although it is not proven to extent of things like Evolution or Gravity, Asperger's theories have proven helpful to many, many people. It has been documented extensively.

TheGrobe makes a fair point, but we are talking about dead person on an internet forum.

Wow, I feel at home with some of the replies here, Robk44 I couldn't agree more.

Does anyone else think that playing and studying a game constantly, where the goal is to constrict your opponent while making no consessions for your own position might cause some of the behavior seen in fischer in certain people.

I had to change that.

And this is why it's a syndrome:  A collective set of symptoms commonly found together and characteristic of a single underlying condition.

It's quite possible that the causality runs the other way.

+1 to both of TheGrobe's posts.

the value of a theory is its ability to explain, predict, and modify.

Hundreds of thousands of children's lives have improved dramatically through the behaviour modification methods available through thinking in terms of Asperger's.

Yet some people want to say it is not real, or want to bash it as an "unscientific scam"? I hope this position is simply out of ignorance, not malice.

              "Bobby Fischer Goes To War", by David Edmonds   Harper Collins publishers.    And  "EndGame"  by Frank Brady   Broadway Books.

I have little knowledge of autism conditions but I have never seen it said that they are degenerative, indeed I think there is a view that autistic children often improve a bit as they reach maturity. To set against that Fischer seemed to get a lot worse in his late twenties and then deteriorated further from there.

Plainly he had social and mental problems but whether they fit neatly into some category or were all his own I don't know. I'd guess the second though and perhaps with some undiagnosed physical condition driving the deterioration.

Whenever I hear about how successful he was at chess I think how proud I am for my pathetic ~900 rating. I am healthy....well... anyway....

This is a good read ...

http://thechessmuseum.blogspot.com/2010/05/fischer-and-aspergers-syndrome-more.html

And BTW, Asperger's is a syndrome, which falls into a different category than a disease.  It describes an array of behaviours and symptoms.

I wish someone who knew him could ring in and give an objective backyard assessment now that he's gone....without feeling he'd lash out with a payback.

Vicious anti-semitsm and general conspiracy theorizing is not a symptom or association of Asperger's.

Fischer was an asshole. You can dig around for a diagnosis if that makes you feel better but don't lump in people on the autistic spectrum with that scumbag.

Is it possible that Fischer was both Asperger's and a jerk?

Not all people with Asperger's are jerks. Not all jerks have Aspergers. But certainly they could coincide.

For the record my brother has Asperger's, but he's gotten better at things as he's gotten older. I don't know much about Fischer but if he degenerated as he got older than maybe it wasn't Asperger's. Or not entirely so, anyway. Asperger's can (and to my understanding, often does) coincide with other psychiatric issues.

Jerkspergersaphrenic.......itis   maybe on the end of it?

"A Psychobiography of Bobby Fischer," by Joseph G Ponterotto, PhD.