Section A: Social Communication and Social Interaction
Chantelle clearly has difficulties with social communication and social interaction. Her slow processing and reliance on rote learning to get by results in stilted and strange social interaction. She struggles to understand what people are saying and thus simply comes out with random statements. She has a tendency to hog the conversation and speak about her own life, her own worries and concerns while showing very little interest in the concerns of others.
Chantelle demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the world around her. She relies on rules. She checks with her family before she does anything. This actually reduces her vulnerability to being exploited because she will only do something with the approval of a trusted person. Although she wants a job, a partner, a circle of friends, her world really revolves pretty much exclusively around her own everyday life.
Because of her slow processing speed and difficulty taking in information orally, it is completely unrealistic to expect Chantelle to be able to interpret facial expression and body language during a conversation. This means that she is unable to pick up on subtle signals that people are not interested in her, or that they are no longer interested. This also applies to electronic means of communication. Chantelle has no idea how often to text someone, or how to tell when the person is losing interest.
As a result, she finds it virtually impossible to make and to keep friends. Any attempts are short lived as people lose interest in her and stop responding. This leaves Chantelle feeling hurt and confused because she does not understand what went wrong. Her social contact is with her family, although she has a great need for social interaction.
Section B: Restricted, Repetitive, Patterns of Behaviour, Interests, or Activities.
For this section, you have to meet two out of four criteria. Chantelle easily meets the criterion regarding difficulty with change and inflexible adherence to routines.
As we saw above, Chantelle struggles with changes in her planned schedule because she is unable to adjust the other parts of her schedule in order to accommodate.
Chantelle is very rigid in her thinking because she lives by rules and rote learning. She has a plan for her life: 1) get a job. 2) get friends, 3) get a partner. In her thinking, she cannot get friends until she has a job because she needs to be able to tell people what she does and she does not want to tell people she is unemployed. She has no interest in trying to make friends. Add to this, her rule to not speak to strangers and it is clear that she has very limited opportunity to come into appropriate contact with people.
It is very difficult to persuade Chantelle to be more flexible in her thinking. To perhaps consider doing things more flexibly and less rigidly. Perhaps it might be a good idea if she were to at least practice making friends before she gets a job.
Chantelle has a very small range of interests. She has very few interests and a very narrow life. She likes drawing, writing stories, watching films, and going to the gym and that is about it. It is doubtful how much she actually understands of the films she watches because her stories demonstrate no understanding of the adult world and are very simplistic in their characters and relationships between characters.
Chantelle is not able to handle a conversation that deals with many different topics. In fact she does not get much further than herself and her own very narrow life.