Anyone raised in a similar situation?
My parents are immigrants from the Soviet Union, so I grew up thinking that my dad was just “weird” because he was an immigrant, but that this was normal behavior. Then as I got older and I started hanging out with other friends whose parents were also immigrants, I quickly realized that my dad was more than just weird, he was fully dysfunctional.
My dad is not normal, to say the least. One of the clearest signs of his mental illness is his addiction to online chess. For as long as I can remember, my dad has been furiously addicted to playing online chess, for years through Yahoo.com and then recently through other websites. (If this was purely autism you’d expect that he’d stick with the same website, no?)
What do I mean by “furiously addicted”? Well, my dad will sit at the edge of his seat with his face glued a few inches away from the screen, playing online chess with either real time opponents or simply a bot for hours at a time (sometimes all day long). He has a very aggressive stimming pattern that he engages in, where his entire face scrunches up and he flails his hands at the side of his head while making a repetitive whistle noise. He does this over and over and over again after Every. Single. Move. for hours on end. And don’t even dare getting near him while he’s in this trance, otherwise he’ll scream things like “I’ll kill you!” in Russian and even start to get aggressively physical if you don’t go away. When I was little, I remember him putting my mom in crutches when she tried to stop him from playing, having to witness my mom crying grabbing her leg while my dad’s full attention was on continuing to furiously play his idiotic online chess game.
We’ve tried confronting my dad about this behavior, but his response is always that “Chess is intelligent and builds brain power”, even when we try to explain to him that he’s being a complete idiot and throwing his life away. He’s delusional and simply in denial.
How would you diagnose his condition? I’ve been thinking Asperger’s, but also considering Bipolar disorder or perhaps Manic Depression.