In The Rosie Project (Graeme Simsion, 2012) we are introduced to Don Tillman, a socially inept professor of genetics who appears to have all the pre-requisite impairments for a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome. However, he is not diagnosed during the course of the book, nor following marriage in the follow-up The Rosie Effect (Graeme Simsion, 2014). The possibility of mental illness is mentioned, although “no definitive diagnosis other than depression was ever recorded” (The Rosie Effect). Somewhere, twenty years in Don Tillman’s past, is a largely irrelevant medical file in which the tentative diagnoses of “‘depression, bipolar disorder? OCD?’ and ‘schizophrenia?’” have been suggested, but the best efforts of 1990s psychiatry failed to fit Don Tillman into any simplistic category (The Rosie Project).
Continue reading On the non-diagnosis of Professor Don Tillman