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No More "Asperger's Syndrome"
cstacy writes "The American Psychiatric Association is dropping Asperger's Syndrome from the upcoming edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) Its symptoms will be included under the umbrella of Autism Spectrum Disorder, which includes everything from severe autism such as children who do not talk or interact, to milder forms of autism. Asperger's disorder is impairment in social interaction and repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behavior, activities and interests, without significant delay in language or cognitive development. Often the person has high intelligence and vast knowledge on narrow subjects but lacks social skills. DSM-5 comes out in May and will be the first major rewrite in 19 years."
And I thought the headline meant they had a cure!
...to Slashdot Spectrum Disorder.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
No more Aspergers, Pluto is not a planet, life starts at conception, etc... Labelling something only help perpetrate the misunderstandings surrounding the very real issues. We need to stop calling things stuff and start actually understanding them in meaningful ways.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
how's nbc gonna write this into 'parenthood' ??
One advantage of the term "autism spectrum" is that it doesn't have a double entendre of "ass boogers".
Disclosure: I have this condition.
I've worked with a number of people who share all the Asperger's traits. Rather socially awkward, some Obsessiveness, not the most physicaly gifted. Yes, I worked with scientists and engineers. But they were just different, and their traits were not a disability, it was who they were. And they are very good at doing what they do. And we all get along just fine.
The only people hurt by this decision is the Autism Speaks people, who will need to revise their statistics.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
At first I thought I had wandered into Psychiatry Today, but then I realized that no, I was still on Slashdot. What is this story doing here?
Not that it's a good thing. Now when I make those curt judgmental remarks due my lack of a sensible social filter, I'm just being an asshole.
Sorry but a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder is such a wide range of issues that we need things to be broken down a bit more. Saying something is ASD is as bad as labeling it Pervasive Developmental Disorder - Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS) which is a HUGE umbrella term. I'm an Asperger Syndrome person, and not quite like everyone else but still a diagnosis of AS fits me much better than ASD.
Shout out to the Aspie Quiz, go take it! - HEX
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
"impairment in social interaction and repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behavior, activities and interests"
This describes everyone I work with, myself included.
Apparently, one can make a good living at being autistic. :)
Sent from my ENIAC
Why does it matter if the label changes. The people who are affected by Aspergers Syndrome/Mild Autism Spectrum Disorder, such as myself, will be the same people regardless. The DSM V is really not changing anything significant to reality.
They want to add shyness to the DSM and remove Asperger. That's not logic.
Whew, thank God it's the 30th anniversary of AIDS. Now that it's trendy again we don't have to worry about losing Aspergers. For a minute I thought we would have to start worrying about "ordinary" medical conditions.
Although I still hope for the day when People will cover star studded fundraisers for corns and calluses.
Three Squirrels
I have met people with Asperger's and I have met people with Autism and I have met both treated and mostly untreated. People with these two diseases are wildly separate in functionality and the ability to function. I would no more say that Asperger's is in the spectrum of autism than I would say freckles are in the spectrum of melanoma. Technically it might be correct that they both have root similarities but a useless categorization. The treated people with Asperger's that I have witnessed have become shockingly functional human beings achieving at a level well in the top 1% while having few interpersonal issues. Whereas the best I have seen with autisim are people who marginally function in most areas of societal interaction and usually at best over develop one or two areas such as piano. So it seems to me that the strategy with people with autism is to help them cope with life whereas with Asperger's the goal should be to give them a few extra social skills so that they can thrive. Like melanoma and freckles with one your focus is to keep the person from becoming dead, with the other your goal is to find a good sun hat.
I am willing to bet that there are quite a few Asperger's programmers out there but very few autistic programmers; testers maybe.
Granted, there are many people who view this as a disorder. But there are also those of us who view it as a gift and view the challenges and the setbacks that it has presented as experiences that have had an extremely positive impact on our lives. While I sympathize with those who have trouble dealing with it, this is who I am and I would never want this to change.
I wold never want to be labeled as someone with a disorder, having a minimal to non-existent social life is fine by me. This is just putting a negative label on people who already have a lot of social stigma to deal with.
My entire team, who fix operational Unix problems for a fortune-5 company whose name rhymes with "EG", are Asberger's. If they weren't,they wouldn't have survived my job interview. I don't care what DSM-whateverthefark calls it, but, if you can't context switch many times a day and intensely follow the important shiny thing, then you are not cut out to be top-level support for a "fix the broken stuff" team. Maybe it's a talent rather than a disorder. /shrug. Discuss.
Often the person has high intelligence and vast knowledge on narrow subjects but lacks social skills ...those with mediocre intelligence and vast knowledge on wide range of subjects, but lacks social skills will still be known as "Ass at the Bar Syndrome"... I'll looking at you Cliffy.
Tom, get off the couch. For Suri's sake, try not to be such an asshole. And for FSM's sake, it's ok to come out of the closet.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
This is terrible. Now Slashdotters will have to find a new disease to self-diagnose and blame for their undeveloped social skills. Might I suggest ASPD?
Why would you go to the bank if your account lacks funds?
The rest of your post made perfect sense though.
Sheldon won't be happy to be declared insane. His mother has tested him.
Most ridiculously named condition, ever. Seriously, the guy who, I assume, this is named after really has to change his name, but more importantly we cannot call something aspergers. Names are important, and calling anything ass-burgers is ridiculous.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Whatever will CWC now that he is diagnosed with that which he hates?
Will this help apk stay on his meds more regularly?
And whatever will the rest of you speshul snowflake internet/self diagnosed asspies do now that you're just fucking autistic?
So basically nerds no longer have any cover for their lack of social skills?
... as someone "on the spectrum", it really disturbs me that bad science is permitted for the sake of politics.
I know the trolls are lining up to post "Ass-burgers is fake anyway, I met an Ass-pie once, and he was fine."
So let me say this first: If you've met an Aspie and dismissed the condition because that person "seemed fine", then please consider that what you didn't see was the countless hours of practice and stress and anxiety of being able to pretend to be that way; the habitual exhaustion from the effort of doing so; the depression and abysmal self-esteem from never, never understanding the people around you or being able to tell whether people actually like you or not. The years of teasing and abuse, the subsequent years of retrospectively realising all the other things which were teasing and abuse at the time but we couldn't tell at the time. The incessant Impostor's Syndrome, which only gets worse the higher you rise -- if you can move forward in your career. Who speak nineteen languages, but get scurvy because they forget to eat. No, seriously: people whose executive dysfunction requires the scheduling of bathing and eating, or else a rigid routine, where even slight interruptions can trigger a panic attack. The meltdowns and fear and frustration and despair.
And you don't see the ones who don't "seem fine". Who weren't as fortunate as those of us who got a series of lucky breaks and have been able to work around our disabilities and take advantage of our strengths. The ones who killed themselves in despair or ended up on the streets or were institutionalised or are housebound on antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds.
The DSMV changes to the Autism Spectrum diagnoses have been widely stated by the people writing them to be for the purpose of excluding people from being diagnosed on the spectrum. Because when people started actually looking at how many people had an ASD, it turns out to be much more than anyone thought.
Obviously it can't be because so many people were swept under the carpet for all those years, so it must be a problem with the definition. Hey, if we change the definition of Cancer to exclude any condition of the skin, that means that all those people with melanomas must be cured, right?
"This is a Hollywood movie: when it comes to the Laws of Physics, they're lucky if they get Gravity!" --- my wife
Now they only have about 2,198 more physchiatric diseases that need to be striken from the record. Perhaps then they could focus on the few real ones instead of just inventing names for common everyday life.
Hypochondria: only disease hyponchondriacs don't self-diagnose.
People on psych meds are nuts.
After you do: damned. Can't quit 'em, can't have a poignant relationship with 'em, don't know whether happy's from the bottle, or they're making you crazy.
There's more to social skills than conformity or infirmity. Hell the Founding Fathers were rebels, god bless 'em.
And pharma laughs all the way to the bank to shill out a pittance for congress and hands-off pez dispensers to bump their business: pushing drugs.
Autism and Asperger's aren't the same thing, and Asperger's is for doctor shoppers and hypochondriacs.
Well no, humans aren't naturally free of depression or anxiety, but that involves the development of coping skills, to be: naturally free of depression, anxiety, and brand new drugs without a generation of experience that change your head, and meet definitions of addictive.
In relatively very few relevant cases, in psychotherapy and as part of the development of life skills, there are true sufferers for whom psych meds are critical for their plain assimilation into culture. Many of the rest are addicts.
Where in the Hippocratic oath does it say "don't make addicts?"
Addiction's a health problem. And so is hypochondria, and so is a need to fit everybody into "nuts".
Next you'll be suggesting that alcoholism isn't an easily cured phony addiction which any sensible and decent person can handle with a kick in the pants.
We're talking about a group whose defining characteristic is that they're antisocial. What this really tells you is that people with Asperger's -- as a group -- were not socially-connected enough to wrangle the politics needed to retain the title. They didn't have friends on the rewrite committee. Being brilliant is one thing. Having the social connections to impose your brilliance on others is another.
Most people I know who have genuine, diagnosed Asperger's Syndrome already call themselves Autistic. They use the term Asperger's sparingly, only to explain afterwards, once they are sure the other person understands where they're coming from. They do so because so many assholes on the Internet have latched onto Asperger's Syndrome as a synonym for being a socially maladjusted asshole of various varieties.
On the other hand, Most people I know who have self-diagnosed, "Internet Asperger's" -- the "I'm a dick but it's MEDICAL so you can't call me out on my bad behavior" syndrome that so many forum twits have -- well, they can go fuck themselves. I would think this would finally put the nail in the coffin for that particular misuse, but I've already seen the various "Assburgers" trolls start to call themselves Autistic instead.
Such is life on the interwebs.
I understand the sentiment that ASDs are not necessarily "diseases" and that it may be inappropriate or undesirable to label them as such. Yes, yes, lots of scientists and engineers and mathematicians and musicians and so on and so forth; lots of these people would qualify as subjects of ASD.
That fact does not mean we should ignore the condition. As someone with moderate formerly-Asperger's-Syndrome afflictions, I think it would be wonderful to have both my analytic and creative aptitudes while also not being socially awkward. The capacities are not mutually exclusive. I can recognize when my behavior is a social detriment, I can analyze the behavior and trace it back to its psychological roots, but I cannot mentally pull myself away from it or alter it in any significant way.
And frankly, it does kind of suck. So maybe don't call it a "disease" or a "disorder" if you don't want to. Social impairment is social impairment, and if social interaction is something you value as a human, you may consider yourself to be impaired if you have psychological hangups which preclude your ability to feel "normal" in social situations.
It is also important to recognize the economic power of social aptitude, and it would be naive to suggest that humanity should attempt to cease its natural social behaviors and in order to accommodate the needs of the infinitely perplexed.
How can it be a disease?
Many geeks are very proud of their special skills which, co-incidentally, fit the description of the Asperger syndrome.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Somehow I suspect that people who exhibit ASD symptoms but are otherwise high functioning will still continue to self-identify with the term Asperger's.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
To all who used to claim to suffer from Asperger Syndrome, but are now miraculously cured since calling yourself autistic doesn't quite have that je ne sais quoi. Seriously though, like parents claiming ADHD for there kids to explain troublesome behavior, this has to have been the #1 claim for self-justification of strange social behaviour of awkward netizens. Even if only for that reason, it's good to see it classified as a serious disorder that's actually no fun at all...
To be fair, most of that is people not following the DSM correctly. Quite commonly they gloss over "Causes the subject significant distress" when diagnosing a condition.
Personally, I've never been too comfortable using the term "Asperger's syndrome" given its history. Dr. Asperger was an Austrian pediatrician who developed a clinical interest in psychiatric disorders. He was the medical director of special education in the University Children's Hospital in Vienna. In 1944 he published a description of what we now call Asperger's syndrome.
By this point, some alarm bells should be ringing in your head. That's at the end of WWII, in an axis country. Sure enough, they were euthanizing children en mass at that facility. Dr. Asperger's role was to determine which would be allowed to live under the eugenics regulations, and which would be killed. I encourage you to re-read the definition of his syndrome with this context in mind... And lest you think he was saving kids, he never objected to his role and kept his job until he retired in 1970. Furthermore, while history is sketchy on exactly who arranged it, 400 disabled children were killed for research purposes (specifically brain dissection), on the order of a pediatrician at Dr. Asperger's hospital...
Current research shows that Asperger's and Autism are an arbitrary distinction, which one might expect from the history. Also, Grunya Sukhareva discovered the same thing in Russia 18 years earlier.
To be fair, much of this is connecting the dots from an unclear historic record. Most of the records were destroyed, hence why Dr. Asperger wasn't executed for war crimes. Of course, maybe he heroically tried to save as many children as possible, but there's no evidence for it and he never made that claim.
Ass purgers syndrome
This is the most ridiculous strawman I've seen in a long time.
You first make up a position for others and then rail against it as stupid. Pointless when you're the only one creating that situation in the first place.
Now, as to the point you're making, you seem to think that just because it impacts people negatively, it has to be autism or a syndrome. I assure you I know many people who suffer negatively from their personality problems. Some are shy and it holds them back. Some are just assholes and it holds them back.
Impostor's syndrome is not a medical disorder either.
Forgetting to eat because you are obsessed is not Asperger's Syndrome, it's obsessive-compulsive disorder. Same with panic attacks over not following rigid routines.
Stop trying to find labels for what you are. Be what you are. Like all the other people who have problems day to day, learn to deal with them and spend less time making up cute names like Aspie for problems you would rather be surmounting. Move forward, or at least try to, like the rest of us do. Instead of spending times making more and more labels and excuses for why you fail.
Asperger's disorder is impairment in social interaction and repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behavior, activities and interests,
Hey ! It's Grover Norquist!
Oh, great. So now my clinical diagnosis is "autism" instead of just "Asperger's"? Like the social stigma of being more or less dysfunctional in most people's eyes isn't enough.
To begin their department have a diagnostic space with several axes onto where the classic autism and aspberger diagnoses are just specified areas in their diagnostic space. This is because the classic diagnoses are relatively static and might not pinpoint the correct treatments/remedies.
A big result of this is that they have realized that a lot of women with problems coping in society(crime,etc) in reality fits into parts of that diagnostic spectrum that would have made them fall out of the classic autism/aspergers diagnoses but still retain a multitude of "problems" in interactions with other people.
I'm unsympathetic and uncommunicative because I don't like you and I think you're all twats.
It's not a strawman, it's barely even paraphrasing many of the comments on this very post.
Impostor's Syndrome is not a medical disorder indeed. Well spotted. You get a gold star. But from my point of view, it's something I've heard that other people don't have. It's really common amongst Autists and Aspies.
Obsessive-Compulsive disorder is the compulsion to enact non-functional rituals. That is not the same thing as being aware that you don't notice that you're hungry, and getting into the habit of eating a hamburger at 8:00 on Tuesdays because that's hamburger time and if you don't do that then you won't get around to eating at all.
It's almost like you haven't got the slightest idea what you're talking about, but you read something on reddit once, and you'e an expert now.
"Some are just assholes", indeed. Congratulations: you're one of the trolls I was talking about.
"This is a Hollywood movie: when it comes to the Laws of Physics, they're lucky if they get Gravity!" --- my wife
Luckily girls don't like boys, girls like cars and money. Otherwise we'd be shit out of luck.
Am I the only one who thinks the thought process involved here may be to make it more difficult for those like Gary McKinnon to use Aspergers as a means to avoid extradition to the US?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_McKinnon
Or am I just a little too cynical?!?
Just my $0.03 (At current exchange rates, my £0.02 is worth more than your $0.02)
gmhowell do us a favor: Quit projecting, ya 1 line post karma whore troll.
Perfection Is For Robots. Human variability always evades "footprints". As does life. The world, reality, existence is a moving target. The "perfect", "flawless", unerring personality is as realistic an expectation as the "perfect race". Any such will be dramatically limited and doomed, by their very nature, to catastrophic extermination. Snotty prudishness, OTOH, *is* a very annoying and improductive defect. And, is possibly contagious, as well.
Hopefully this will reduce the number of attention whores roaming the intarwebs thumbing their chests and boasting "I'm an Aspie!"
also people like do better in a hands on educational model vs say a big college lecture setting.
Also the tech / trades schools are better for people like that but when employers pass people over who when to a tech school / who can do the job with on the job training that is discrimination.
My understanding is that the federal laws stating what conditions qualify a child for special education services include Autism, but do not mention Asperger's Syndrome. All other considerations of this move aside, if medical professionals now need to apply the label Autism to anyone they would have diagnosed with Asperger's, it could make dealing with school districts reluctant to loosen their special ed purse-strings that much more straight forward.
The district I live it has been great about just writing in Autism where they need to on forms to justify the services that make our daughter's educational experience much more managable, but I can well imagine districts that would balk if they see a diagnosis that is not on the list in the law books.
FWIW:
Only the name "Asperger's Syndrome" has been dropped. The collective set of symptoms and diagnostic criteria are in the DSM and there is no danger of the diagnosis disappearing. Just don't label it "Asperger's".
Apparently in some parts of the world (eg US) health insurers don't provide support because the word "Autism" is not in the name. If the label doesn't say autism then I guess it ain't autism. Go figure.
IMHO this is a particularly bad summary description.
What bothers me the most about modern mental 'disorders' is that they seem to have come about as a result of a 'popular' rejection of Freudian psychology -- in particular, relating to the role of nurture on the psyche.
The sad truth is, people who are afraid of social rejection probably learned that fear from the actions of their parents. Period. Now, I'm sure all of you self-protective parents are going to shortly mod this post into oblivion, but as someone who fell under the wheels of the 'autistic' bus, only to emerge and prove that diagnosis to be largely unfounded, I am quite adamant about my position.
If you parent improperly -- if you teach your child that people cannot be trusted -- you will have socially maladjusted children. It's just how it is. Simple cause and effect. Nurture, not nature.
However, much to my great personal suffering and on-going chagrin, we now live in a society that has decided, at some point along the modern road of ever-sharpening curves, that it's 'unproductive' to criticise parents about their parenting, but impractical to educate them properly, and politically difficult to take their children away from them when they're obviously doing them mental damage.
This has in turn led to a disastrous multi-generational scenario where children who had bad parents grew up to -- guess what -- be bad parents.
And now, to make that problem even worse than it already was, the 'powers that be' have decided 'in their infinite wisdom' that the nebulous definition of 'Asperger's Syndrome' could have been leading to 'unproductive' guilt in the minds of the parents of so-'afflicted' children, and that to solve this 'problem', we've opted to move this collection of symptoms over to the autism spectrum in an effort to re-assure these disconcerted parents that it's really a physical problem -- a congenital birth-defect -- and not anything they've personally done to their child.
To be quite frank, this is bullshit. Parenting is hard -- I understand that, and nobody is questioning that. But no parent should ever be given a 'free pass' to disassociate themselves from their child's social difficulties by being absolved of blame at every turn through bullshit 'diagnosis' that attempt to make everything a 'developmental' problem.
This does not encourage behaviour change on the part of parents, and only serves to only allow the damage to continue unabated, further aggravated by the ultimate stigmatisation of a child who is ultimately told that they were 'born defective', and that normality will be a hard road, if one even traversable at all.
The reality is, bad parenting breeds anxious, depressed, socially awkward children. This is obvious to anyone who contemplates it for even but a moment. This is the 'elephant in the room' -- children do not want to blame their parents. Parents do not wish to feel guilt about the lives of their children. So, we all dance around, blaming it on in-vitro 'accidents', or poor genetics -- anything but to face the truth, that socialisation is the ultimate responsibility of parents, and the failure of socialisation lies chiefly at their feet.
Well, I am here to lay that blame. It will not make me popular. But parents need to know that it may not be a congenital defect, but instead that at a crucial moment, you laid little Nancy down when she needed you most. Nobody wants to deal with that, but for the sake of the child, they should.
Personally, I think Asperger's Syndrome is just an expression of Neanderthal and Denisovian genes on the brain, but I'm not going to open up that can of worms (much more than I just did). What I would like to point out is that the reason that some people don't like to call Asperger's a medical condition is because they fail to separate the condition that causes poor development of some areas of the brain with the miraculous benefits of what sometimes happens when the brain reroutes and tries to compensate.
Scientists have already proved with transcranial magnetic stimulation that some patients spontaneously developed savant skills when select areas of their brains were shut down temporarily.
I guess my point is that just because some people get something awesome out of the deal doesn't mean it's not still autism.
How is it not Ass-burgers?
Because that's less funny to bullies.
I wonder what bullies will do with "autistic", especially since it has a positive mondegreen of "artistic" especially in nonrhotic dialects.
Communication with a single word has already been implemented in the land of Og: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_World_of_Og
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
So I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere in the comments above, and putting on my tin-foil hat for a moment: If there's no more "Asperger's Sydrome", I wonder if the US will then claim that they do not recognise that disorder/disease when pursuing hackers and pirates for deportation from the UK when they use it as an appeal against the deportation.
(and yes.. I hate the terms 'hacker' and 'pirate' too..)
As if Autism Spectrum Disorder isn't already misdiagnosed enough. And Asperger's Syndrome is another one that gets nonsense diagnoses. It's really gotten to a point where a kid who's slightly different will get diagnosed with autism. In fact, I've seen a school try that with a friend's son. I've interacted with this kid many a time; he's perfectly normal. It's like lack of conformity is an illness.
But I can't help but wonder if there aren't monied interests behind all this. This sort of thing is a huge money-making machine. And it's a convenient scapegoat for parents. Is your kid poorly behaved? Lack of discipline? Give him a disorder and it's no longer your fault.
What gets me is that no one questions the statistics. In 1980 the autism rate was over 1 in 1000. Earlier this year it was claimed to be 1 in 88. How is that possible? Some of the suspected causes have been disproved. So far nothing in our environment has been found to coincide with this rise. The only thing I can possible think of is the rise of wireless technology. But I think the real culprit is simple misdiagnosis.
Real autism is nothing like the crap people bring up. A family friend has a daughter with autism, and she can't function without being cared for constantly. She told us an interesting story about New Jersey. It was found that the autism rates there were exceptionally high compared to the rest of the country. Someone did some digging and realized that the reason for this is that parents with autistic kids were moving to the state because that's where a lot of the best research was occurring. That said, I continue to find articles talking about epidemic levels of autism in the state. The reality is even hinted at in some of those articles, but "journalists" would never let those facts get in the way of sensationalism.
Aspergers doesnt exist and people need to stop pretending it does.
Fuck the DSM.
It's called righteous anger motherfuckers.
People with Asperger's just don't conform to the expectations most people have, and unless you have some background and understanding, it is just baffling, and they tend to get slotted into categories people already have, like "rude" or "difficult," when really something else is going on. My personal experience (family member) is that you keep saying to yourself or the other person "Why can't you ..?" where ? is something that fits expectations, and finally you realize the answer is that "because you have a non-typical brain wiring." Once you get that it becomes easier because you understand that this probably isn't fixable, and you're going to have to alter your expectations. But most people don't get to that level of understanding of Asperger's.
"Asperger's shouldn't even be considered a mental disorder unless it's really serious like it cuts into your social life. ...
No longer will they feel outcast, no longer will they have to prove themselves, to rise above the rest of society simply because of a stupid name given by a German doctor. It's too broad of a disease with only one, maybe two specific symptoms."
Hmm, now we have a couple of new problems. One, people with these characteristics still have to prove themselves, because we just make social mistakes that confuse other people. Where this gets all fuzzy is whether you present yourself to other people under the banner of the medical determination or not. For the audience of some people in these categories, it makes them feel better that your confusing behavior "is something medical" because then they can go into "oh, it's not his fault" mode. I've done the presentation both with and without the medical banner.
Now if that particular term is going away, the banner becomes "Autistic" (bonus words like Spectrum and now we get Disorder replacing Syndrome; I'm not at all sure about what the semantics of that means!). To me that might encourage mean name calling like "Rainman".
New bumper sticker: if the tapeworm you save is gay, will you still fight for its rights?
just sayin, not everyone is interested in power and control
(captcha was "unhappy" lul)
Prozac is the most obvious fabrication. In many studies, its effect can't be distinguished from placebo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoxetine#cite_note-78). Of course, if you ARE on prozac and stop taking it suddenly, you will likely get depressed (and sometimes suicidal), but that's most likely withdrawal symptoms, not a manifestation of an underlying condition.
I suspect that pharmaceutical researchers can't think of a way to mask the symptoms of Asperger's, so there is no need to list it in the DSM. Call me cynical if you like.
Psychiatry, a modern pseudo-scientific cult .. discuss ...
AccountKiller
1. No, "autism" does not imply "non-functioning". There's a strong tendency for people not to get diagnosed unless they are having problems, though, because who spends a lot of time talking to psychiatrists just in case?
2. Functional ability is often largely a function of whether your environment is within your tolerances. The same person can be very functional in one environment, very non-functional in another.
3. Autism Speaks is a propaganda mill for anti-autistic propaganda. I have not yet met a single autistic person who approves of them. The rhetoric about them promoting anti-autistic eugenics is not nearly as exaggerated as you would likely assume it to be.
4. "Person with autism" is, in fact, usually regarded as insulting by autistic people. Anyone who dogmatically tells you that it's better should probably be regarded as unreliable.
5. For the most part, the autistics I know think that the distinction being eliminated was in fact a meaningless distinction, and I don't know any who considered it a significant differentiation. There is some concern about people who are unambiguously autistic, but who may now be considered not autistic, and therefore not entitled to the accommodations without which they cannot function.
6. If you haven't seen it already, you may find it very entertaining to read up on any of the reframings in which people describe what non-autism would look like in a predominantly autistic society, because much of what we regard as "disability" in our culture wouldn't be a problem if it were the norm; it's only a problem because it's not the norm.
7. If someone indicates a preference for written communications, please don't push them to switch to the phone. They probably dislike the phone.
8. Yes, being autistic is probably part of why I'm often unintentionally insulting. It is in no way an explanation or justification for when I'm intentionally insulting, though. That's just me being sort of an asshole. I do not expect special deference to be given to my jerk behaviors in general, but I appreciate it if people will accept my claims that I did not mean offense when I actually make them. (I am conceptually aware that in theory people could lie about this, but it sounds stupid to me; if you lie about your intent, people will become less likely to understand what you mean, and that would be annoying.)
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Several people in my lifetime have mentioned to me that I might have Aspergers.
Fortunately I figured out how I could cure myself.
I just stopped caring about anyone else's feelings.
Now I'm just an asshole!
paintball
The strawman is creating a behavior for someone else so you can complain about it. There is nothing to correct when you are doing so, you're just making up something to complain about. Even if someone later comes along and fulfills your prophecy, you still have created a strawman by your actions.
OCD does include the compulsion to do things on fixed schedules, or obsessing about something to the exclusion of noticing you are hungry.
Pretty funny how you make up Impostor Syndrome being a medical issue and then you tell me it's as if I haven't got the slightest idea what I'm talking about.
>"Some are just assholes", indeed. Congratulations: you're one of the trolls I was talking about.
Please tell me you knew how ironic and ludicrous this sounded when you posted it. It would just be too too much otherwise.
I created nothing, I wasn't even pre-empting.
OCD obsessions and ASD executive dysfunction do look kind of similar, if you don't know anything about either. Gastroenteritis and bulemia both involve throwing up, so they're the same thing, right?
Maybe I should ask if you actually know what Impostor Syndrome is before indulging your Reading Comprehension failure any more.
"This is a Hollywood movie: when it comes to the Laws of Physics, they're lucky if they get Gravity!" --- my wife
I tried that test and got 42! I'm worried :-) It's been an hour. I'll try again and see what I get this time (I've forgotten what I answered last time).
How fucked up does someone have to be to live by an irrational insistence that everyone be EXACTLY THE SAME?
It was the wrong color. Seriously.
There are enough people out there who think they have Asperger's when they haven't been diagnosed by a professional.
Asperger's is clearly on the spectrum. This is simply a recognition of that. Additional clarification of where an individual is can be done by professionals on diagnosis.
is a dead aspie. Chlorinate that gene pool bitches!
I was tested as borderline for Asperger's two items
to note.
1) I am hard of hearing so I don't socialize often because I am not always sure of what is going on.
2)I have a Mensa IQ I don't frequently socialize with others because most of them tend to bore me. This is by deliberate choice on my part...
Why do they drop it from the manual?
This is the most common flaw in all articles nowdays, and reasoning in general.
The sky is blue, air is invisible, etc, it means absolutely nothing.
"Ham. It's what Christmas is all about." But Chanukah not so much.
See http://sonichu.com/cwcki/Asperger for more information.
Thank you. Thank you.
We don't get nearly enough links to the uncyclopedia.
--
Flag signal ZL - Your signal has been received but not understood.
Why do we use a one-dimensional model (spectrum) to chart autism?
People present a wide variety of behaviours. Some socially smooth, others not so easy for interaction. How does left-right-lefter-righter work for this?
Just asking.
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Average Intelligence is a Scary Thing
http://dyslexicfonts.com/
"Your brain can sometimes do funny things to letters. OpenDyslexic tries to help prevent some of these things from happening. Letters have heavy weighted bottoms to add a kind of "gravity" to each letter, helping to keep your brain from rotating them around in ways that can make them look like other letters. Consistently weighted bottoms can also help reinforce the line of text. The unique shapes of each letter can help prevent flipping and swapping."
Also consider looking into vitamin D and other nutritional stuff:
http://www.ontrackreading.com/dyslexia-puzzle/the-diet-piece-of-the-dyslexia-puzzle
A program for a handheld that translates wiring colors to text might be helpful too.
Great story. Human characteristics, inclinations, proclivities, talents, and habits and so on can indeed be strengths or weaknesses depending on the situation.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Behavior therapy makes a lot of sense. It is amazing what the brain is capable of as it growns new connections. Other approahces like addressing vitamin D deficiency, vegetable deficiency, and other things like iodine deificency and omega 3 deficiency may help too, as can removing food dyes and artifical flavors etc... Good luck. Below are some links on those other topics.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/neurological-conditions/autism/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/children/default.aspx
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.