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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."
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!
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.
"Aspergers may be on the austisic spectrum, but they're nothing alike in real terms."
I disagree. I have aspergers and I have 2 children who are both autistic. The are certainly some differences between us, but there is also a lot of similarities. One of the biggest things that we have in common is our low tolerance for difficult and stimulating situations.
I personally have always felt that aspergers really did fit under the ASD umbrella although it was medically as accepted that way until now.
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.
Speaking as a person who exhibits most of the classical symptoms of Asperger's, I have to agree that it is an affliction, a disorder or disease.
I am not saying this to garner pity or priviledge... a parking spot would be nice though. I say this because if it is found to be preventable or curable, I would push for it It makes life needlessly difficult. There are simply things I cannot do. Among these include "going with the flow" which might seem like an easy, brainless thing to do, but it's not. The whole notion of merely "fitting it" is an amazingly complex thing which includes self delusion along with the ability to convince others of the same. I have spent more than enough time working it all through.
In PC terms, Asperger's is a bug in a person's social BIOS. The social BIOS cannot be flashed. It is the bootstrap for all social interactions. Things other people natually seem to understand are completely alien to the Asperger's person. But once we fully understand and appreciate the differences, effective changes can be made. It isn't a fix by any means. But learning to compensate is helpful, but also placing one's self in an environment where it exposes the afflicted to fewer people is also quite helpful.
I think most of us here on both sides of the general issue are failing to see the objective matters at hand. Asperger's is a disadvantage in most all cases except for when the other side-effects might appeat to be an advantage. We often associate specific mental abilities/capacities as "gifts" associated with the condition. This is not always the case and especially as the generally accepted autistics out there are not all idiot-savants.
Instead of identifying things, we tend to want to label things with words which do not have as universal a meaning as we think. This problem is identified by the arguments collapsing into a discussion about definitions of words. It is a problem of language and of social politics.
Asperger's is an advantage to me sometimes. I can disregard my emotional components to see the facts of the matters I observe. I don't always see all of the facts available at all times -- I have a limited capacity just like everyone else. But I have less propensity to fill in the gaps with belief and unsupported ideas.(Consider when you were a very young child... did you understand why girls and boys should dislike each other? I never did. I never saw cause. Go back in time and see which side of such questions you fell on... do you even remember?)