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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!
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.
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
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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.
Because many of us have at least been accused of having it. Or are "self-diagnosed" as having it. Or were even diagnosed by an actual psychiatrist.
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.
News for nerds. This has some times been described as a sort of "nerd sydrome" as some of it's symptoms coincide with the common perception of nerds. It's interesting as certain aspecs of it acually seems to be an advantage for people in scientific fields.
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.
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?
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
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.
Because many of us have at least been accused of having it. Or are "self-diagnosed" as having it. Or were even diagnosed by an actual psychiatrist.
There's a not-actually-diagnostic Autism Spectrum Quotient test that you can take at Wired.
It might be fun to have a Slashdot poll on the range of results.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
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...
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.
What you mistake as a lack of social skills is my desire not to pollute my mind with the useless drivel you want to talk about. If that's not normal, then maybe I just don't want to play at being a "good person". I have no desire to be overly social with most humans. There is a big difference between not doing something by choice, and not being able to do something. I socialize quite well with those I wish to. The ones who would like to be social but can't still have an "excuse". Me? I've never made an excuse for not caring about what you think -- Why should I care if you've never given me a reason to? What's odd is the value you humans give to efforts that only result in the needless wasting of your very short lives.
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
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.
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.