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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.
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.
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.
To qualify for the diagnosis, not only do the criteria have to be met, but it must cause clinically significant impairment in functioning. People always seem to overlook that part.
The move itself is akin to splitting off persons who have compulsive tendency in their personalities from those diagnose-able with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and as such seems to be a reasonable change in categorization.
This is one of the most controversial aspects of psychiatry. Human behavior is all a spectrum. All of us (well, most of us anyway) have personality traits. One may be a bit tightly wound, or a bit too laid back, or sloppy or overly neat, or insensitive or smotheringly kind. The combination of those traits make us who we are.
The classical definition of a personality disorder has been when one or more of those traits becomes a dominant part of a persons personality and becomes 'harmful' to that person or society at large. We've all seen the psychopathic boss, the obsessive person who drives family and coworkers away, the very dependent person who wrecks relationships. But when do you call it a disorder? The first time someone complains about the boss? The first divorce? The first time you get into a fight?
It's a fluid distinction. Our favorite disordered personality, Stephen P. Jobs, might well have been banished to an Ashram if we had any sort of effective treatment. Balmer and Gates might have been turned into, well, dunno, I have nothing here. Anyway, it is at the heart of how we define normal (or at least acceptable). In many ways, we don't really want to get to the point where we can treat it or even understand it.
Careful what you ask for, you just might get it.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Well, not exactly, the DSM-5 at the same time removing the AS label relaxes the criteria of Autism Spectrum Disorder. Anyone who qualified for the criteria of Asperger's Syndrom qualifies for the DSM-5's criteria for proper autism. This is because there is little to no benefit at all in treating people with severe issues who have AS any differently from those with Autism. The only differentiator, really, between AS and classical Kanner's autism in the DSM-4 was a language delay, even if one had a language delay and coped better as an adult than someone who did not have one, that person would be diagnosed kanners and the one without the delay with aspergers. This caused as you can imagine a headache with regards to getting insurance or the state to cover any amount of therapy if you had the AS label even if you really needed it and your family wasn't in a position to reasonably afford it.
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
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...
No, you work with a bunch of people who *think* they have Asperger's. if you sit through one of my son's 3 hour long meltdowns because he suddenly decided his shirt was the wrong color, you'd see the difference.
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.
It's not that people with Asperger's are anti-social. In fact, many with Asperger's *WANT* to be social. We just don't know how. (Yes, I have Asperger's as does my son.) Think of it as if you suddenly landed on an alien planet with strange and complex customs and social norms. You would likely find simple things in this world funny, but others wouldn't see why. You would commit social blunders that even a "normal" child born in the alien world wouldn't do. Over time, you might be able to slowly learn how to blend in socially, but it would be a chore. You'd constantly have to remind yourself just what to do in each situation.
Merely remembering them isn't enough. You need to remember and put them into effect on a split second basis. You could manage it, and might even appear "normal", for periods of time, but it would be taxing and you'd need downtime to relax. So you'd be constantly torn between "want to socialize" and "socializing is hard and tiring."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.