carlos55 wrote:
Autism with a normal IQ i.e above 85 and no language delay was called Asperger's, that's about it.
Asperger's was removed a decade ago, so its all now called Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), the spectrum part supposed to represent the severity of the condition, mild to severe.
What separated “Aspergers Disorder” from what was unofficially called “High Functioning Autism” was language delay until age 3 which is insignificant for most autistic people since most of us are way older than 3.
MaxE wrote:
I also don't think Hans Asperger's personal history should have a bearing on the subject. If they wanted to deal with that by coming up with another name, no problem. But it didn't justify canceling the whole Asperger's community.
Hans Asperger’s personal history did not have a bearing on Asperger’s “cancellation” as his Nazi complicity was hardly known at the time. The reason was it was thought ASD’s were being overdiagnosed and the Aspergers diagnosis was to blame.
Why Claim Asperger's is Overdiagnosed? - Psychology Today November 2012Quote:
Some of the overdiagnosis comments sampled below have achieved notoriety in the autism community, but still, the Asperger’s Alive! archive would be remiss not to include them. And its worth remembering that social communciation and Theory of Mind present challenges for some autism researchers.
Susan Swedo, chair of the DSM-5 neurodevelopmental disorders workgroup, said in May that many people who identify with Asperger’s Syndrome “don't actually have Asperger's disorder, much less an autism spectrum disorder.”
David Kupfer, chair of the task force charged with the DSM revisions, blurted to the New York Times in January: “We have to make sure not everybody who is a little odd gets a diagnosis of autism or Asperger Disorder. It involves a use of treatment resources. It becomes a cost issue.” (This was startling to those who’d missed the memo that declared costs and treatment resources the responsibility of the APA. Which was everyone.)
Catherine Lord, the director of the Institute for Brain Development at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, and another member of the workgroup, told Scientific American in January, “If the DSM-IV criteria are taken too literally, anybody in the world could qualify for Asperger's or PDD-NOS... We need to make sure the criteria are not pulling in kids who do not have these disorders.”
Paul Steinberg, a D.C. psychiatrist, declared in a New York Times op-ed in January that “with the loosening of the diagnosis of Asperger, children and adults who are shy and timid, who have quirky interests like train schedules and baseball statistics, and who have trouble relating to their peers” are erroneously and harmfully labeled autistic. He blamed a 1992 Department of Education directive that “called for enhanced services" for children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders: “The diagnosis of Asperger syndrome went through the roof."
Dr. Bryna Siegel, a developmental psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, told a Daily Beast reporter in February that she “undiagnoses” nine of out ten students with so-called Asperger’s. Siegel was a member of the panel responsible for the inclusion of Asperger’s in the DSM-IV, which the reporter cited to me in a phone call as evidence of Seigel's objectivity: implicitly, Seigel is critiquing her own work. But that same journalist made no mention in the piece of Dr. Seigel’s history as an expert witness for school districts fending off families’ claims for those “enhanced services,” and the obvious conflict of interest (as well as the selection bias in her client pool) this represents. In October, she told New York magazine that she undiagnoses six out of ten. That's quite a shift in eight months. Hope it was evidence-based.
At the time and in the years after there was quite a bit of fear and anger over the removal of Aspergers. This was an obvious attempt to stop and reverse the widening diagnostic criteria. Many feared never getting diagnosed in the first place or losing the diagnosis they had and returning to just being just weird, attention seeker etc. The Aspergers diagnosis and Aspie identity had finally given a whole bunch of adults a boost in self esteem by giving them an explanation, showing them there are others like them, and now these mean NT’s were snatching it away.
As it turned out the those fears were unfounded. A provision was added that grandfathered in all the old Aspergers Disorder diagnosis into the new Autism Spectrum Disorder diagnosis. The attempt to lower the amount of ASD diagnosis clearly failed, the Autism Prevalence rate has continued to rise.
That all said while the main fears of a decade ago were unfounded as mentioned trying to solve a category that was perceived as too broad by putting it in a broader category has created its own set of problems.
The 2018 widespread publicity about Hans Asperger’s Nazi complicity coming at a time where there is a lot more concern about “problematic” naming did shut down a lot of the remaining resistance. That said outside of certain spaces “Aspergers” and “Aspie” hasn't been cancelled. You still see those terms used here, in the mainstream media, and as noted by some clinicians. As the Autistics who were diagnosed with Aspergers die off those terms will become a historical footnote. Arguably the revelations about Hans Asperger hastened that process a bit.
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Professionally Identified and joined WP August 26, 2013
DSM 5: Autism Spectrum Disorder, DSM IV: Aspergers Moderate Severity
“My autism is not a superpower. It also isn’t some kind of god-forsaken, endless fountain of suffering inflicted on my family. It’s just part of who I am as a person”. - Sara Luterman
Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 03 Jan 2024, 12:01 pm, edited 5 times in total.
08 Nov 2023, 12:32 pm
