Awe-tistic rewrite of DSM-IV. Love it!

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OLD SCHOOL: (A) marked impairments in the use of multiple nonverbal behaviors such as eye-to-eye gaze, facial expression, body posture, and gestures to regulate social interaction
NEW SCHOOL: (A) An acute sensory and empathic sensitivity that i) makes eye contact and social interaction intensely difficult and ii) results in the rejection of ambiguous nonverbal behaviors in favor of direct, detailed, and honest speech.

OLD SCHOOL: (B) failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level
NEW SCHOOL: (B) Beginning in early childhood, a gift for developing relationships with people of widely different ages and developmental trajectories.

OLD SCHOOL: (C) a lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interest or achievements with other people, (e.g.. by a lack of showing, bringing, or pointing out objects of interest to other people)
NEW SCHOOL: (C) The understanding, gained uncannily early in life, that i) most people will not appreciate the awe-tist’s interests or achievements, and ii) showing, bringing, or pointing out objects of interest will be met with judgment and/or hostility that manifest in socially acceptable forms of repression (such as social exclusion) or criminal acts (such as physical assault).

OLD SCHOOL: (D) lack of social or emotional reciprocity
NEW SCHOOL: (D) An acute sensitivity to the feelings of others that causes the awe-tist to refrain from using banal pleasantries or empty words that may hurt or offend.

NEW SCHOOL: (E) An altogether eccentric form of social and emotional reciprocity that insists upon fairness, directness, sensitivity, tolerance, substance, acceptance of difference, and mutually interesting subject matter.
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I really like this! I think this autism advocate did a great job. Now, she actually very bravely strikes through the current text (I simply don't know how to do that formatting). Please check out the whole thing if you are interested.
http://www.journeyswithautism.com/2009/ ... or-autism/

The new edition, in all seriousness, has a thousand problems, which is why the publication date has been pushed back a full year.

American Psychiatry is Facing 'Civil War' over Diagnostic Manual

The New But Not Neccessarily Improved DSM V

Association for Women in Psychology Addresses DSM-V Concerns

About the DSM-IV quips,
failure to make age-appropriate friends doesn't mean we make all sorts of friends of various ages-
many here have never had a friend of any sort.

Likewise, the *apparent* lack of empathy of Autistics, while sometimes mis-appropriated as indicative of internal states,
is in many cases quite true- most of us here do feel alienated puzzled, often, by the feelings of NT's.

The first one, A, though, was EXCELLENT. It takes a behavioralist BS criterion and reshapes it into a descriptor of the underlying mechanisms CAUSING those behaviors. I liked D, as well.

EDIT: Is the Rachel B. Cohen-Rottenberg, the author, of any relation to the Simon Baron-Cohen of Autistic (supposed) research fame?


DOUBLE EDIT: Bentham's a favorite of mine, as-is Robert Penn Warren.

Last edited by ValentineWiggin on 06 Oct 2011, 4:34 pm, edited 3 times in total.

But I don't think our particular viewpoint is well represented.

PS I like Jeremy Bentham, both as a pretty alright philosopher, and plus I think he might have been one of us.

The HUMAN LIBERATION Movement: It's okay to be on the spectrum, it's okay not to be on the spectrum. People should be accepted for who they are.

I really, really like this. Much the better deffinition.

this is awesome.

While I agree with most of the proposed definitions, it must be pointed out that the link in the first post is to one person's on-line blog, and not the official DSM website.

I know ... I win the Captain Obvious Award for this week ...

Oh, absolutely, and I think we can do much better unofficially than officially.

And from the proposed, playful, offhand definition:
"An acute sensitivity to the feelings of others that causes the awe-tist to refrain from using banal pleasantries or empty words that may hurt or offend."

And some of us may have this and some might not. And either way is perfectly okay.

Is this an actual rewrite or is this some kind of joke/spoof thing The new sounds contradictory to the old in spots

Not an actual rewrite....just a creative way of critiquing the DSM criteria.

It's a re-write, although not an official one. Sort of like a fanfic of the DSM.

I hope something along these lines gets added in. I don't fit the 'old' version which my mother had commented on, but I certainly fit the 'new' version very much. I don't talk much even to family because my likes and dislikes are often in opposition to the family or things they consider unimportant. My having likes is not considered unimportant but what I like and my talking about my likes are not looked favorably on and haven't been as far back as I can remember though this likely started because I talked a lot about the things I liked and my parents got tired of hearing it over and over and over and over again(as an adult now I can understand that but it doesn't fix things). So I learned to not talk about things I liked as I got older because I'd be told to stop talking about it or that the person I was talking to 'was busy' and couldn't listen to me (and never was not busy as I recall).

I figured the re write had to do with how the author interpreted it. It just shows what it really means because criteria are complicated to understand and how each person interprets it differently.

I know what you are talking about. Gosh, you typed "like" 8 times...

That makes sense. I think the new are things someone could learn for reasons other than AS like growing up in an orphanage for example. I do NOT like the idea of the rewrite because most people including psychs & specialist would be able to see the new; they would just see the old effects instead of understanding how they were learned with the new. I fit the old as a kid to a T but I would not of appeared to fit the new to most who new me only a little like teachers

I have a question?

Autism is not a mental illness, so what is it doing in the DSM at all?

It's a disorder and mental disorders are also in the DSM.

According to wiki, DSM's official title is "The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders"

It's a disorder because, primarily, it's not a part of the "normal order". The root -dis basically means "Not", so dis-order in the psychological community basically translates to "not (of the normal) order".