About the existence or inexistence of Asperger Syndrome

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I disagree because being homosexual was a terrible impairment and many suffered terrible distress until quite recently. Enough that many people, Alan Turing, for example, committed suicide because of it, as recently as the 1950's.
I believe that the vast majority of the traits of AS (not the unable to care for themself autistic, I hasten to add), are *exactly* like you say: only an impairment if we view it as such. With homosexuality, societies attitude changed and the distress lessened. The same would happen with AS if societies attitude towards quiet, reserved, inwardly looking types became changed.

BTW "Not having friends" hardly counts as a symptom of a dysfunction any more than "not getting the job you want in the legal department" is a dysfunction. Having or not having friends is a result of so many factors. After no friends for years, suddenly you can meet 5 people who become friends - that happens more often than blind people suddenly able to see.

Why autism? It's the existence of Aspergers we're doubting, not autism.

Also surely Visual acuity is an advantage, not an impairment? It could be an impairment in an environment of overstimulation because everybody else isn't as sharp as you. But that's what I'm saying: that the traits are not objectively negative.

Aspergers Syndrome = just a very small cluster of behaviours, ( that are not even intrinsically dysfunctions/disorders/impairments ), not a "person" nor an identity.

( shakes head to clear it of miasma of identity-politics )
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Last edited by ouinon on 20 Mar 2009, 1:37 am, edited 3 times in total.

OK, I'll carry on disagreeing with you then

I do like a discussion that can be intense without descending into name calling!

The premise you posit is erroneous. Nothing about the species-typical traits that influence the formation of human societies necessitates any such thing.

Why would a society always be anti-pathetical to people with AS , ( non-typical ), but not to homosexuals, ( non-typical )?

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I ask because, earlier, you were attempting to make your own categories based on severity (which is different to how things are currently categorized; and I'm not arguing that the current categories are brilliant). I was just curious to know more about your criteria for delineation, since you were actually delineating--between impairment (i.e., what you say covers autism) and non-impairment (i.e., what you say covers AS)--and didn't seem to be taking diversity and overlap into account.

As for the casting off of socially constructed labels: even some of those with severe and multiple disabilities and autism wish to do this. The arguments you made for this can logically be applied to these groups too; just like you mention they can with the blind. However, you made a confusing distinction when saying that autism was an actual impairment and things like blindness and AS were socially constructed impairments. If you're using the social disability model, they would all be classified as socially constructed impairments.



OK, that's clearer now. So, therefore, in this system, HFA becomes AS, which both become personality variations, and not autism or other diagnostic labels.

I'm sorry! I didn't mean to be rude or condescending. I don't get into debating. I like to argue ideas, not use of language. That's all I meant.

pandd ...

I ask because I don't understand why one kind of "untypicality" would always cause impairment when another would not. Your answer earlier seemed to suggest that simple untypicality would mean impairment. But you disagreed with my conclusion that typical human society formation would therefore mean that society would always necessarily be antipathetical to homosexuality.


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Last edited by ouinon on 19 Mar 2009, 6:41 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Maybe the concern is not so much whether Aspergers exists or not, but that a whole bunch of introverted people with very, very mild to non-existant autistic traits, really are getting diagnosed as Aspergers.

And another bunch of people, with much more intense traits, who are barely functioning, are also getting diagnosed as Aspergers.

And even more worrying to me, is that very young pre-school children are getting diagnosed as Aspergers even though nobody has any idea of how they'll function as adults (wasn't Einstein a non-verbal child?). But purely because they are not "as sociable" as somebody would like them to be, they are diagnosed.

Aspergers is becoming too much of a "catch all" term. Hence the diversity in symptoms. Sometimes it is as if we don't have the same syndrome at all.

Pandd, I tried the searches you gave, thanks. Funny thing is that I have 'visual acuity' to an extent. Certainly when younger although after decades staring at a screen, this has faded now. In my mid 20's, my party piece was that I could read a newspaper at around 20 feet away!

I don't think visual acuity is a 100% reliable indicator as several people I've worked with who are probably more Aspie than me, yet they wear glasses. Isn't the stereotypical geek almost *born* wearing glasses?

Yes, I think the diagnostic criteria are ridiculously vague. And that they not only could, but do, apply to many different kinds of people and conditions. About as silly as saying that people who watche the TV for at least three hours a day, eat burger and chips at least three times a week, and play pool, are fundamentally similar.

The fact that ( only ) 56% of Autistic children ( in the recent study by Campbell ) also had a gene reputedly responsible for GI problems already suggests that at least two very different groups of people/metabolisms are being diagnosed with the same thing.


Me too. Not newspapers, but colours/colour changes. In a test at school I amazed the health-professional with my responses, which they almost had trouble believing.
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Last edited by ouinon on 19 Mar 2009, 6:39 pm, edited 3 times in total.

The real problem with all the definition-parsing and criteria-testing, is that the people who are so focused on definitions and criteria are not really seeing the syndrome and conditions as things in themselves but how to validate use of those terms to others professionally. That whole criteria-testing approach to AS is only useful for forensics and other uses for which labeling correctly is the most important thing.

In reality, AS is something that for high-functioning people comes and goes. There are days or moments when we have certain abilities and clarity and days or moments when we are very low functioning. And this is true also of NTs -- they vary in their ability to function in various skills areas. What is true about AS, in my opinion, is that the variability is greater in AS, i.e. when I get low functioning I get much more low functioning than NT's tend to fluctuate and when I get high functioning I can be more skilled and accomplished than NTs who are familiar with my baseline might suspect. I've mentioned this to an AS psychological professional, and they agreed that this variability is an Asperger trait.

The rigid criteria-testers, though, tend to short out when you mention that to them. I have yet to get anyone to admit that their criteria mean that many Asperger people therefore have AS on one day and then don't have AS on another day, when the only thing that might change is their diet or some factor in their external environment.

The labeling and criteria-testing are useful only for diagnostic purposes and not for understanding the condition. I.e. that criteria-testing and the clinical diagnostic tests aren't prima facie data for analyzing the nature of the condition. The definitions and criteria, being labels, are applied diagnostics tools, and are not useful to conduct research into the fundamentals of AS or understanding autism.

That's the sort of thing which makes me suspect that many people being diagnosed with AS/Aspergers/Autism are actually "suffering" from three or four, or five, or even six, entirely different things, ( metabolic imbalances/deficiencies/suceptibilities etc ), as Martha Herbert suggests, ( or nothing at all as you point out, ManErg ), and that as research progresses it will turn out that Donna Williams is right, and AS/Autism/Aspergers really is a fruit-salad, four or five or more groups of people with simply a small cluster of similar behaviours, ( a sort of "generalised 'stress"/overload reaction ), but little or nothing in common from the biological angle, aswell as a sizeable group who are "simply" being disabled/discriminated against by society ( the chemical and/or structural environment it is responsible for ).

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Last edited by ouinon on 19 Mar 2009, 7:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It's a complicated question. However, I believe that there are a coherent set of real, fundamental principles that provide underlying unity to what appears to be surface noise.

Engineers do their research and development work in two main ways: (1) analysis and (2) synthesis. Analysis means, in part, to break something down and understand its parts and how they form the whole. Synthesis is a way to describe or specify a particular instance or form of a that thing. So analysis is to understand a thing, synthesis is to specify a thing.

Diagnostic criteria and other clinical checklists are just tools that are a collection of specifications. You can't use diagnostic criteria for analysis purposes, or to understand Asperger syndrome. That's like trying to take the the menu lists of ingredients for all the special pizzas (italian, garden vegetable, etc) and using them to understand what a pizza is and is not. Specifications aren't the same thing as principles or theory, and clinical specifications and diagnostic criteria can't be turned around and used to understand AS, not really. Remember, the diagnostic criteria and clinical checklists are there for professionals to use as tools, not for laypeople to use to understand the medicine behind a disorder.

I like Martha Herbert's analysis though for exactly that reason.

( ... Leaving aside the probably significant numbers of people disabled by social organisation/environment etc ... )

Herbert argues from the biochemical and neurological point of view, ( most notably in her paper, " Autism, a disorder of the brain or a disorder which affects the brain" ), that several completely different metabolic disruptions/imbalances/susceptibilities could result in a few apparently, ( and misleadingly ), similar behaviours/difficulties. The underlying differences would explain why there are so many associated variations, aswell as similarities, in AS/Autism etc.
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Last edited by ouinon on 20 Mar 2009, 1:28 am, edited 1 time in total.

The problem is that at the moment the "dysfunction/disorder" is being diagnosed by behaviour rather than biology, and that this is leaving room for the sort of social-organisation bias/selecting/filtering which we were talking about, in which many people who are actually fine, just different, are being labelled disordered.

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