About the existence or inexistence of Asperger Syndrome

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When a label is for a comparatively physical condition like asthma I do not believe that the label refers to "the person". I distinguish the person from their respiratory dysfunction, ( ... perhaps I am wrong to do so ).

But when a label pertains to chronic/lifelong mental, emotional, social, and/or behavioural aspects of a person I almost always conflate whatever it refers to with "the person"; it is the person. After all what else is the person but their mental, emotional, and behavioural aspects? Hence why I refuse to see AS as a dysfunction.

But as you say above, about this attitude, I may be in fact guilty of a kind of unconscious/unreflecting bigotry about something. I'm not quite sure what though.
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Last edited by ouinon on 21 Mar 2009, 12:38 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Last edited by alba on 21 Mar 2009, 5:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yes, labels have far too much effect on people and the world for it to be safe to leave their use, definition, meaning, etc, up to others.

"Dysfunction" for instance. At some level I actually have trouble believing that anything is "dysfunctional". That label seems to be associated with a worldview that is increasingly alien to me. Which is why I don't tend to think the world/society is dysfunctional either! When I believe in the word dysfunctional it applies to many aspects of both the world in general and myself, others, etc, and breaks the world up/divides it. I actually think everything is functional/functioning. Nothing is dysfunctional. "Impairment" too, seems equally bizarre.

My personal idea of an AS revolution revolves around diet. I believe that many of the problems people with AS experience in the modern world are the result of chronic/lifelong overload, too much stimulus/sensory and other data. And that it is possible to limit that by cutting down on the "amount of data" that our 300 square meters of gut has to process. I am serious, and convinced, that exclusion diets of various kinds may be the most powerful tool available to many of us at the moment for changing our lives.

But on the subject of "dysfunction" I still fail to see in what way people with AS are in any way "dysfunctional"/impaired in comparison to many other so called "able"/functional people who pour out of pubs on Friday night breaking things, throwing drink over people, shouting and swearing and cackling, and which phenomenon frightens many people off town/city streets in the evening. The word "dysfunctional" simply has no sense. "Different" does make sense to me.

If the DSM was called "The Handbook of Difference", included a section on the different kinds of neurotypicals, and was issued by the government as a guide to living with others in society, the name "Aspergers" might be acceptable.

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Ouinon, I wanted to respond to something we discussed earlier.... my point being we need to empower ourselves. Our best tool for empowerment is confidence. In general--Whatever enables confidence is our friend and ally. Whatever neutralizes or destroys confidence is our enemy. [For narcissists and a few other PDs the opposite may be more applicable.] .. For most of us, when we feel either self-pity or self-blame....it doesn't really matter whether they are totally different or 2 sides of the same coin. Either way, they defeat self-esteem and as such are to be regarded as worthless endeavors.

Yeah, a lot of us feel that way [self pity, self blame, self loathing, etc..] Well, we need to stop doing it. It's like a hamster going round and round in that circular hoop/wheel thingy. It gets us nowhere. There are positive strategies which are confidence building and confidence nurturing. These are the techniques we need to articulate and practice. They can be substituted for feelings and behaviors which drain our energy reserves and make us feel like crap.

Last edited by alba on 21 Mar 2009, 5:53 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I like where you're going with this..

Thank you. Yes, I didn't realise until sometime after I posted the idea, but it could be quite a "fun" consciousness-raising tool. Don't feel up to writing it myself, at least not much of it, nor the final typing up, etc, ( not expert enough on the computer/word-processing etc ), but I would buy it, and circulate it, if someone else did.

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Interesting article and links at the bottom (although the Case History goes on a bit...) :

http://www.arachnoid.com/psychology/aspergers.php

I think he makes many valid points. However, he points the finger too much at parents and not at our culture as a whole. Most parents understandably do what the experts have led them to believe is best for children. And what other parents are doing.

Thanks for the link ManErg.

Heres another link from Tahitiii's post on a different thread. It concerns civil rights for autistics.

See Michelle Dawson www.sentex.net/~nexus23/naa_02.html

Very, ( though I agree about the overlong Case History ). Thank you very much for posting it.

I particularly appreciated the article linked to at the bottom of the page. It's brilliant. Made me cry too.

http://www.sengifted.org/articles_couns ... dren.shtml

We're gifted.

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That's why there are so many creative, brilliant, original, extraordinary people on WP. Because we are gifted. You were saying, alba, how we need confidence. This is it. We are gifted. We are GIFTED!! !

Because of my german mother I can't help disliking the word "gift" because it means "poison" in german. But in fact it is as if we are, poison, at the moment, for society. And being diagnosed as "disordered"/dysfunctional.

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Gifted children are apparently "highly sensitive", both physically, ( "bothered by tags on shirts and seams in socks" ), and emotionally, aswell as "intrinsically motivated", etc etc etc ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_giftedness

The section about "gifted characteristics" aswell as other info on this page sounds like a description of Aspergers, ... but from a positive/inspiring point of view.

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^^^last few posts..

ugh...gift means poison in German?

From my pov, we do need to appreciate our good qualities and emphasize them. We need to understand how our abilities are gifts. Definitely. But we also need to understand how our abilites are a curse too. It's like we are aliens and we brought a very special tool from our home planet. Earthlings tend to fear what they don't understand and they surely don't understand our tool. When we try to explain it to them, they don't want to listen. They just want to talk among themselves and figure out the best way to invalidate us and reject our really useful tool. Our tool is a gift that can be used for technological advancement. But the Earthlings are terrified of it.

Many with autism/AS are gifted. However AS does not equal giftedness. Most defined as gifted do not meet the criteria for AS. I've met dozens of gifted people; almost none were diagnosed AS or had strong traits.

Yes, I almost linked just to that and skipped the main article. However there are a couple of interesting, very structured and logical articles on the dubiousness of psychology as science. Also interested in the point that any damage caused by incorrect diagnosis of a child will be the responsibility of the childs parents. I also thought the MBP was very interesting too - almost like a mystery unfolding - is he telling the truth or is she? Not specifically relevant to AS, but to every life situation where you only hear one part of the story.

I'm aware that many here do not consider themselves gifted, but there are also those that do and that is where we could find normal traits misdiagnosed due to difference.

I agree. I think the article would have stood up on its own, ( better, in fact, without the case history, though like you I find it fascinating ); it is indeed a spot-on, and damning, analysis of how clinical psychology actually functions.

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I think that may be because those who are recognised as "gifted", ( and not diagnosed as suffering from some pathology or other ), are the lucky ones, those who haven't been "poisoned" by the modern environment. The article I linked to above, about misdiagnosis, states that 3% of those identified as gifted have food allergies/intolerances.

I suggest that they are just the tip of the iceberg, that in fact many many more gifted children have food or chemical intolerances, and that the majority are disabled by them to such an extent in the modern environment, ( with the "brain-fog"/loss of cognitive function, including poor memory, poor executive skills, confusion, aswell lethargy/inertia, depression, anxiety, withdrawal, and other symptoms of overload ), that their giftedness is obscured to the point that they are being diagnosed as Aspergers/AS, perhaps even "lower functioning" autistic.

Alba, the environment extends to the 300 square meters of our guts, in the form of food, ( as in the strange vase with a hole in the botttom that someone once designed to challenge our ideas of "inside/outside" ), and I seriously believe that most/many people currently diagnosed as AS are "gifted" and "poisoned" to the point of "disability"/reduced capacity.

Physical environment is obviously not the only disabling factor; social structures, as many of us have been saying, ( particularly the school system ), exert pressures on gifted children which are also likely to disable, ( "gifts" don't necessarily "fit" into the usual/traditional categories of IQ, advanced reading/verbal skills, or standard maths, for example ). And both the Wiki article and the one about misdiagnosis refer to the ways in which giftedness impacts on social relations, especially with peers, aswell as causing difficulties with those in positions of authority.

But I believe that susceptibility/sensitivity to physical environmental stress/"poisoning" may account for apparent differences between one, recognisably "gifted" group, and another, ( us ).

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