About the existence or inexistence of Asperger Syndrome

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Thread & 21st Century Prophets


ah...the cool clear voice of reason
a prophet's declaration
against whom both herds* rail and scream abuse
in their ignorance
collecting stones to throw
at the gentle prophet

gentle but precise
in ripping away scales of delusion
scales that prevent the seeing of truth
prevent the soaring free
where everything makes sense--
the air is clear
the sky is clean
and the heart is pure

*both herds? aye...Aspie as well as NT
claiming to be violated and betrayed...
but such is the illusion
we oftimes embrace
chains of the collective--borg


people grow accustomed to their prisons
and their labels.....

pulling the pin from their cages and asking them to push open the door
with joyful announcements - "You are free to go"
are met with insults--unbridled terror
stones hurled at the liberator
and freedom once embraced is now disdained
ah...how effective the indoctrination
and ah...how difficult to mend the natural tendencies
to be as they were prior to being imprisoned in one's cage

a lone bird cries out in the clear azure sky...

"don't kill the messenger
s/he only wants to give you the truth
which sets you free!"

and he ye would call Violator is your best friend in disguise
truly your Guardian Angel
teacher of the divine
the closest ye will get to your [beloved] god
oh ye hypocrites...

lose your right to be sane in an insane world
but such is your seeming choice..............

It would be weird if autistic/AS behaviours were being "picked on", ( designated a dysfunction/disorder ), because society itself is suffering from "overload", has been for 125 years, is reacting in "classic" overloaded-AS way by demanding homogeneity, predictability, etc, and is refusing to admit it.

Whites projected stuff onto black people, germans onto the jewish people, men onto homosexuals. Subordinate groups make good whipping boys/scapegoats. If look at fears about autism's effect on children, what are the most salient features? What does society find most horrific about AS/Autism?

Waste, wasted lives.

Alienation. Self-harm. Destructive behaviour. Meaningless, repetitive, activities.

What else?

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Seems that everyone else has gone....away

That many of us are not impressed by their self-aggrandisation?

Well, the words are all here...not much more to add..."but I'm sure I'll think of something". Those that have eyes shall see etc etc

Ouinon, what you said about society in general being Autistic struck me as very interesting. I've often been confused when I've read that apparently *we* are the ones who are inflexible and *we* are the ones who can't stand change. Because it's always felt to me that I am at core very flexible, open minded, easy going, yet born into a rigid, fixed, inflexible world. School, Work, Everything MUST be done according to a strict timetable according to them, not me.

I've read many here talk about bursts of inspiration when a task gets done, followed by long periods when it just doesn't happen. I work like that and it drives bosses crazy. The truth is that almost everyone I've ever worked with also works like I do. A very few people work like automatons yet they expect all of us to be machines. And then accuse us of being 'rigid' and 'inflexible'

Every cell of inflexibilty, rigidity and resistance to change in my being (and there are a fair few by now) is there to please OTHERS, to fit in with their rules, not my natural inner freedom. This is where the bitterness comes from - I feel I did everything according to their rules, changed myself to fit what was expected of me. And now they tell me that I have a social disorder!! !! ! Because I follow their rules too rigidly!! !! This is just so funny!

Did you write that yourself Alba? At first I thought it was going to be a Kahlil Gibran quote, but the AS/NT reference casts doubt on this Either way, I really like it.

good one



Thanks. Funny you should ask because I was thinking of Kahlil Gibran's "Prophet" when I wrote it. And I think what struck me--that the truth tellers are often the ones most reviled--is something that inspired Gibran as well.

Where one prophet is silenced, three more shall rise up to replace him..and if those three are then silenced, nine more shall rise up. Chinese proverb.

For the last month, off and on, I've been thinking about the prophet Ezekiel...he went through some rough patch where he tore a hole in a wall in his home and then proceeded to move all his furniture outside through that hole....and after a period of time had elapsed, he moved it all back in again, through the hole...well something like that. I don't recall the significance of his actions, but they were in some way a metaphor for what was going on around him...and his chosen method of teaching the people.

I must say I find this discussion fascinating, I can only hope I can contribute to the issue.

I'd like to try and qualify what existence means, what it means for something to be real and to exist. Most obviously, one would say something is real if it is physical, but this has limitations. As someone pointed out earlier, countries do not have physical existences yet they can still be considered real. With psychiatry, it becomes difficult to suggests what physical reality Aspergers syndrome might have. Brain chemistry, genes, brain structure, psychological make up? In truth, current psychiatry does not know, given that it is currently impossible to scan someone's brain and point towards the Aspergers bit. Rather, psychiatrists are forced to rely upon the evidence of each given patient, how they act and what they say. What then is the link between someone's actions and a psychiatric illness and how does this affect its existence? Given that everyone has different actions, why specify people one group of actions with a psychiatric condition and not anyone else? To my mind, the answer must be causation, that something is real if it has a causal affect, just as countries are not physical yet have causal consequences. The question then becomes what causes people's actions, specifically the actions of those talking to psychiatrists? The fear seems to social construction, that people who exhibit certain traits are given a label because the actions make them stand out as being different and that is all the justification psychiatry requires. It is certainly true that basically everyone bases many of their actions based upon the society they live in, that social conventions are certainly real since they are a source of causation on people's actions, not least the psychiatrists perceptions of the psychiatric patient. However, this is also true of physical disabilities, that someone without legs is labelled disabled which is certainly a social construct with particular causal consequences of that label, such as the existence of a medical profession and social services for physically disabled people which certainly exist in the sense that they have causal consequences yet do not exist physically just as countries do not exist physically. Yet the disability is caused by something physical, the lack of legs, and hence is also real. So something can be socially constructed and also be real due to physical factors, it is real in two different ways rather than one (the (psychiatric) existence of the causal affect of the physical nature of Aspergers in the physical makeup of the brain and the (socially constructed) existence of causal affects of specifying a label of Aspergers). It all comes back to the evidence for the label to determine its type of existence, the relation between what someone says when they talk to a psychiatrist and what causes it.

I believe that Aspergers Syndrome is real and that I have it because I cannot explain why statistically there are particular seemingly otherwise unrelated traits that a significant number of the population share. For me it was the fact that people with Aspergers syndrome both have social skills difficulties and obsessions (one could mention many other traits though). Having low social skills does not entail or even make likely that the same person will have obsessions and visa versa, yet a substantial number of people do share these specific traits which suggests there is something else fundamentally causing it. Whatever the physical nature of that thing it, the name we give it is Aspergers Syndrome. By contrast, I've had diagnosis of various personality disorders but these I do not consider to be describing anything real in a causal sense. There strike me as other explanations why someone exhibiting traits associated with some personality disorders are acting as they do than something fundamental in the brain causing it. Consequently, (of the ones I have studied after being diagnosed with) personality disorders do not describe anything real, they merely point someone out as being different - something which will really only assist discriminating against people - and hence should be dropped from psychiatry.

So it is certainly true that if someone were to simply act as though they had Aspergers Syndrome then they would be diagnosed, regardless of if they had it or not. This is a major flaw of psychiatry but I can see no means around it. Instead, the focus needs to be placed on the evidence for a condition and in some cases I think there is good cases to call some psychiatric conditions real. I do not know why the children in the video's act as they do, it could be pure coincidence that they exhibit Autistic traits or their could be something more fundamental causing it.

Form and content topic

I could have written label and detail in the topic line above.

No one is purely a label. This is a construct necessary to understand the detail, the content.

Millie said it best.

As for me, I am still very self conscious of being AS, not when I am alone, but when I am outside of my own home. I do not think others see the label, but they do see difference, and they do not like it. No matter what the label is, that I am different is visible, noticeable to others, that is, NTs.
It is only recently that I have accepted my difference, and value it, even if others still do not.

The details of this difference are grouped as the label of AS/Asperger's.

If being aware of one's autism is a factor in self acceptance, then this is a positive sign.

I meant the "upfront"/visible fears, the ones about children being in the grip of the "monster" which is AS/Autism.

What does society find most frightening/horrific about AS/Autism? What things do people talk about/dwell on when describing the horror of Autism? Although I generally avoid seeing the Cure-AS ads, etc, I do occasionally read things from the "horrified" angle, and the things that seem to "bother" people most are those I listed above:


People are using us to express their horror and despair about their own lives in modern society.

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Most humans do seem to have a problem, ( to a lesser or greater degree ), with difference. But their attitude towards it is socially mediated.

Two hundred years ago, for example, social relations, ( at least in the middle and upper classes in the West, and in various groups/classes elsewhere ), were very codified/regulated, and clear, about what people could talk about, when and with whom, and for how long. Also people did not talk much about "feelings", ( that was reserved for talking to God, your priest, or perhaps your mother/close family ).

The development of a kind of socialising without such clear structures, and involving discussion of feelings, including the expectation that people respond "appropriately" to self-exposure, has put a lot of socially-constructed pressure on people now diagnosed AS. Appearance was also more formulaic, less to do with "personal expression", more driven by "down to earth" considerations, than it is now.


The label is important, as black people have made clear.

It matters whether you are referred to by a term which is laden with past abuse and oppression, which was used when you were considered little better than an animal, or at best a child, with inferior intellect, immature/primitive passions/emotions etc. It matters if a label was invented by the medical profession, because medicine does not bother to name normality/health, nor does science spend years and millions on researching it.

The term Aspergers is a medical one, and as such serves to distance/separate us from "normal" people, from "fully functioning" people.

This distancing is a crucial part of "scapegoating", of the process of "projection". It allows/"enables", ( the dominant majority of ) people to express their horror about their own lives, their own wasted, wasteful, alienated, self-harming, destructive lives which are so full of meaningless, repetitive activities, without having to recognise that it is themselves, their experience in modern society, that they feel this horror and despair about.


Everybody is different. Everybody needs to accept their own difference. But why has society labelled your difference a dysfunction/disorder?

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My dad actually suggested to me once "People with your disorders don't generally have kids out of fear of giving them to their children."

That they have no legs is a physical reality, but that is not in itself a "disability".

It is disabling because society expects/demands that people walk. But in a society in which walking played little or no part, ( imagine a society in which people spent most of the time in cars and on their computer, had food brought to them by robot, and used nappies/seats with chemical toilets in ), a person without legs would not be disabled.

The same applies to all so called disabilities. The "disability" is produced by the society in which a person lives.


There are reasonably reliable, ( at least as reliable as those for behaviour ), tests for physical "markers" already, but they are not included in the DSM handbook.

It will be interesting to see if they will ever be used, or whether, so long as the concept/idea/myth of an Autism Spectrum continues to be allowed to fulfil a need in society for a particular scapegoat, ( a projection of their own alienation, wasted lives, self-harm, wastefulness, destructiveness, etc ), the criteria will remain purely behavioural.

A group of the population with "markers" of visual acuity and/or low carbohydrate-digesting-enzyme production, for example, does not permit the same kind of demonisation/expression of society's unconscious fear, despair, and horror. When did you last see an ad calling for funds to rescue people from the monster of phenylketonuria? !

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I think it's a social construct. Aspies have a certain set of characteristics that are different from the 'norm', so society has labelled it a 'disorder'. In a different society it could just as easily be labelled as a personality type, or a spiritual gift, depending on the worldview and philosophies of the society, and that wouldn't change the essence of it, but simply how people react to it and understand it.

Some kind of label for a minority group is important in order for people to recognise that the minority exists and has different needs from the majority. I don't think the 'disorder' label is ideal, but it certainly has some advantages in enabling us to have some rights, with regard to laws in workplaces and colleges that allowances must be made for our different ways of processing things.

I agree that people/behaviours falling under the label "homosexual", for example, have become more accepted again after over 100 years of systematic/institutionalised loathing and discrimination. However did they need the term "homosexual" in order to achieve this partial acceptance? Could tolerance/legal protection against discrimination have been acquired without the medical label?

I got the impression that it was in fact only when people with "homosexual" behaviours stopped identifying with the medical label, stopped accepting/using it for themselves, ( took "gay", and "gay pride" instead ), stopped believing in the medical model of their behaviour, that they began to have an effect on laws etc, put a stop to the discrimination that the label had justified.

So long as people with "homosexual" behaviours believe(d) the medical term they remain(ed) mute, passive/inactive/submissive/fearful/self-hating, often depressed, to the point of suicide in some/many cases. You could almost say that they performed the role which the medical model gave to them, of pseudo-feminine or a freakish man, that it disabled them, so long as they did not repudiate it.

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Oh come on, AS is real, it is a disability. I could waste time by typing paragraphs of evidence on why it is, but I can't be bothered using up so much time on such a pointless thread.

How about the 'Snowman' is it real?

My guess:


AS is a mild form of autism so we are closer to normal. We can all talk and we aren't like the autistics who are severe and need assistance vs us looking normal and seeming normal.

There are lot of a**holes in the world, people who don't give a s**t about others, don't follow rules, are rude, say rude things and are inconsiderate, etc. Now when they hear about AS and hear what it is, they think "Oh they have found a name for being an a**hole, Aspergers. Oh my god."

Everyone has traits of it and does an aspie thing so when they hear about AS or read about it, they are going "Oh everybody does that" and "Oh that happens to everyone" and "that can happen to anyone" so they think it's bogus.

Sociopaths also don't care about people or have empathy for others so when they hear about AS, they are probably thinking "So they have found another word for sociopath."

More and more kids are being diagnosed with AS today so people are getting skeptical about it. So they might think it's a word doctor found for kids who are brats or for kids who are shy or for kids who are singled out. So they just don't agree with the name.

So I can see why people would think AS is fake and an excuse to be an a**hole. I think there is a huge difference between a**hole and AS even though you can be both.

So if, according to you, "we look normal, seem normal, don't need assistance, lots of people don't follow rules, say rude things, are inconsiderate, etc, and everyone has traits of it", why do you think that the medical establishment has come up with a medical label for us? What is it that justifies us having a diagnosis, with criteria in the DSM which is a list of dysfunctions and disorders?

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