"Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna"
Complete waste of time and energy.
Aspergers has already been officially removed from the medical book in favor of ASD so from a technical point of view people should just say Autism.
Not that I have anything against someone using either Autism or Aspergers anyway.
It’s highly likely even the term Autism or ASD will be removed in the future too in favor of a more exact subtype.
It’s easy to be moralistic against those living in a different time or place.
Tens of millions lived under the Nazi’s at the time and had to continue their jobs and earn a living. They had no advanced knowledge of the course of the war or occupation.
If you was living in Austria back then and had known France had just fallen along with practically all of Europe, the US wasn’t interested and funded both sides Stalin’s Russia had made a non aggression pact with Hitler and there was no one else, you would be forgiven for thinking this was permanent and you either got on with life, starved on the streets or face a firing squad for rebelling.
I’ve not read historical details of Hans Aspergers as a person.
I don’t know the details of what Aspergers cooperation with Nazi’s was but unless he was a paid up member of the Nazi party or directly responsible for killing kids we shouldn’t be too judgmental on an ordinary psychiatrist doing his job.
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"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends upon the unreasonable man."
- George Bernie Shaw
Punkrockaspie
Yellow-bellied Woodpecker
Joined: 4 Feb 2016
Age: 71
Gender: Male
Posts: 50
Location: Toronto
Given the revelations in Herwig Czech, “Hans Asperger, National Socialism, and ‘race hygiene’ in Nazi-era Vienna,” Molecular Autism (2018), I was wondering if individuals not only on this forum but in the entire Wrong Planet community still call themselves “aspies” and why?
If I've got it correctly, this is the link for Czech's article:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5907291/
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Diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome by Dr. Joel Jeffries of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Adult Psychiatry and Health Systems, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. No intellectual or language impairment.
Asperger's should have been kept as a sub-autism condition, but with changing the name from Asperger's to Social Communication Sensory Disorder or something like that. Because mild autism does exist. People with Asperger's have less of a spiky profile and their existing "spikes" are more likely to be co-morbids like ADHD, anxiety and depression. We're not just "high masking autistics". Some of us don't use a mask much at all but can still appear as just a quirky NT. Many cases of autism are more spiky, probably the majority, and so it makes sense to just call them autistic. But that doesn't mean cases like mine don't exist and should be lumped in with autism. Because autism sounds more like a disability, while Asperger's sounds more like a difference in many (not all) of us, if you strip away their co-morbids if any.
My co-morbids (ADHD and anxiety disorder) make up most of my issues, as I've researched a lot about adults with anxiety disorders and ADHD and like 90% of the symptoms describe me in a nutshell.
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My diagnosis story and why it was a traumatic experience for me:
viewtopic.php?f=35&t=416910&start=1056#p9695026
Please notify me if there's a spelling mistake or an obvious autocorrect error in my posts.
As far as I understand it Asperger syndrom was a sub-group in the autism spectrum and never thought of as a separate condition. Sort of "autism light" and to call it Asperger was a way to sugarcoat it so that these people didn't have to be lumped together with people with severe autism. Like calling a slightly fat person "full figured". I think there were good reasons to drop the term. But Hans Asperger being a person of questionable moral is not a good reason. America is the Latinized version of the first name of Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. If historians found documents that he was a serial killer or something like that - should the continent be renamed for that reason?
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English is not my first language.
Double Retired
Veteran
Joined: 31 Jul 2020
Age: 71
Gender: Male
Posts: 7,344
Location: U.S.A. (Mid-Atlantic)
I thought the Nazi intent was to kill everyone with Autism and they hired Asperger to identify the Autistics...but Asperger made the case that a subset of them should be kept alive, the subset now identified as having Asperger's Syndrome.
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When diagnosed I bought champagne!
I finally knew why people were strange.
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