Wake up people! There is no such thing as Aspergers.

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I'm afraid I cannot be as politically correct as the previous poster in that I personally think that Junior1 is a s**thead at best and a dickface dorkwad bit-twiddler jerkoff cross-dresser at the worse. Other than that he's just plain ignorant trailer trash who most likely dropped out of high school after getting his sister pregnant and now has nothing to do but sit back and wait for the welfare checks.

I never said people shouldn't get help for problems. People should get help for problems!

Freaking out at unimportant noises or wrapper rustling, for example, is a problem. "Aspergers" is not a problem, it it is a social construct.

Note that this problems ("freak out at such (...) noises as wrapper rustling, voices, cars or birds") does not appear in any of the diagnosis criteria of AS, AFAIK.

TPE2:

Not specifically (I think), but the diagnostic criteria do include sensory issues. Psychology never claimed to be a hard science, so generalizations are a given.

I don't entirely disagree with what you, ouinon and junior1 are saying; non-harmful autistic behaviours certainly ought to be accepted and autistic opinions should not be undervalued. But I think it's more logical and efficient to work on removing the negative connotations from the label so that people can also get help for fundamental neurological differences that are clear in autistics and come together in certain but varied groups. This concept does not preclude a variety of personalities, nor do all professionals seem to understand it (whoever says autistics are not imaginative has to contend with a number of professionals who might say otherwise, though); that's why clarification is required from autistics themselves. I don't see how an amateur and impractical philosophy exercise is preferable to this method; indeed, it seems to harm our position more than anything else if we need to justify ourselves by positing an inefficient and ultimately unmanageable means of inquiry. (I say unmanageable because, to get services, like it or not, you have to fit into a clear category; the present system doesn't allow for much else.)

Now, the talk about naivete and ignorance and the attention-grabbing topic headline are a bit much, particularly when the only difference between your position (autistics should be accepted; brains are different and that's OK) and that of the general WP populace is an obscure and impractical philosophical quarrel. At best, it's confusing, but usually it's just insulting.

EDIT: I also agree that women are underdiagnosed for cultural reasons, but I'd rather not go off on a tangent.

Last edited by Ixtli on 10 Mar 2009, 8:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I suppose, if everybody is done, it may be time to close this thread.

As junior1 asserts in his title: "There is no such thing as Aspergers (sp)", we should take his word for it, and expect him to vanish from WrongPlanet.net: "The online resource and community for Autism and Asperger's". A board that clearly cannot exist.

Oh yes please, lau! You're a godsend.

Yes!! ! please close. (agree with above)

I was just starting to get out my dictionary and thesaurus.

Social construct, sure. So is religion, names, beliefs, values, language...everything you utter is not your own language but rather socially constructed. Medicine has social constructs as it is guided by the needs of a particular society.

That's not the point. Without the socially constructed insistence that we name some particular disorder, then we would exist back in the day when nameless faces were locked away, nonentities, referred to as criminally insane by socially constructed definitions.

The broader criteria requires a more objective measurement and has allowed more verifiability, more precision, more particulars. The diagnostic criteria dignifies the human being and suggests that there are indeed many positive gifts to be recognized. It categorizes groups of people with very similar phenotypes and then measures the degree of impairment by how much the impairments interfere with functioning in a socially constructed world.

When you publish books, you earn the label "author" and you are deserving of certain rights that the others are not. When you are diagnosed with Aspergers by a doctor, you earn the right to be accepted, percieved and tolerated in a particular manner. It is a right, well deserved.

You can choose to not believe it. It's your choice. But, it will still exists because, in case you haven't noticed or decide to pull your head out of the sand, smart humans have progressed beyond a primitive level of diagnostic measurement, always moving forward and improving in tolerance and our regard for people that are different. We accept that which helps us to improve our current condition. We accepted technology and other advancements. Why not Aspergers? If a label encourages better treatment, I'm all for it. The question is, why do you disregard the name of it? Do you accept a MacIntosh? How about an I-Pod? Do these exist? What about depression or paranoia? I could go on. All labels are socially constructed. If you did your homework you would know that Aspergers was named after Hans Asperger, the brilliant doctor who spent his life invested in identifying this particular form of autism which presented differently. He was an honorable man who sought to identify a new disorder within he autism community. Thankfully, he succeeded, finally, in the 1990's. Look how long it took before this socially constructed diagnosis entered the DSM IV. Ignorance is socially constructed too, driven by the majority of nah sayers who disregard the particulars, dismiss the good work with a wave of the hand. You are a prime example of it.

I only hope you aren't an educator where you might influence others to think the way you do, the old school way.

Well. i don't think it is obscure or impractical, because the label is not defined or controlled by the "autistic" community, and most people will defer to the experts, including many, if not most, members of the autistic community. How many people here repeat common "truisms" about Aspergers that these experts invented and take these truisms into their conceptions about themselves?

I argue that a large amount of skepticism is appropriate towards what these so called experts are saying, especially as if effects peoples identity.

A lot of folks here very ... trustingly... go on about getting a diagnosis and worrying about what the result will be, are they or aren't they, and this will effect how they see themselves for the rest of their life.

But this massive element of their own identity is being made up, arbitrarily, by committees and individuals based on an arbitrary, imprecise, inaccurate, potentially hurtful model.

You were the same person that you were before some person with a degree labeled you with some social invention, but that label will now effect how you see yourself for the rest of your life.

Ah well, I was thinking that you might be able to say something less repetitive, junior1, but all you have done is make yet another vaguely offensive attack on the majority of the members of this board.