Differences between mild Aspergers and severe Autism?

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No.

One, I'm convinced that no one is intrinsically better than anyone else. Though people seem very good at degrading what intrinsic value they are born with.

Two, I cannot characterize the internal mental states of a severe autistic let alone compare them to mine.

[qoute]
The point of this thread confuses me.[/quote]

An exercise in categorization? Isn't this something Aspies excel at?

Mild Asperger's creates a certain amount of inconvenience but it can be handled by a sufficiently intelligent person. I have manage to adapt to the NT world without being NT since it is more convenient for me to be able to operate in NT-land.

Severe autism is a disabling condition and the person suffering from it most likely will need assistance for the rest of his/her life.

ruveyn

In terms of severity i score within the autism range and yet i have Asperger's Syndrome becaues of my verbal abilities. It is simply not true that everybody classified as having Asperger's is "high functioning" or "mild".

And, I do support classifying Asperger's as a type of autism. The best thing for now, anyways. I suspect in time we'll find that Autism is actually better understood as a variety of conditions or disorders, and not one single thing. I mean i'm not really like Temple Grandin at all, and yet she's considered having Asperger's too (she's a visual thinker, i'm very verbal). These labels cannot obscure our individuality and uniqueness as persons; I cringe at the thought that everybody with Asperger's is stereotyped in the mass media as a somewhat successful male engineer or computer geek who just happens to be lonely and socially ackward.

I don't think many people with just Aspergers or moderate Autism will sit in a corner hitting themselves in the head all day, unless they wanted to. But not subconsciously.

Mild vs Severe?

The difference between having a semi-difficult childhood and being thoroughly dysfunctional.

ruveyn

Then, going by that definition, count me as "not mild" even though i'm diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. Something in between like moderate, perhaps.
.

...there's just better & worse camouflage.
situations where you stand out more or blend in more.
is it possible to control one's reactions, or moderate them? perhaps this is something.
another thread here is discussing "meltdowns" & "shutdowns"--this is important.
drawing a line between red & orange--not important.

Very true, calling Asperger's high functioning or mild autism doesn't do justice to the problems many face. From what i'm gathering, very, very few people with Asperger's have simply a "difficult childhood".

I've got a very distant cousin, who I met a few years ago when he was 5. He was full of life, and communicated well, anddidn't stim, and didn't mind loud noises, and he was like a NT 5-year-old. The next day my mum had said to me, ''I bet he's going to be loud and full-of-it and popular when he's a bit older.'' And I agreed.
But just yesterday my mum had a phonecall from his mum, and she said that he was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. I was so surprised because he showed no symptoms at all when I first saw him. He had good eye-contact and didn't mind being touched, and was no different from my NT cousin (who was just a year older than him).

This child is 9 now, and I just can't believe he's been diagnosed with Aspergers. Even I showed a few symptoms when I was 5, like not liking loud noises.

But if he had moderate or severe Autism, I think he would have showed a few symptoms at 5.

Heh. Categorization is something my brain just refuses to handle, even when I want it to. It always looks like it would be so neat and orderly. And yet my brain is incapable of shutting out the real, messy, complicated, uncategorizable world enough to really engage in it well. Which is probably why I had a massive receptive language delay as a kid and still struggle with forcing my brain to deal with language (despite writing with what appears to be fluency or even eloquence).

Personally I don't think that autism can easily be classified into mild and severe. For one thing, we don't even know what autism is. It's possible that having a little autism makes life much harder than having a lot of it. (There's even apparently some evidence for that idea.) We just don't know.

The other reason is because, even if we were to take the standard individual-model-of-disability way of looking at things, and categorize severity by how difficult it was for us to fit into the standard "normal" life with the standard "normal" skills... well, autism is too complex for that. How do you measure the severity of something that can affect dozens of different abilities, and where every combination of those ability levels can intersect in ways that make it much harder or much easier such that just counting the abilities doesn't give you a sense of the person's life?

My doctors still insist on calling me severely autistic. And yet at different points in my life people could have called me anything. For some reason when it comes to what's written down on paper I've only ever gotten called severe. But there were times in my life where I was bouncing between different mental institutions, and each new one I'd go to, they'd unofficially categorize me as in the milder group or the more severe group in ways that seemed totally random and nothing at all to do with either my abilities or the abilities of the other inmates. And weirdly enough, the mentality of "mild" or "severe" meant that... basically if they called me "mild", then they wouldn't believe stories of what happened at places where I was called "severe", and if they called me "severe", then they wouldn't believe stories of what happened at places where I was called "mild".

Because, "mild" and "severe" are lenses that people look at your life through. They filter out everything that doesn't fit with their conception of who you ought to be. Then they proceed to judge you based on everything they filter out. And if you happen to do something that doesn't fit... well if you're considered "mild" and do something they call "severe", they say you're being lazy or faking it, and if you're considered "severe" and do something they call "mild", they say it's just an illusion and you don't really have that ability. As someone who's been bounced back and forth between those two labels enough to give me a case of emotional whiplash, I'm firmly against attaching them to autistic people in this manner. They do more damage than good.

I think what ought to be said instead of mild or severe, is really look at the ability that you're thinking of. If you're thinking "This person can live in their society without help that their society considers extra," then say that. If you're thinking "Is not able to speak," then say that. But be careful that you're saying what you actually mean, because often a person is assumed to be one of these things when they're not, or it's assumed that if you're one then you can't be the other.

I get pissed at people who call me severe and I get pissed at people who call me mild or say "you can't possibly be severe because (insert ridiculous criteria here that I might not even meet but they assume I do". (Okay that last one pisses me off the most because it's got all these hidden barbs in it and it is nearly impossible to refute because my communication skills, despite appearances, don't work that way.) All of these things are judgements that I never asked for and don't want, and they have meaning beyond just the literal meaning of the words.

I have progressed from moderate to severe pervasive developmental disorder to something that resembles aspergers. I used to bang my head on the floor when I got mad..then screamed cuz it hurt and cram my hand in my mouth and not know why I choked as a kid. I did not really have the ability to independantly function until my early 20's. Doctors told mom that I would never be able to live outside of an institution, she has worked hard to prove them wrong. I still have alot of difficulties with daily living skills, mostly time management and a bad case of executive functioning disfunction, but I can think quite well.

When I was a kid, I scored in the moderate ret*d range on an IQ test and then later that year took a nonverbal IQ test and scored 135 or 138 not sure which. Now that is a hell of a language based learning disability! The doctor who tested me was a autism researcher who said that autism is the mother of all language based learning disabilities.
I am suprised that his method of diagnosing autism did not make it in the DSM, but it was simple; compare the basic IQ test with the non-verbal IQ test to see if there are any differences of 20 pts or more. In my case, there was a 60 or so point difference between the two.
It seems alot more scientific than just going by lists of traits and might be more accurate.

What does this have to do with the topic of the thread. The last time I took these tests, the gap narrowed to about 30 points as I became higher functioning. So I am, in a way, proof that it is all one thing. Its like taking a medication....at one dose...the reaction would be much different that if that person took the same drug at a much higher dose. It is still the same drug.

Well, what does this mean?
On the web, I saw a clip called ''my Aspie son'', and it showed a little 8 year old boy with AS, happily talking to the camera about his mainstream school he goes to, like any normal kid. Then I saw another clip called ''my very Autistic son'' and it just showed a teenage boy wimpering and hitting himself in the head all day, and one of the parents said ''this is what we have to endure 365 days a year''. Explain the differences are there, between a severely Autistic person and a mild AS person.

Neither video is an accurate depiction of the wide range of possibilities. Each accurately portrays one individual. This is the problem with these videos. They are informative, but people want to generalize them far beyond any reasonable point. Even these two individuals are far more complex than what can be shown on a U Tube clip.

Was the 'severely autistic' boy only autistic or did he have other issues such as ADHD, dyspraxia, or other comorbids? Did the bright eyed 8 year old have 5 years of intensive intervention that has made mainstreaming successful?

The only official difference is how soon you learn to speak as a child. Thus if you have all the traits of severe autism except that you learned to talk at the age of 2 (but maybe later in life stopped talking) then you're an aspie. And if you have all the traits of the mildest form of Asperger's except that you didn't learn to talk until age 5 then you're autistic.

There are differences in the trends. Aspies tend to have higher intelligence than autistics, but some autistics are extremely intelligent and some aspies are extremely slow. The problem with applying this to your question is that you cannot apply statistical trends to individual cases. You could say that you are more likely to notice this or that difference in the situation you explained, but it can not be stated as an absolute.

And all that confusion is why they are being condensed into one in DSM-V.

That's the thing-it's a spectrum.
I'm hyperlexic and intelligent/intellectual. I don't have as many social problems as many Aspies and Auties due to "early intervention" (even though I didn't have a diagnosis; I was born in '81). On the flipside, I have dyspraxia, hypersensitivity, prosopagnosia, get VERY upset/confused by change, and these problems for me are much worse than most individuals with asperger's. I'm much better at describing things and ranting about my special interests in a way others can identify with than most aspies, but I'm worse at communicating my feelings and needs. I'm fairly prone to emotional/sensory overload/frustration storms/tantrums.
It's just a mixture of different traits involving impairment, intelligence, and personality as well(people always forget about that, i think.)

I've questioned this. In the DSM, learning to use words verbally is not the precise criteria.



According to this, speech alone is not sufficient. I still at, age 52, have trouble initiating conversation, and definitely have trouble sustaining it. If there is something specific that needs to be said, no problem. Like "How big is this? Where do you want this?" But the more unspecific, the more I have to force engaging in the conversation. This is even worse if I'm not interested in the topic.