Severe Asperger's

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I meet the criteria for just autism. It was recognised by the specialist straight away before she even did any assessment. AS was never even looked at cause i guess i meet the criteria for just autism and was more alike to that, than AS.

Some people who are diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome do not even meet the criteria that falls with in the diagnostic spectrum for autism but they are still diagnosed with AS because they meet all the AS criteria.

Were as other people with AS do fall into the rating scale of having autism. They would be normal to mild or mild to moderately autistic. Typically a person with AS would not have a score higher than being mild to moderately autistic. Though they could have a higher score on the AS rating scale.

I dont talk like some one who has AS eithier. I mean, i am really generalising here but I have noticed cause i used to work with special needs children; That the children with just autism (not severe) talking was more reserved and gentle.
Children with AS, however, it was much more pendantic and full on.

AS children seemed to have more difficulty with co ordination and of being clumsy. Were as the autistic children did not.

A child with autism, generally had more withdrawn and passive type behaviour. Speech was not as well developed or articulated as AS children's.

Children with autism certainly had fixations and obessions inparticular needing to touch out so they needed OT. More stimulation in regards to movements, touch thearpy and swimming etc

Were as the time spent with the AS children was getting them involved and passionate about their interests, in such a socially supportive enviroment, were they could interact and share with others. The ASD children's obessions were no were near to that of an AS 'special interests.'

^ I have not written this from a book or any research. So wether it be right or wrong It's not set in stone to be anything factual. Rather, it is of my own observations of which I have summarised.

In the case of the original patients of Asperger, I don't know if it was not exactly 'lack of concern with social interaction' (instead of 'lack of success with social interaction')

What is it like to have severe Asperger's? Dawn

I think Chris (Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime) was an example of severe AS. He was a lot worse than me and a lot more effected by it. I thought he was more autistic though than AS.

Autism.

That's a good point. I'd peg him as "severe AS". He's resourceful enough, though, and persistent, and doesn't have any real self esteem issues; I'd think he'd be out on his own by the mid-twenties.

Re. "severe AS"="[classic] Autism", I'd say not quite, because as they're defined, you have AS if you have no speech delay or developmental delay, and normal autism otherwise. It's possible to have neither one and still end up needing quite a lot of help; and possible to have speech or developmental delay and end up independent. Speech delay, especially, isn't much of a determinant because once you learn speech, you are clinically indistinguishable from Aspie except by history. I have a friend like that, who is a great deal more independent than me, and my father (who obviously grew up to live on his own, marry, and have a child) is another such example. You can't predict one from the other, even if on average Aspies need less help than auties. There's just too much overlap. If you actually divided the spectrum by functioning level, people would jump from one category to the other as time went on; but as it is now, they're divided by childhood history and either stay in the same category or else lose their diagnosis as they grow up.

Wing hit it with her odd/eccentric, overly formal/stilted, passive, and aloof categories to determine functioning.

The former three don't look autistic, rather they look odd, eccentric and etcetera (except "passive" when they're stressed), and "aloof" always look autistic [and will have the worst outcome]. The former two usually have an Asperger's label, whereas the latter two have Autism.

Some start off aloof and move up, whereas others stay aloof. Aloof is the most common, whereas the other three make up the rest ("passive" being the least common).

That sounds very subjective. Did she ever actually do the research on that idea?

Basing severity on social functioning doesn't sound too bad to me; the more autistic someone is, the greater their social deficits. It works. The aloof and indifferent individual will be worse than the odd and eccentric individual in most ways defined in autism (whether they can talk or not, even though most of the aloof group had/have language difficulties).

Yeah, she did research on it (Gould was in on it too), and the 3 [or 4] types of social ability are what make up the whole spectrum for the most part; this is how many professionals tend to see it too.

Autism = aloof/passive (mainly aloof, but HFA tend to be passive)
Asperger's = mainly odd and eccentric [as children], which can change into overly formal and stilted as an adult

People can move up, but they can also move back down.

O, and here's a quick overview:

Deleted since I referred said aspie to this site.

Last edited by FireMinstrel on 14 Dec 2008, 3:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.

That sounds like run-of-the-mill AS to me, see: odd and eccentric (one-sided, verbose and insensitive).

That's interesting; I always thought that the passive group was seen as Asperger's rather than autism. It interests me because I'm a passive; my psychologist diagnosed me as Asperger's (maybe because I was diagnosed after childhood and had no language delay?), but in his opinion, AS and HFA were interchangeable.

None of that is really the point of this thread, however. Oh well.

Basing severity on social functioning doesn't sound bad to me either - the more problems you have with your imagination and communication skills, the more difficulty you're going to have with socialising. But then, that doesn't take into account things like sensory issues, need for routine, etc. Maybe we need to look at functioning level not as a one dimensional continuum, but rather as a web. The closer you are to the centre of the web, the more 'normal' you are. So there are many different directions you can go in your abnormality.

Not that I want to imply that all people who are normal in terms of autism spectrum disorders are the same; in terms of ASDs, when you are looking only at specific symptoms of ASDs, then they all share certain similarities. But of course they are different on other spectrums.

Basically, my point is that AS is not a continuum. As such, there are many different ways of being 'severe'.

Hmm, throughout my life since I can remember I have cycled through all of these "styles" (such as, when I was age 3, one day I would be mostly aloof, some time passive, another day switching to eccentric then to passive, the next day have good language for a few hours and be excessively formal and polite; this pattern has pretty much continued through to adulthood). I spend most of my time probably at aloof and passive prolly nowadays.

If that's "standard" AS, then that really makes me question whether or not I want to share my own condition with people once I'm diagnosed. I don't want people thinking I'm like the fellow I described above. Being patronized and talked down to makes me see red. I can drive, I have a boyfriend, I play in a band, and I hold a full-time job(though it's not what I went to school for). It's just taken me longer to have all these accomplishments than others, and I do have sensory issues and special interests(classic rock and video games, which I learned the hard way when to shut up about).
Also it makes me wonder that anything more severe than the fellow described in my last post wouldn't simply slide into HFA territory.

Well, you also have to consider that Danielismyname is refering to officially diagnosed adults with AS. Most adults with AS have reached the "sub-clinical" phase, where their AS has become 'too mild' to diagnose through observation alone. In fact, many of these sub-clinical adults who go for assessments are automatically dismissed by psychologists based on the fact that they don't conform to common stereotypes, despite obvious AS behaviours in childhood. Hell, I would wager that a significant portion of adults with AS don't even suspect that anything is 'wrong' with them, and certainly don't know what "Asperger's Syndrome" is (and this is in the developed world. The rate of these adults in the developing world is significantly higher still).

As such, the general picture of adults with AS (that is officially recognized by psychological authorities) is skewed towards the lower-functioning/severe end. You also have to consider that even amongst the diagnosed, there is a selection bias towards the lower-functioning when it comes to participation in Asperger organizations (parent run, not self-advocacy, just to clarify), group homes and support groups. The higher-functioning often consider such groups to be beneath them.

I don't agree on basing severity on social function. What if, for example, you have special interests that are so absolutely consuming that you forget to eat for a week if not pulled away and told to do it? What if your planning ability is so bad that you take four hours to get ready in the morning? What if you're so easily overloaded that the wrong sound or touch can send you into insta-meltdown? There are many problems that you can have that are unrelated to socializing ability.

I don't get why we have to categorize Asperger's by severity anyway, because there's more to how you're functioning than just whether you have Asperger's; and the same functioning level at some point in time and in some environment could mean different things for different people, and require different accommodations.

IMO it seems that if you want to categorize functioning level, you would probably have to do it for a specific place and a specific time and a specific stress level, and then calculate it by something concrete, like "How much help does this person need to survive here?"--a full-time aide? Occasional help? Extra education? Minor environmental changes? Nothing at all?

I don't like global functioning labels; they're inaccurate half the time and almost always useless. They're just an invitation to pigeonhole somebody. The most you can do is ask, "Overall, at this time, in this environment, how well has this person adapted?"