Is Aspergers a mental illness?

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A mental disorder should be something that affects in different severities your everyday functioning and is neurological in origin. If people aren't impaired in an area that sort of holds them back then there's no bloody point to be diagnosed.
I'm reading through the article and I think that Al Frances would agree. It sounds like he is saying doctors are turning everyday personality traits into a disorder. I mean passive aggressive disorder? Come on. SCT I could understand because maybe they could develop some sort of treatment for those people. Right now they are getting very little support and meds hardly work on them.

Anyway, back to it. Nice find by the way.

I do think he would agree too. I thought that lead paragraph was interesting, but the whole article goes into a lot of depth.

This means Schizophrenia is not a mental illness, as it isn't a chemical imbalence, it's some sort of genetic anomoly. Depression is a chemical imbalence.

Anyhoo, like I said, why does everyone ignore criteria number III in the DSM for aspergers? It basically says if you are not actually disabled or disordered and chronically negatively effected by your autistic traits then you don't have aspergers. And if you do, you necessarily meet the criteria for mental illness.

Asperger is'nt a mental ilness in itself, but many people with asperger have mental health problems, like anxiety and depression. As I see it, this has more to do with trying to cope in a neurologically typical world than with asperger itself

The way it works is the DSM accounts for illnesses, disorders etc. If you don't have a problem, it's not classified. That said, there are still conditions out there. Or behaviours/characteristics that could be classified as a condition.

[img][800:448]http://i40.tinypic.com/14mgbut.png[/img]

Technically yeah, but who cares, it's just a classification IMHO. Personally I don't think so.

@Phonic: Illogical.

And ASDs don't have a chemical imbalance component? And severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia don't have developmental/structural abnormalities? Not a good enough definition in the neuroscience world.

I did not ignore those criteria, but like I said in my previous post, autism and Asperger syndrome is not generally considered to be a mental illness and your criteria for mental illness, despite being a definition quoted in the Oxford dictionary, is not sufficient and is not the definition of mental illness used by psychiatrists. If we used your definition, that would mean that many other things would also be mental illnesses, for example ADHD would also be a mental illness, but it is not actually considered to be a mental illness.

So basically you agree there's a 0% chance that the DSM, the current "authorities" on "autism" and what they think autism is, is anything other than 100% correct?

Phonic has a point.

Count me as most certainly in the "disability, not just a difference" camp.

(post 6666! How auspicious)

you're speaking as a layman. look up the actual definition and you will see that you are not accurate.

EDIT: i.e. read the WHO's document on "health" and there is a definition in there about what constitutes illness, including mental illness. what Phonic is explaining is that regardless of popular culture's view of what constitutes "mental illness", according to the definitions themselves ASD qualifies.

I have grappled with the issues in Phonic's illustration. What I have come up with is, yes, Autism is a disability. To put things in perspective, I remind myself there are varing degrees of limitations placed on all living beings. A tree hasn't a CNS, for example, so they cannot think or feel.. Humans possess no wings or feathers rendering them incapable of flight in the manner of birds although they can fly with the help of equipment and machines. Despite the fact humans can't fly in the same way birds can, they do not let it ruin their day. They progress nonetheless.
Everybody does have difficulties and should be given the tools to overcome them. It doesn't matter if someone is disabled or not. All humans deserve the same rights.

I don't question at all that ASDs are disorders and (often) disabilities. Technically it is possible for it to be impairing enough to be a disorder but not a disability in a mild case, but it is still a disorder and not just a difference in that case. (Disability being a legal term its weird)

I question the use of 'mental illness', because of not having a standard definition to turn to. It fits some definitions and not others. I don't find it accurate to use the phrase 'mental illness', because common perception around me is the mental illnesses can be 'cured' and require and benefit from medication.

However, being a disorder that has to do with mental stuff, it definitely fits some definitions of mental illness.

And arnoldism, that's not at all what Phonic is saying. Phonic is saying that it must impair you like every other diagnosis in the DSM. They can have mistakes, they can be wrong, they likely have the wrong idea about other bits.

That doesn't change that in order to get a diagnosis you need to be impaired.

That doesn't make any statement about whether it also comes with benefits, it just states that it must have impairments and if there are impairments then its a disorder. That's the definition of disorder.

So then why are some of the major experts in ASD, including Tony Attwood and Simon Baron-Cohen, on record as saying that that Asperger's in itself is not a mental illness?

Yes, it's a developmental disability but developmental disabilities are distinguishable from mental illnesses and people with AS can be mentally healthy. What can affect the mental health of people with AS are co-morbid conditions. Not everything in the DSM is what would necessarily be described as a "mental illness".

EDIT: I found this answer to the question of whether autism is considered a mental illness:

http://library.thinkquest.org/C0110296/faq.php?id=103