Why Asperger's should be separated from Autism

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Aspies don't have speech delays because we say words on time. But we do have communication delays. For example, I communicated by using scripts; I couldn't have a back-and-forth conversation until I was about eight or nine years old; and I learned idioms from an idiom dictionary rather than from daily experience. I still have communication issues; I answer rhetorical questions, take things literally, miss sarcasm, and occasionally become incoherent or mute under stress. I say things people consider inappropriate; I miscommunicate; and I don't use gestures very effectively. I can't read another person's motivations to save my life (and really hope that this never becomes literally true).

Were you to take those speech issues and make them just a little more pronounced, it would be called classic autism. All it would take is a little more auditory processing issues, or a little less talent with language, and voila--classic autism.

Autistic people differ from each other on many different parameters. Speech is only one of many. It's only used to differentiate classic autism and Asperger's because it's so dramatic. If Johnny isn't speaking at age four, everybody notices. If Johnny is just obsessed with Bob the Builder, hasn't made any friends, and likes to run in circles, it's nowhere near as dramatic.

I'd be a little hesitant to apply the idea of mental retardation to the idea of autism unless there were a known type of congenital disorder (Down syndrome, for example) involved... It's not that autistic people aren't delayed, because by definition we all are. We just don't tend to be uniformly delayed. There'll be one skill ahead of the other; one skill behind the others inhibiting your ability to use them; yet another just developing in a completely different way. The definition of MR implies something roughly linear, with development that's pretty much a straight upward line with different slopes depending on your degree of MR. Problem is, that assumption doesn't hold true with autism. Different skills can develop quite separately; you could plateau or you could jump ahead or you could even lose skills.

The more dimensions are added, the more you diverge from typical development, the less "mental retardation" means, the less useful it becomes in practice, and the more you have to define delays in terms of specific skills. Sure, you can average out those skills and say the person's above or below average, but when it comes down to it, that average doesn't really help you all that much in designing an educational plan or predicting what the person can do and can't do. You can give an autistic person a mental retardation label; but it's not going to do much good because he's not going to be developing in the same way that people with just mental retardation do. Having the same expectations of him will probably sell him short in one aspect while expecting too much in others. Similarly, "gifted" or "genius" have very little meaning when it comes to autism. Sure, you can have some very high skill levels, but looking at one gives you absolutely no way to predict what the others are... It really all comes down to the individual. Some autistics are very disabled; others only slightly; IQ doesn't have near as much correlation with that as you might think.

IQ is bad enough as a straitjacket for kids with more typical MR. Like autistic people, they've got atypical neurology, and that means you can't apply NT assumptions ot it. Apply IQ to educating kids with MR, and you'll run straight into the atypical nature of their minds, which may be more like NT than autistics' brains, but are still different enough to create serious issues when assumptions are made. Basing your education of an autistic child on IQ is even worse, because the skills are even more scattered. Better to ignore IQ, catalogue abilities, and base your education on that.

Mental retardation is not something to be ashamed of. But, like autism, it has many stereotypes dragging along with it that you need to avoid--among them the idea that, if you have an IQ at a certain level, all your skills will be at or near that level. When your brain's weird enough, that just isn't so!

Yes, I realize that all Aspies have some sort of communication problem, but what I meant is that the brain wiring in those with AS must be different than HFA individuals to have them say words on time. And neuroscience needs to explore this area much more. There are confounds galore in the current autism research, and I am highly against the common use of mixed HFA/AS experimental groups when we have not fully sorted out HFA from AS. The issue of many AS individuals having higher VIQ than PIQ and HFA individuals showing the opposite pattern, as well as many AS individuals having pronounced clumsiness, also has not been fully explored. Even if there is not found to be a statistically significant difference between HFA and AS when these traits are added, we need to see how the different brains do differ to simply further our understanding of the human brain. At any rate, I refuse to believe that Asperger's is equivalent to high-functioning autism until I see definitive proof from research studies.
-OddDuckNash99-

I'd say the clumsiness in my case is due to feeling like I'm piloting my body, rather than it being a part of me.

Speech is just something that I noticed others doing, so I tried to figure it out.

I don't think you can really just apply a linear scale though, rather with Aspies and HFA it stands out that we have developed along some channels normally, or rapidly even, but the areas we lag in stand out.

In cases with Aspies, it is often subtle areas which can be taken as merely being shy or awkward, but when it is pointed out, you tend to find many who have noticed that everyone else seemed tuned in to something they weren't, like myself.


MR is not always co-morbid with ASD.

It seems like it would be very difficult to prove, because both categories are subjective anyway. Which one you wind up in depends on the biases of whoever did your diagnosis.

Look what you started KoS!

So question - is the main difference between AS and other forms of Autism the language development?
I look at my son, classic Autism, vs my friends son of a similar age with AS and that seems to be the main difference between the two. Also my son is not aggressive while the AS boy is.

Its still pretty frikkin mysterious to me, although I can now pick an AS adult, theres a few around here (I work in IT).

Just have to add:

The mental retardation that's seen in Autism is different to your general and global mental retardation in people without it.

Usually, the skill pattern isn't evenly distributed.

Take me for example, where the last IQ test I took resulted in 58 (mild MR); I scored high on a couple of parts, but low in all others.

Not that there's anything wrong with scoring low in everything, of course, I'm just pointing out the differences that are often seen.

I get tired of hearing the idea that what people call LFA is "HFA + comorbids" or something. Or that it's "HFA + MR". Many autistic people who get low IQ scores get them because they're autistic, not because they're MR. Just like lots of people with cerebral palsy get low IQ scores because of cerebral palsy. Not that anything at all is wrong with MR, it's just different.

I'm someone who has been officially classified as low functioning and/or severe at various times. And unofficially that's how a lot of people see me. I don't put a functioning label on myself, and would encourage people not to assume I've lived the stereotypical life of someone with that label, but I have zero control over what others have called me. I'm also one of those people where every year of my life the gulf between me and typical development widens.

But anyway. The attributes that get me labeled that way by people are nearly all autism-related. It is totally possible for autistic people to vary so widely that which skills get us labeled what can have more to do with either a different sort or different degree of autistic traits. It doesn't require additional conditions. Sometimes I wonder if at least some of the people who insist it's all comorbids (gah I even hate the word, very pathologizing) are people who don't want to think certain traits could possibly come from being autistic.

Nowadays, MR is defined as having a certain IQ score with adpative skill delays. So if you had the IQ score and the adaptive skill delays, you would be diagnosed with both autism and mental retardation--even though your neurology was autistic, and not very much like non-autistic people who scored the same on an IQ test as you did. That makes it a pretty useless diagnosis.

Maybe it's not that we use the MR label, which can be applied to autistic people; but that professionals often treat it as though it were a single group of traits, like autism is, or like any of the axis I conditions are supposed to be. But it's not. MR is more of a description of that one aspect of your cognition, than one big diagnosis that's all the same. All you need to do to be diagnosed is to have trouble taking care of yourself and suck at IQ tests, and there are only about a million and three reasons why that might be true of you--anything from brain injury to a bad early environment to just being at the low end of the bell curve. You can't act like anybody in that huge group is all the same; it's insane to assume that.

Mental retardation strikes me as something that can be either a symptom of a larger diagnosis, or else something you can have on its own, and which has a very different quality depending on why you have it. So somebody who's got MR because of autism is going to be different from somebody who's got it because he's got fetal alcohol syndrome, and different from somebody who got it because they couldn't get him breathing soon enough after he was born...

I think the "mental retardation" label probably dates back to the time when people thought that anybody who was "defective" (they seriously used that word) was just about the same as any other "defective" person, so you could just detect them all with an IQ test, round them up, and deal with them however you liked... If I were running the show, I'd just have a simple "cognitive disability" label for people who didn't have any other condition, and then leave people with other conditions in their own categories rather than shoehorning them into MR, too. That'd be like having a medical diagnosis for "can't walk", when there are a million reasons why you mightn't be able... you know, everything from a broken ankle to a coma. You have a category that's too general, and it just isn't useful anymore. Worse than useless when people start stereotyping.

Man theres no way anyone reading your post, or the one preceding it could see the author as anything but intelligent. I wonder if half the problem with IQ tests is the time limit...I remember reading about that fascinating person Perelman, his maths tutor from Russia said he didn't think quickly, he thought 'deep'. You don't work out something like the Poinecaire by thinking fast after all.
Most of the posts by people on here with 'LFA' or 'low IQ' I think if only the people I work with could write (reports) so well.

Has anyone seen the documentary "Autism: The Musical"? There's a scene in it in which parents of an autistic boy are told (by the person they were hoping to hire as an advocate, IIRC) that test scores show their son has low intelligence. The same boy was interviewed previously in the movie and is clearly intelligent. It's infuriating.

The one issue I see with a cure is the fact autism (and aspergers) are thought to be genetic, and from the same genes. Curing autism would involve eradicating the genes. Anyone care to remember instances in history where certain genetic traits were targeted for elimination?

Yeah, eugenics is a bad idea, even without the ethics angle. You need genetic diversity for the survival of a species, simple as that. People who thought they could apply the principles they learned from breeding livestock to improve the human race didn't realize that when you breed livestock, you breed it for one particular condition--life on a farm--and will generally create animals that are a great deal less hardy and adaptable than the wild variety--often times, will outright die if put in any situation other than that farm. Similarly, if you tried eugenics with humans, you'd simply end up with humans who couldn't adapt to new situations because the gene pool would be too small. It's not just bad for human rights; it's just plain bad science.

Saw it. Loved it. I know exactly the boy you are talking about. In the interview he said he was sometimes annoyed with another boy in the group who talked on and on about dinosaurs because it made him feel shut out, not part of the conversation. Then he wondered if he sometimes made other people feel the same annoyance. Good use of logic and empathy too.

I identified with his parents very strongly. I have a livid memory of the scene with the advocate (I do mean livid, not vivid). The parents are at a table in a room with the advocate. The advocate wave their son's assessment results at them and says, "I don't know why you insist on calling him high functioning. These results are quite low functioning." The stony look on their faces was one I have had with professionals too. And for the same reason.

The kid? I saw a clip of him later (elsewhere, not that movie) doing a duet with Jack Black. Nice voice. Good musical timing. Ha!! Good for him.

If it is only one (or even several) targeted genes, then there's no "cure" for those of us already born and living. My fear would be a definitive test for autism in a zygote, because then people might start aborting autistic babies... I suppose in the end it's the mother's choice at that point (because the baby isn't a baby yet), but it worries me that even HFA/Asperger's could be targeted.

That is under the assumption that it is having or not having a specific gene or a few genes that makes the difference, when it is likely combinatorial. And how does one fix an "autism gene" that is necessary for living? It's not like these were necessarily just extra DNA that cells had on hand and decided to throw in for the heck of it.

Exactly, autism isn't like down syndrome... I'm willing to bet it's caused by tweaks in multiple places across the genome, and is probably different for every "strain," so to speak. What I mean by that is that I'm sure the areas that are different in my genome are also different from the differences in my (also AS) boyfriend's genome. I doubt it's a pinpoint-able thing. (Or at least I hope so for the reasons in my previous post lol.)