Is aspergers a fad diagnosis?

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I may be in the minority here, but yes, it is quickly becoming a fad. Along with OCD and bipolar, AS has become the "in" thing to have, it's all over TV and film at the moment and the number of "self diagnosed" has gone through the roof on the internet. And kids are getting diagnosed a lot more often than adults, I'm not saying they don't have it because most probably do but at the same time there will be many who are misdiagnosed.

The answer to this question depends on what exactly is being asked.

Is it "fashionable" for clinicians to fix an ASD label on people? Not in my experience and it's been actually hard in my case to get a clear-cut answer from someone.

However, is it "fashionable" to the larger public? I'll have to agree with some posters here and say yes, there seems to be more people who are claiming to have "Asperger's" or say things like, "I have a little bit of Asperger's" - when they obviously don't. It's not so much a competition between posters on whether someone's traits are autistic enough, but it's more a matter of people who may not have a complete and full understanding of autism co-op the syndrome and dilute how impairing it can be to people who are on the spectrum.

I agree 100%. It's definitely the fad diagnosis these days.

It has nothing to do with the way I see myself. Having known why I've always had to try harder than other people to do things they could easily do would have helped me. My parents were verbally and sometimes physically abusive to me because of my AS symptoms, they now regret the things they've said and done to me. I had to grow up not understanding things and wondering why I couldn't understand things. I had trouble in school and I have trouble holding a job, and I tried to kill myself twice before I was diagnosed.

I look at it this way, suddenly someone magically gives you all these answers to questions you didn't even understand and OMG life starts to make sense and with those answers life becomes less hopeless and scary. That's what a DX was for me. I'm just lucky I managed to survive to be DXed.

this. (in adult population, at least)

although a lot of people seem to think the cutoff point should be exactly at their level of impairment and nothing milder. i don't really understand what all the fuss is about. on the one hand you have people who are griping that it's become popular and complaining their are fake self-diagnosers all over the place (with no evidence of either), and on the other hand the most vocal of them are the ones wanting to keep aspiehood as some elite club inclusive of them but exclusive of other people. i have seen more arguments about this since joining wrong planet than anything else.

tbh, i have not seen much real life evidence that the general population even knows what it is, let alone how to recognize it. it matters more that people who need help receive it than whether a few people who "had the disorder first" are rubbed the wrong way.

based on posts here and those i know in real life, the trend for parents if anything seems to be denial of the condition unless the evidence is overwhelming, or reluctance to let their children be labelled.



this suggests to me that diagnosticians are getting better at recognizing the condition.

in either direction, errors are going to be made no matter how well educated anyone is about anything.
and the OP said nothing about noticing people without traits being diagnosed. he just asked a question.

someone mentioned bipolar being a fad diagnosis. maybe psychs are learning to recognize it more easily.




no it's not. "my kid is genius" vs. "my kid has a pervasive developmental disorder"

this whole argument is ridiculous, it gets no less ridiculous the more it's brought up.

Just because the media gives attention to a disorder, people have this weird idea that it's suddenly some fad diagnosis. The supposed "rise" in cases are really just due to awareness and more people trying to seek a diagnosis due to it. There is always going to be the odd person who will fake symptoms or be paranoid about non-existent symptoms, but that doesn't automatically mean it's a fad. I think it's lazy to assume that the rise in diagnosis of any condition is due to misdiagnosis.

The only reason why can get away with calling AS and ADHD a fad is simply because people are ignorant when it comes to neuroscience.

I don't think that it's a fad. I think that it's a very real disorder.

I'm sorry but that was highly offensive and uncalled for. Most likely, I will have a diagnosis by the end of the month. However, I'm not sure how it would affect me negatively or positively. It's just, a diagnosis and it doesn't really change anything. You are who you are and that doesn't change just because of a label. That's actually the reason that I've been hesitant to get a diagnosis, up until now. It won't really make a difference in my life, so I'm not sure there's a point.

In order to agree that Asperger's is a fad diagnosis, I would need to admit that there is large number of us who merely fell victim to a fad. I think that very few of us who KNOW our diagnoses to be correct would believe that (and I believe that would be nearly 100% of those diagnosed as adults). There may be a few children who are mistakenly or even fraudulently labeled with AS, but I would still bet that that's not many.

Most of the disorders in children that have been labeled as fads are those that also became newly available. Asperger's was not added to the DSM unitl 1994 (DSM IV)... SO, if there seems like there were a lot of new cases after 1994... I guess that would be why!

Anyway, in adults most psychiatrists look for (and therefore find) only depression, bipolar, OCD, and anxiety and chances are, you will get diagnosed with one of those long before he/she will resort to the autistic spectrum. When I got my diagnosis, only four months ago, my doctor looked at me as an oddity and my therapist was completely befuddled.

So fad, no.

I don't think AS is a fad to any clinicians, parents, or people who have struggled with AS their whole lives.

But I do think there has been a tendency in some books about AS to paint a rosy picture of people with AS as misunderstood eccentric geniuses who are guileless and loyal and who cannot tell a lie. This has led to some people who don't have AS to want to associate themselves with the condition. In that sense it could be considered a fad, but in a very limited way.

People who actually have AS know first hand the turmoil and difficulty it can bring. But someone who only read about it in a book might want to attach herself to the "eccentric genius" bandwagon because she thinks it makes her seem interesting.

I was not trying to imply that Asperger syndrome was not a real disorder I was asking if people thought that it was overdiagnosed.

every profecional (my childrens psychologists/psychiatrists/therapists) who has met me since my diagnosis has questioned it, they all say scathinly how they think its a 'fad diagnosis' and 'over diagnosed'. However I have an AQ of 48 out of 50 and a low EQ of 12 and INTJ personality, so if I am an NT Im certainly an inadequate one, Ive never heard of an NT haveing an EQ of 12! However Im quite a confident person and wear make up and dresses so dont 'look aspergers'.

I should imagine if these psychologists Ive met have such a sterotyped vision of aspergers in their minds that plenty of others do too, and unless your clutching a collection of batteries or bus timetables and wearing unattractive clothes they will presume you dont have AS.

Ive not met anyone at an AS meet up who I didnt think had AS, they were all very different but they definately had AS.

I think people can not beleive the numbers of people with AS so have to dismiss it as a 'fad diagnosis', where as I think there is probably just a large porportion of people with it. We have not yet reached the numbers of AS people that is recorded for schizophrenia 1%, or personality disorders 10% so I dont think we need to worry about over diagnosis.

I think the human race is just more diverse and less 'normal' than people imagine.

I think it is underdiagnosed.

I agree, most people actually have a problem, even those who seem pretty "NT", but no one truly act like the stereotyped xdisorder they are supposed to have.

Most of my "friends" have a disorder : usually depression which is easily diagnosed (but still sometimes wrongly, and it can be a fad diagnosis), two are bipolar, one has schizophrenia, another has a schizoid personality disorder, and one of my bests friends is quite normal yet very intelligent, have self-confidence issues and social phobia, plus some diseases or other disorder associated.

None of them truly act like the other who has the same disorder, I've even seen two of them arguing that one was misdiagnosed because they seemed to have a better life than the latter. Truth is : we don't know what people think and how they deal with it.

And since there are more and more "new" disorders, we assume that if everyone were to pass a great amount ot tests, almost no one would be NT.

There are no epidemy, this is probably not a trend when you have been diagnosed, people are just informed and sciences make progress.

However, if one were to come here and say that he has watched a TV show or a movie where one character is supposedly autistic and that one started to think one was just "like them", it would be great to see whether it is true by investigating (how whas their childhood, ect ?) or if it's just that one started to mimic they favourite character since it happens a lot, especially among young people.

I suspect that AS is under-diagnosed in live, anonymous people and over-diagnosed in dead, famous people.