Autism vs. Asperger's

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Some people think Asperger's and autism are the same thing, but other's don't, what do you think?

I think they are both the same except they vary in levels of intensity.

I think AS falls in the same spectrum as Autism, but I found something very interesting in my reading the other day (after watching Shutter Island), where some symptoms associated with AS can also be a result of frontal lobe damage. The specific disorder I am speaking of is Dysexecutive syndrome.

According to the unreliable Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontal_lo ... e_syndrome), there are three main categories; cognitive, emotional and behavioural.

Personally, I don't have any opinion on this, other than interest, but here are the symptoms.

Cognitive symptoms
- Short attention span
- Poor working memory
- Poor short term memory
- Difficulty in planning and reasoning
- Environmental dependence syndrome

Emotional symptoms
- Difficulty in inhibiting emotions, anger, excitement, sadness etc...
- Depression, possibly due to above.
- Occasionally, difficulty in understanding others' points of view, leading to anger and frustration.

Behavioural symptoms
- Utilization behaviour
- Perseveration behaviour
- Inappropriate aggression
- Inappropriate sexual behaviour
- Inappropriate humour and telling of pointless and boring stories (Witzelsucht)

Yes autism is similar to frontal lobe damage. The frontal lobes are underconnected in autism. Same could be said for AS.

I love you.

I thought of a more K-O boxing match.

Love you too

Yeah, or celebrity death match.

Wow, that poster is amazing!

Mom? Is that you?

Aspies don't have the speech delays autistic people have, so they aren't exactly the same thing.

Autistic people don't have to have speech delays, just that Aspies never do. However, Aspies can and do have communication difficulties.

Anyway, since autistic people have such diversity in how it is for each of us, it's hard to say this person's autism is exactly like that person's autism in general. There are clusters and similarities and some who may be identical, but in that kind of framework, Asperger's is a part of the autistic spectrum, and only somewhat distinguishable by speaking a year or two earlier than most diagnosed with autism or PDD-NOS.

I don't even know that the lack of speech delay is that big a feature.

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt141443.html

According to the 2nd poster on this thread autism has a communication category that asperger's doesn't. This person explains how it's possible to be diagnosed with autism without a speech delay.

All this stuff is confusing to me including how the DSM words things.

I fit all that criteria. So if you had AS you wouldn't fit more than two of it?

Yeah, this was me for years in childhood. Not so much now, or really my teens.



I wonder what "stereotyped" and "idiosyncratic" mean. I assume repetitive is echolalia and palilalia.



I am not precisely sure what this means. Was it normal to line toys up or arrange them in scenes? I am pretty sure my play was imaginative, but I don't remember whether I did the more stereotypical "make believe" play with toys.

Also, was it normal to look at pictures in books and then imagine yourself in the scenes in the book? I spent a lot of time doing this, especially with Dr. Seuss and Richard Scarry before I moved on to novels. Strangely, although I read comic books (my parents gave me all kinds to read), I don't recall doing this with those.

Or reading books later (say, Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass) and imagine yourself in those? I was obsessed with chess for a few years because of this.

The DSM tends to be weirdly vague if you haven't actually taken the classes or read the books. The word "stereotyped" is overused in the PDD section, I think. They need a better, more specific, word.

I think the key word is 'appropriate'. I rarely imagined my own play, it was decided by my sister or one friend. Then I was more of a prop than an actual participant in play.
My first imaginative play was me acting out a type of movie scene imagined by myself when I was about 8, in the rain. My play was more acting. And the acting was focusing on my own movements and setting up scenes. Like you know how Frodo held the ring in his hand or anything like that? It has to beheld at a certain way. Yes, that was my play.

I remember in year 5 I would stare at the year 6 students incredulously when they were pretending to be zombies. I was one year younger but thought they were being ridiculous. My own brand of play was very life like and I sort of physical hurt people that way because in cartoons no one actually got hurt.

Yeah. I never directed such things. I always followed along. Or when playing with toys such as Legos, I just built things, I never built things and made up some narrative or story for them. It was all very concrete.



Heh. Like the time we were playing some group thing with 20 kids.We were all marching around in circles then the adult in charge would call out something (I forget what it was) and some of the kids would have to "die" and lay on the ground. I'm thinking "They're dead. They can't feel anything". So I stepped on one of the "bodies". I was then severely scolded. I couldn't understand the problem. He was dead, wasn't he?

I find it interesting how split this poll is so far (at present, 17 say Asperger's is autism, 19 say it is not). I was under the impression that Asperger's was more or less accepted as being part of the autism spectrum. Personally, I think of myself as mildly autistic. But I had a speech delay, so maybe I have HFA and not Asperger's. The label changes nothing for me, anyway.