Calling Aspergers autism? why?

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I'd rather tell people that I'm autistic than telling them that I have AS. When people hear "Asperger's", they either imagine a condition that gives people awesome geek powers and turns them into the next Einstein or Bill Gates, or they think of it as a mental disease that causes sufferers to say grossly inappropriate things all the time and laugh at funerals. I'm neither of that. I'm no Einstein and no inconsiderate dolt. I'm autistic.

I have been Diagnosed with both AS and HFA either way I am stuck on the spectrum with an unbreakable ball and chain ancoring me to it.

I have seen so many threads with this kind of title on WP and since you only joined WP in Feb and this is your 8th post, I wondered if perhaps you are a troll?

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and suggest you read some quality Asperger's reference books to answer this question.

Oh, I have such a history. You just reminded me of how many times I have been in pain and not even been able to talk about it, or just ignored it.

I had something that felt very much like a gall bladder attack, and was so painful I was nearly in tears. And this was going on for days, but I couldn't get the words out to tell anyone. Fortunately, nothing bad came of it - whatever it was resolved itself.

I was stabbed in the leg with a pencil in the first grade, but I never mentioned it. I finally saw a doctor when my mother noticed I was barely able to walk because I had a massive painful abscess right below my knee.

When I developed costochondritis - severe chest pain, thanks to inflammation of the cartilage in my ribcage - I mostly didn't tell anyone until it had been going on for months. And then I ended up going to a free clinic instead of the ER.

I also tend to ignore toothaches until the pain spreads all over and causes extremely painful headaches as well.

I had a pain in my hip for close to 6 years, that I told no one about ever, until about a year ago, at which point it turned out to be bursitis and was easily resolved.

The thing is, despite having pretty typical Aspie traits (as an adult--as a youngster I had more autie traits), I have more in common with the people they call "LFA" than you might expect on first glance.

I'm just not capable of forming social connections. I just... don't. I like people or don't like them, but I can leave them without missing them. I can stay alone indefinitely without feeling lonely, even though I do feel stir-crazy if I don't leave the apartment. I zone out and ignore the world. I'm unaware of what many people around me think of me. If I get stressed enough, I forget the people around me altogether. I stare at shiny things, flap my hands, rock, flick my fingers.

You wouldn't think that someone with those traits is also a highly verbal gifted college student, but I am. A lot of the stereotypes that come with "Asperger's" don't apply to me. I care a great deal about others' well-being; I'm not anxious in social situations; I'm creative. I'm a visual/conceptual thinker, not word-focused. I don't lash out at others unless someone tries to restrain me during a meltdown.

That's not unusual. Most Aspies don't fit the Aspie stereotype exactly. The trouble is that people often assume we do, because we fit just enough on first glance that that assumption isn't immediately invalidated.

I've been diagnosed Aspie, autistic, and PDD-NOS. Asperger's is the most common judgment, but I don't agree with it. PDD-NOS is really the only valid diagnosis for my case, just like for most of the Spectrum.

When I say "autistic" rather than "Aspie", that is a more general statement. Because I don't fit the stereotype of someone who's a completely unresponsive savant calculating people's birthdates, saying "autistic" forces people to see me as an individual with an individual set of autistic traits.

What I have noticed during the time that I’ve spent on this wrong planet behind the sun is that people with Asperger’s gladly seem to associate themselves to autism and many have the need to argue that high functioning autism and Asperger’s don’t really differ in any way at all.

I am not going to state anything to a direction or another, but I kind of understand what Sky Heart means. In some cases high functioning autism really isn’t the same thing as AS is to most of you. It seems that I personally probably have even less problems than most people with Asperger’s here, albeit me being as a child in the “more autistic” side. I can associate my HFA easily to AS and I actually almost have a constant need to reassure that to myself, where as people with AS seem to feel their problems are more comparable with LFA and have an almost opposite need to emphasize how seriously affected they really are. That is of course understandable, since some seem to doubt the existence of AS and it very often is not taken as seriously as it should.

I surely don’t want to underestimate anyone’s problems, but I just want to say, that the way in which e.g. Sky Heart is nonverbal differs a lot from me or somebody else not being able to explain things clearly.

I am a person who went from severely autistic and non-verbal in childhood to high-functioning and Asperger-like in adulthood.

My progression through the autism spectrum was not an aerial tramway to the top of a mountain, but a rollercoaster ride with many ups and downs at many different spacetimes.

Because I have lived through a big block of the spectrum during my life, I feel that I can relate to many different people on the spectrum. I can relate to people who are non-verbal and cannot communicate their needs and wants, because I remember the same from my childhood and adolescence. I can relate to people who function well and have careers and relationships, because I hope to achieve the same in my life.

Splitting the spectrum into LFA and HFA and AS does not make sense to me, because that is like splitting myself into multiple people.

I am glad that the spectrum will be merged into ASD in the DSM-V. On the outside, my diagnosis will be ASD, and I will have gone from Level 3 in childhood to Level 1 in adulthood. On the inside, I am just me.

What VisInsita got me back to thinking that "people with AS" and "people with LFA" can both mean different things. And why I'm in favour of calling AS autism.

In my case, "utmost hf" or "very mild" AS as far as language is concerned means that I am capable of speaking pretty fluently under certain circumstances (coherence aside for a moment), that in everyday life (now that I talk to several people/have remotely normal conversations that I think are perfectly normal and awesome) my speech is broken ranging from semi-fluently with only a few words wrong, sounds wrong, wrong tenses to a sentence with all wrong grammar, wrong words and wrong pronunciation and that I also cannot speak (make the sounds necessary to speak) sometimes.

From what I understand there is also another difference - if one wants to be very exact about language and speech in autistic people - between creating original speech/language and saying the sentences that belong in a certain situations (as in echolalia) and the many levels between those two. Explaining yourself is greatly affected by what your ability in this is and more so, how well you can spontaneously access your ability (for example, answering well (coherent, fluent, to the point, possibly with the correct social address) only several hours after the question was asked can be very useless and problematic).

Meaning, I can say that I am hurt and I'll say it hurts "there" but that's about as far as it goes. I am however not usually incapable of learning how to describe it with assistance so that makes me quite different from someone who cannot describe it even when they're offered similar assistance by being told examples and picking up the ones that fit. These two might look very similar but it makes quite a difference to be able to figure it out with assistance and needing someone else to do most of the figuring out for you because you can't do it.

And different levels of understanding language (in whatever form) and of understanding speech are also playing a huge role in this as does the access to non-verbal signals such as pointing or nodding in response to a question. Difficult to answer to anything you don't comprehend or didn't hear right or both.

Anyway, differences can be huge or not so huge at all which is why some people with supposedly very mild or utmost hf AS can relate to a few or even many symptoms, daily struggles/impairments and experiences of someone with classical autism and/or "LFA" but why some people with classical autism/LFA have far fewer in common with some people with AS.

all the asperger people here could not go for 1 year with no talking. I think asperger is a type of autism. But people here are fustraiting. Where to all the autistic people go. not here I think.

Well, the obvious answer is that AS *IS* Autism, even if not exactly the same as HFA, they are pretty darn close. Probably have exact same cause, but maybe a bit of difference in brain activity or neuropathway development.
The Flu analogy works for me, you have Type A & Type B, but they are still the Flu.

Sincerely,
Matthew