I had a dream one day where I heard of "Aspergerian syndrome" (note the ending "ian" rather than "s") which stands for "severe Asperger".
This brings an interesting question. If you think of Asperger as "mild autism" then "severe Asperger" would be like "severe mild autism" or perhaps it would be something "just" below the artificial mild/moderate line, so you are mild (hence Asperger) but more severe than other people that are mild (too close to that dividing line) so you are "severe Asperger". Oh, wait a second, it won't even be mild/moderate line: you would have to better off than people with mild autism that aren't aspies. So I guess it is mild/very mild line, you are right below mild/very mild line (so you are "very mild", hence aspie) but not quite as "very mild" as other aspies, hence "severe aspie". Sounds pretty meaningless, doesn't it.
But there is a different way of looking at it, which wouldn't be so meaningless. Asperger is not the same as "mild autism", because its features are different. For example, what if a person with mild autism has speech delays (which disqualifies them from Asperger) but, once they finally learned to speak, they ended up being quite normal, while person with severe Asperger learned to speak on time (hence they are Asperger) but they have all those other deficits that are bad (hence they are severe). If so, someone with "severe Asperger" can actually be "worse off" than someone with "mild autism". They would still be better off than someone with moderate autism, but that would just be a "statistical circumstance" rather than the definition.
22 Apr 2018, 2:19 pm
