High functioning Kanner's

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High functioning autism is separate from Asperger because people with High Functioning Autism have speech delays, so their diagnosis is classic autism, they just happened to be high functioning. Now, since "classic autism" is a synonym of Kanner's, then you can replace "high functioning autism" with "high functioning Kanners". Nobody ever used that expression since they are too used to lump together high functioning autism with Asperger plus they are too used of thinking of Kanners as low functioning. But it would be quite fascinating to start using the term "high functioning Kanners", might be a nice exercise in challenging your thinking habbits.

If speech delay is due to "knowing but not wanting to speak".
Would you call it high functioning kanner or asperger?

My understanding (via Neurotribes) is that idea would have upset Kanner nicely!

But yeah, while there are functioning differences, functioning labels themselves suck.

In what way would it upset him?

Perhaps PDD NOS, which would be neither of the two.

So I guess HFA would have to include both people with Autistic Disorder and people with PDD NOS; the former would be Kanners, the latter neither Kanners nor Asperger. People with Asperger won't be included since Asperger is expressly separated from HFA. But the ones in HFA that are Kanners, well they would be "high functioning Kanners", won't they?

I'll agree with that and also you're right I don't think of come across the term high functioning Kanners.

Being able to speak but not wanting to is called selective mutisim. The speech delay with kanners is a neurological development delay.

But what if there are other symptoms of autism and/or asperger present, would you be giving a dual diagnosis? If so, which one? You can't say Asperger + selective mutism, since Asperger expressly excludes selective mutism symptoms, nor could you say Kanners + selective mutism, since Kanners already covers speech delays so you don't want to cover it twice. So would you say PDD NOS + selective mutism? But if so, would you really want to include selective mutism into the mix, since PDD NOS already covers such POSSIBILITY?

I've had a triple diagnosis. Originally it was significant speech delay due to severe kanners autism (which is now classified as moderate). But that's also now coupled with apraxia of speech and selective mutism. There's thee different things occurring. The speech processing part of my brain is impaired. And the coordination part that regulates mouth and tongue movement is disordered. And because of that I prefer not to try talking and also can't say any words when I am stressed out, which is the psychological condition called selective mutism.

That's interesting. If your autism is severe, how come you communicate so fluently? Back when I was in high school I ran into a guy with severe autism, and all he was doing was rocking back and forth and making weird sounds as he was rocking, he couldn't speak at all, although later on staff got him a speech machine where he could say some simple words by pressing keys. Staff told me he had no concept of numbers, no concept of other people, and he saw things in "dots and spots" (whatever that means). He also had Downs though, but still I was assuming that severely autistic are pretty much like him.

I recently read "The Autistic Brain" and in it Temple Grandin describes a boy she met called Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay. He is severely autistic and doesn't speak, but his mother taught him to read and write and he has written poems and published books. He writes about his "thinking self" being different from his "acting self" and he understood everything going on around him, he just couldn't communicate that he understood. There may be some autistic people with additional learning disabilities that do not understand things, but I would never assume that just because someone doesn't speak that they don't understand. And writing is very different to speaking.

That sounds interesting. Too bad I just took what staff said for granted and didn't ask them how do they know it. I mean, one of the things staff told me is that he saw everything in "dots and spots". Now the obvious question is: how did they know it, if he didn't have words to communicate it? Apparently somehow they did, but its too late to ask them how -- its been 20 years ago.

I was diagnosed severe until I was 8 years old. Then I started becoming more responsive and saying one syllable words. By 10 I was rediagnosed as moderate. Some with severe autism are able to communicate well in writing. We had a member with severe autism and intellectual disability who wrote well. Probably the best recognized low functioning person who writes well is Carly Fleischmann who wrote a book. In real life I appear more significantly autistic. Withdrawn and detached. I have a concept of numbers but can't do math past a 3rd grade level etc. I type very slowly. But how someone appears and behaves can be a lot different from what is going on in their mind. One part works really good but the other parts don't.

Kanner was not interested in a broad diagnosis, insisting that outliers were not "true cases" of "his" condition, for thirty years. Because of his singular influence on the development of knowledge of autism, this lead to a great delay in identifying the "Asperger's end" of the spectrum in the US.

But, *even if you remove Asperger's entirely* what is left is *still* a broad spectrum, particularly since it includes both HFA and LFA. Or are you saying HFA is neither Kanner's nor Asperger's? I mean, according to DSM 4, Kanner's and "Autistic disorder" are synonyms. Or are you saying thats not what Kanner intended and he wanted his condition to be "just" at the lower end of "autistic disorder"?

Incidentally, its not so cut-and-dry that he wanted his condition to be low functioning. As a matter of fact, he described his children as having "high intellectual potential" (see here https://www.news-medical.net/health/Autism-History.aspx ) as evident by the following quote:



So could it be that historically both Kanner's and Asperger's was high functioning, but then they just use Kanner's as a broader category to include lower functioning cases? But, if so, that is quite surprising, because I used to think that in the past autism was only covering more severe cases (as evident from the way the doctors described Rainman as high functioning when introducing him to his brother). So was it sort of like they first started off with high functioning cases, then they changed their focus to low functioning ones, and then later on their focus came back to high functioning cases? What do you think?

Back before DSM-V we used the classifications LFA, MFA, HFA (all Kanner's), AS and PDD-NOS.
High functioning Kanner's is what I think of still when I hear HFA.