Grunya Sukhareva in old Soviet Union described autism 1925?

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Yes, it looks like she did. And yes, I wish she would have come up with a better starting term than "schizoid psychopathy." Her later term was "autistic psychopathy" which was an improvement but could still be further improved on.

Some I agree with. For example, I like the fact that Dr. Sukhareva includes "sensitivity to noise" and "sensitivity to smell." I think this is more straightforward, more matter-of-fact, and more plain English than DSM-5 (although DSM does include the "hypo" reaction, as in too little reaction to sensory environment).

Some I don't agree with. For example, I don't think everyone on the autism spectrum is musically gifted (as nice as that might be! )

And some are just weird and wondrous such as "tendency toward abstraction and schematization (the introduction of
concrete concepts does not improve but rather impedes thought processes)." That one, I'm just going to have to think about.

The part where Dr. Sukhareva writes "Find it hard to adapt to other children" and "Ridiculed by their peers and have low status," well, it's poignant and it's a chicken-and-the-egg question of which comes first. Most probably, the two feed into each other. And add to it that "school" is a conformist, high stakes environment. A professional outside of school seemingly can do the most good or the only good by changing the child. A professional inside of school, at least in theory, could start to change and improve the school environment.

For example, schools put so much emphasis on the smooth function of the classroom that the teacher themselves sometimes begins and models the ostracizing, exclusion, labelling of low-status, etc, of the student who is different, for any reason. It is overall not a healthy environment, and we shouldn't elevate it to the skies.

Last edited by AardvarkGoodSwimmer on 24 Apr 2018, 1:08 pm, edited 2 times in total.

and the part in which Dr. Sukhareva says, "Intelligence normal or above normal"

Okay, look, the people reading and writing here on WrongPlanet are going to tend to be middle-functioning or so-called "high"-functioning (although important life areas probably not!) more so than average within the population of persons on the autism spectrum. That is, we have a self-selection process going on.

With easy and matter-of-fact confidence, we should stand in solidarity with our "lower"-functioning and/or nonverbal sisters and brothers. And activism and social advocacy is a skill like any other and in time we can get better and better at it.

Have heard about this before: that a soviet lady researcher beat both Kanner and Asperger to the discovery of autism. But I have never seen her work given justice in a whole article like this before.

Even Silberstien's book "Neuro Wars" (an otherwise great primer for learning about the history of autism reseach) mentions her, but only in like one sentence, before moving on to its chapters about Asperger and Kanner, and so on.

In his book Neurotribes, Steve Silberman (this is the correct title of the book and the author's actual surname) mentions her a number of times in the original hardback copy (and no doubt subsequent ones that I don't have). Pages 95-98, 101-102, 470.

Amongst other things, he notes that (importantly) she was the first to .. "caution that (using the term schizoid) might lead to conceptual confusion and misinterpretation"; she was the first to realise that the two conditions might turn out to be "completely unrelated". As Silberman noted, her concerns proved to be well founded.

However nearly a hundred years later, psychiatrists appear to be still confusing AS for mental illness, and the misdiagnosis of schizophrenia is an ignorance that continues according to both research and self report here.

Silberman also notes that Asperger was "apparently" unaware of her work - leaving this as an open issue for future scholarship. One difference is that Sukhareva was "impressed by her patients' prodigious abilities in music and art" (page 102) compared to "Asperger was struck by these boys' natural aptitude for science".

Silberman also notes that Asperger made the mistake of seeing the fertile imaginations of his subjects disparagingly, as "remote from reality" - because one talked about a future with rocket ships - however Silberman notes that "the advent of space exploration in the 1950s forced him to retract that statement, in favour of a suggestion that the designers of them were autistic" (! ! how very scientific of Hans Asperger....not)

I trust Silberman to have researched all that was available to any researcher in his preparation for Neurotribes. No doubt some of the many prizes the book won was in some part due to his unprecedented thoroughness.

The Oxford English Dictionary tells me the word "autism" was first used in German in 1910 and in English in 1912:

Origin: A borrowing from German. Etymon: German Autismus.
Etymology: < German Autismus (E. Bleuler 1910, in Psychiatrisch-Neurol. Wochenschr. 12 175/1) < ancient Greek αὐτός self (see auto- comb. form1) + German -ismus -ism suffix.

1. A condition or state of mind characterized by patterns of thought which are detached from reality and logic, formerly sometimes regarded as a manifestation of schizophrenia or other psychiatric illness. Now hist.

1912 A. Hoch in Amer. Jrnl. Insanity 69 888 The chief traits which had existed before the mental breakdown were those which I at that time called the shut-in tendencies—tendencies to which Professor Bleuler has recently applied the term autism.

Great info, thanks.
I shall now refer to my self as a high functioning Hareva (it's a neoglism).

Now, now, just because someone is nonverbal doesn't mean they lack intelligence, or above average intellect

Sukharevan Syndrome?

Gotta admit that it sounds better than "ass burgers".

The equivalent of "an aspie" would be "a suki",or "a Sukarevan"?

The later sounds like race of aliens on Star Trek. Kinda cool actually.

Thank you. I put some work into reading the 5-page article and then using as an excerpt what I thought was the heart of it.

Love it! Sounds like a very cool race of extraterrestrials!

I agree 100%! Which is why I said and/or. Although I realize that's probably not enough and will work on better explaining what I'm trying to say in the future.

I do want us to stand with people who might need more help, and not just go off as "mid"- or "high"-functioning people doing our own thing.

The name Sukhareva syndrome would go along nicely with my user name, as both she and the person in my user name are Russian!

"Suki" sounds like a great name for a Siamese cat-another reason to love it!

If she was indeed talking about ASDs, thank heavens her name didn't catch on! 'reva' sounds very much like an obscene Norwegian word for "the @$$". Sukh looking like "suck" doesn't help.

We wouldn't be "suki", we'd no doubt be called sucky.

The only reason Asperger is pronounced like what naturalplastic said, is that English speaking people mispronounce it.

yes, indeed

and plus, the cat is a great animal model for the autism spectrum

My own personal view of the autism spectrum:

1) sensory issues,

2) intense interests,

3) stimming as both a symptom and as part of the solution,

4) patchy social skills, and

5) meltdowns

https://books.google.com/books?id=w3XoA ... 22&f=false

This is a part in NeuroTribes which talks about Dr. Sukhareva, and a 13-year-old boy identified merely as M.Sch. who was musically gifted and played the violin.

' . . . Concerned for his future, his parents checked him into Sukhareva's inpatient program at the hospital. There he adopted the role of the clown, cracking jokes and chasing girls around the ward. He knew he was being naughty, but he seemed unable to stop himself. . . '