Why Asperger's takes a battering

Post Reply New Topic

Asperger's is very fashionable. Many people want to study us or want to be so called ‘Asperger's experts’ or be involved some way in treatment or commercially. Our way of thinking is being analysed from all angles and not always favourably, for instance in the various criminology theories. Criminals are sometimes essentially diagnosed by their lawyers after they commit a crime, because of this, as if by default we should always be classed as having diminished responsibility or be insane.

But who are ‘we’ as a collective? The Asperger's that Hans Asperger studied is not the Asperger's of today that’s for sure. It is quite right that he did the research. I’d never rubbish his work. But if we went just on his observations quite a lot of us wouldn't be diagnosed today. It has somewhat broadened as a concept since then, in most people minds at least. But regardless we are diagnosed because we fit into to somebody's train of thought of Asperger's not everyone's. So what? Can we do better?

Asperger's as a term is antiquated. It has historical significance but that doesn't make a particularly useful term today. It is no different in that sense to PDD-NOS, NLD, Kraner's, etc. We are quite capable of being naive and lap up what we are told as golden truth.

Just to be clear I'm not saying research is baseless just that the terms and requirements are very short sighted and also can have an inefficient and detrimental effect on the focus of research as each generation clambers to take the baton.

A theorist is somebody with some ideas of his own. A diagnostician is just somebody who went to school and read up a bit on the some theories, did some practical care experience. They are just ordinary people not supper human. They too can be as naive as us and take the arbitrary diagnostic requirement as the be all and end all. Does it occur to you that some are merely juggling their patients between the various terms and occasionally jamming them into one or other with little regard to what is left outside of the cookie cutter?

These terms are completely one dimensional, when the nature of autism is clearly multidimensional. They are never ever going to be able to describe any patient remotely accurately but you can do better than that. It is not like these terms are related to autism! Ok we can say they are related to autism with hindsight but diagnostically they are only spuriously linked they have never been autism centric, ever. They are microcosms in themselves and can’t give you a picture ‘autisticness’ in the broader sense.

ASD is what all spectrumites are. Whether I’m Asperger’s or not is fairly meaningless to me.

From a neutral standpoint if you just took possible components of the autistic spectrum that can be well defined at this point in time and widely agreed upon. Let’s just say there are a dozen of them for arguments sake. Then divide each of these on to degrees of ‘autisticness’ that we could reasonably access, let’s say give each a scale of 10 units with 0 as no component.

So that means there are 40,960+ different variants

Asperger’s who?

Each one of us is completely different there are billions of different people in the world.

This ‘Aspie’ community is very important to me as is the Autistic community in general. But I see you and me as ASD and believe we are moving into that era. Even in my recent assessment they suggested as such.

Asperger’s is rubbished because it is wide open to such without scrutiny it can’t afford. It is hardly surprising is it? But that doesn’t have to be a problem, and hopefully the research will be more fruitful with a more joined up reasoning and shared common data.

Last edited by 0_equals_true on 27 Oct 2007, 10:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I think the same could be said about any psychological diagnosis in general.

I've got the maths wrong haven't I?

It should be 11^12 or 3,138,428,376,721 variants

Is that right? Only theoretically as there are only around 6.6 billion people in the world. So that should give you enough scope to look at trends in plots.

My head is not working. You are never going to get that many variants as even NTs will have several component scores.

I agree completely. People desperatly search for what makes them 'different' because deep down we all want to be the same. This causes the diagnosises to become so broad they are unreliable. For right now Autism and Aspergers are in the limelight, so a lot of people will be diagnosed it and a lot of people will suspect they have it when they don't.

It' like what happened with ADHD a few years ago, so many kids were put on meds to 'control' their hyperactivness, and now were're being told they had something else. Give it a few years and it'll morph again, and again.

As long as there's a new disorder on the market, there'll be a whole slew of new drugs to be bought and consumed. Who'll be all the richer and powerful as a result of this new wave of psycoBabel?....<think, think>

Oh yeah.... the expert *therapists*
The pharmaceutical corps...http://psychcentral.com/news/2006/12/04 ... lt-autism/ - clinical trials being conducted now - http://www.aspennj.org/resources_research-projects.asp - ongoing since 06 - http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/a/asperge ... trials.htm
the shrinks
the publishing companies
the tv talk shows
the domain name kings

and all the others who keep fading in and out as the trends are set into motion....

Last edited by jjstar on 28 Oct 2007, 8:44 am, edited 1 time in total.

What drugs? There is no AS drug I know of, it's just a way for people to explain why they're different. What if you're just different? I could easily say I have AS, I have a lot of the symptoms, until you look at why I have them. Every single one of my quirks is explained through life experiances and learned events, so I can't say I have I'm not neurotypical, I just have a lot of defence mechanisms in place.

Breaking this down as I see it, AS should explain why someone does something when they have no reason to. I was abused as a child, so I have social phobia, cause and effect it's not a sign of AS, but if you didn't know that about me then you'd never guess. I walked late, but then my legs bent wrong and couldn't hold weight for a long time. Watching me, at times you'd think I 'stim', when really I just spasm, I think it has to do with nerve pain, I'll be sitting and something will hurt for little to no reason. By all the signs I should consider myself an aspie, but I'm not.

You could although many psychological disorders have much better more accurate catchments than Asperger’s does, and can be much better defined. Not that there aren't parallels to be drawn.

Asperger's isn't really psychological though historically its origins are in psychology despite being classed as a neurodevelopmental disorder today.

The ambiguity surrounding terms like Asperger's, PDD-NOS, NLD is astounding. You only have to be on this board for a few months to see how almost everyone is getting diagnosed under an entirely different criteria. It looks like diagnosticians are struggling to know what to do with these terms and more are being created all the time because of break downs in communication. There is no continuation or integrity of the knowledge.

Some will treat each of these as mutually exclusive. You are either one or the other. They will also sometimes line them up one dimensionally as if you have 'autism lite' or 'autism strong'. Others will treat each one as milestones blending from one to the other, again fairly one dimensional. Other people have been told they are Aspergers with NVD or PDD-NOS or HFA. As if NLD, etc are just other names for common components such as the executive but the diagnostician isn't aware they already exist or want to otherwise emphasise it. Etc, ect.

The main point in there is no real established connection between any of these terms. There is no continuation. There is not established relation to autism and they are doing nothing to help themselves map these trends.

On the other hand you can say that somebody has particular motor or sensory traits and so on.

Here is a simplified example plot from the Autistic Spectrum Components


Never mind what those components above are at the moment, let’s just assume for the sake of argument the following components are established and definable:

Repetitive behaviours
Focused interests
Social impairment
Language
Organisation
Concentration
Reasoning
Problem solving
Recall
Imaging
Sensory
Motor

If you can develop practical tests for each of this and reduce the subjectivity by some magnitude it could be beneficial to our understanding overall, and could be used as core data for anyone to analyse trends.

Social phobia is a learnt behaviour under the psychological definition. It precludes 'natural shyness' to an extent. NTs with SA do not lack social understanding entirely but do have trouble using their social understanding.

The cause isn't always important in treatment because of my memory problems it would near on impossible to go back even if I wanted to but was able to do CBT regardless.

You could say my SA was triggered through my lack of social understanding from my ASD causing bulling or from bulling for no particular reason or that I wasn't especially bullied, I just thought I was because of my lack of social understanding (as someone wrote in a report) and that is why it escalated or it could be nothing to do with these but due to my cognitive problems causing learning difficulties or a natural predisposition or many other possibilities.

It doesn't matter so much because 24 years later, when I was ready to tackle my SA, the trigger conditions didn’t necessarily exist any more, they were merely a catalyst if you could say they existed at all, my phobia was very much in the present.

You can sometimes look at things in hindsight. I never had clinical depression. But my SA friends do. In a lot of cases it looks as if the SA caused the depression. In one of my friends it looks much more as if the depression. Either way they both have/had depression and SA.

Btw I won't jump on this 'jumping on the bandwagon' bandwagon

Most people a capable of realising when there is a problem. There is no reason why a person can’t make some accurate deductions about themselves.

I don't think people should stop seeking Asperger's diagnosis. I think for the future we should look in to a much more helpful way of looking at autism in general.