Wake up people! There is no such thing as Aspergers.

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Yes!! ! please close. (agree with above)

I was just starting to get out my dictionary and thesaurus.

Social construct, sure. So is religion, names, beliefs, values, language...everything you utter is not your own language but rather socially constructed. Medicine has social constructs as it is guided by the needs of a particular society.

That's not the point. Without the socially constructed insistence that we name some particular disorder, then we would exist back in the day when nameless faces were locked away, nonentities, referred to as criminally insane by socially constructed definitions.

The broader criteria requires a more objective measurement and has allowed more verifiability, more precision, more particulars. The diagnostic criteria dignifies the human being and suggests that there are indeed many positive gifts to be recognized. It categorizes groups of people with very similar phenotypes and then measures the degree of impairment by how much the impairments interfere with functioning in a socially constructed world.

When you publish books, you earn the label "author" and you are deserving of certain rights that the others are not. When you are diagnosed with Aspergers by a doctor, you earn the right to be accepted, percieved and tolerated in a particular manner. It is a right, well deserved.

You can choose to not believe it. It's your choice. But, it will still exists because, in case you haven't noticed or decide to pull your head out of the sand, smart humans have progressed beyond a primitive level of diagnostic measurement, always moving forward and improving in tolerance and our regard for people that are different. We accept that which helps us to improve our current condition. We accepted technology and other advancements. Why not Aspergers? If a label encourages better treatment, I'm all for it. The question is, why do you disregard the name of it? Do you accept a MacIntosh? How about an I-Pod? Do these exist? What about depression or paranoia? I could go on. All labels are socially constructed. If you did your homework you would know that Aspergers was named after Hans Asperger, the brilliant doctor who spent his life invested in identifying this particular form of autism which presented differently. He was an honorable man who sought to identify a new disorder within he autism community. Thankfully, he succeeded, finally, in the 1990's. Look how long it took before this socially constructed diagnosis entered the DSM IV. Ignorance is socially constructed too, driven by the majority of nah sayers who disregard the particulars, dismiss the good work with a wave of the hand. You are a prime example of it.

I only hope you aren't an educator where you might influence others to think the way you do, the old school way.

Well. i don't think it is obscure or impractical, because the label is not defined or controlled by the "autistic" community, and most people will defer to the experts, including many, if not most, members of the autistic community. How many people here repeat common "truisms" about Aspergers that these experts invented and take these truisms into their conceptions about themselves?

I argue that a large amount of skepticism is appropriate towards what these so called experts are saying, especially as if effects peoples identity.

A lot of folks here very ... trustingly... go on about getting a diagnosis and worrying about what the result will be, are they or aren't they, and this will effect how they see themselves for the rest of their life.

But this massive element of their own identity is being made up, arbitrarily, by committees and individuals based on an arbitrary, imprecise, inaccurate, potentially hurtful model.

You were the same person that you were before some person with a degree labeled you with some social invention, but that label will now effect how you see yourself for the rest of your life.

Ah well, I was thinking that you might be able to say something less repetitive, junior1, but all you have done is make yet another vaguely offensive attack on the majority of the members of this board.