is Aspegers a disease? Your opinion.

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Diseases don't need to be contagious to be considered as such. -.- Some can easily be delimited to a single person. Such as cancer.

No.

I don't like the term 'disease' for it because it implies that it gets progressively worse, and 'disease' is often associated with something potentially fatal or life destroying. However, if someone called it a disease, I think that's just bad word choice, I don't understand why it's offensive.

I would say it's definitely a disorder. I don't like it when people say that it's not a problem. Meltdowns, sensory issues, misunderstandings, accidentally offending people, not being able to communicate things, feeling really confused, needing a precise routine - they are all problems.
I know there are aspects of it that aren't problems, but what defines it and makes it Asperger's Syndrome are the difficulties. This is why I was not diagnosed - I do not have a lot of difficulties due to it.

I voted "no" in the poll. I think AS is a disorder if only for the reason that so often the majority of people who are perceived as normal, the neurotypicals, typically seem to treat anyone who doesn't conform to their standards as being a person out-of-order.

Right, there is no cure or treatment for AS. You have to live with it, which is why I voted no.

Yes.

Now, see, I would define disease even more narrowly. A broken leg is an injury, not a disease.

Cambridge Dictionaries Online has an interesting definition: (an) illness of people, animals, plants, etc., caused by infection or a failure of health rather than by an accident

Autism (includeing Asperger's) seems to have multiple causes. Some of those causes may arguable fall under "failure of health". But some don't.

Generally, the term "disease" just doesn't fit. If thinking of it as something wrong (which is arguable, of course), the term handicap fits better, I think. But better called a difference, because there are plused and minuses.

I voted: no. From what I have understood about Aspergers (which isn't very much) it relates to how the brain is working.

Where does the definition of 'one standard deviation from the mean' come from? Is it a fixed law of the universe like the proverbial laws of physics? Or is it something like an Income Tax Law that can change as human beings change their mind about things?



Yes, that's fine. But how do we *know* that the 68.2% is normal and the rest are, then, abnormal. It looks to me purely like the product of human minds trying to impose some kind of order. A 'rule of thumb'.

The key point is why are we even talking about determining normal and abnormal psychological symptoms this way? Is this how we determine normal or abnormal chicken pox symptoms? No, of course not. We have an objective test and can determine with 99.9% accuracy who has and who hasn't got it. It can't be done with our minds because we have no objective test of what is normal. The question shows up the huge difference between physical illness and very idea of 'mental' illness.

Neither Asperger's nor Autism are diseases. They're both "disorders"--neurological disorders, to be precise. They're the extreme end of the Bell curve, and the cutoff line for autistic or not autistic is the point where it causes significant impairment. Not that you can't also have significant talent; not that they're not perfectly good ways to live; but they do cause problems and that makes them a diagnosis rather than just a personality type. Just because something's a disability doesn't make it bad.

Yes, "significant impairment" is a fuzzy line. Life is fuzzy. Live with it.

If normality is a multidimensional spectrum, following statistics, there is not going to be a whole whack of differences between that 68.2%, why 68.2? it is a number that is significant in the bell curve. 1 Standard Deviation is defined as being mean difference of all the peices of data from the mean of the data. It just so happens that this is thus the normal range, as it is average, and the number of data points that will be in this average range will always be 68.2% as that is constant and cannot change because of how the standard deviation is derived.

A disease to me is not something you are born with but something that infiltrates the body. That is probably wrong but it is the way I think of it.
Autism/Aspergers is a disorder that causes a specific condition.

Don't worry....I took Statistics in college. I know what you mean. I was being a bit "tongue in cheek"...note the smiles I used.

Chicken pox existed before that test existed, as did the idea that there was something to try to make an objective means of testing for. Our technology is limited, and few conditions had objective means of testing for them before we constructed an idea that they were there to test for.

I think AS isn't disease.
I think it's the way of another, new, next human version.

Yes, now aspie-people are in minority into the world of nonaspie-people, but all minorities always have difficulties from majorities, it's ok.
And when in far-far-far future aspies will become majority... namely nonaspies will have difficulties

I think we perform an important function in human evolution.
We are the atoms of the bridge to Superman
Thus Spake Zarathustra

P.S. I have a little "evolution" idea about this: http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt193592.html

You guys still not worked out this "Mallard".

The authors studied 60 autistic and 52 normal boys (age, 2 to 16 years) using MRI.

( I know this is not a As one but think about it as a As one. )

http://tsmdel.com/EDU3506/Attachments/a ... autism.pdf

What's the probability of comparing 60 introverts & 52 extroverts.?

Based on the fact that introvets brains are wired different to an extrovert brain. Your only talking about 1 dimension of an "Introvert" or say "Extrovert" since other things can cause it.

Then you get As is different species? Get it?

Just think about it, if they did every test like this. Your only thinking about 1 attribute.

This part would be classed as a "difference" but the rest of it has to cause impairment.

Edit:- it's classed as a disiblity not a disease.

The unbrella term would have those under it.

http://www.ehow.com/info_8130156_differ ... eople.html

Last edited by TechnoDog on 25 Mar 2012, 10:48 am, edited 2 times in total.