Asperger's eliminated from the DSM V?

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Who cares if AS is cool or not? Btw it's not cool, from the way I've seen NT's look at it.

Who cares if AS is cool or not? Btw it's not cool, from the way I've seen NT's look at it.

I am very, very Not Happy. I don't fit the new criteria. I will not be able to call myself autistic. I will not be able to call myself an Aspie. This is taking, among other things, my ability to say that I am a member of this group.

Anyone like me will not get a diagnosis. The new criteria suck. The old criteria also suck, but less.

I'm not sure it's a step in the wrong direction so much as it fails to do anything. Except I guess it is. It's a baby step in the wrong direction, when what's needed is for us to cover a million miles in the right one.

I suppose it doesn't matter. I'm a dandelion anyway, and whether they call me autistic, Asperger's, PDD-NOS or NT, that doesn't change.

If Einstein had a speech delay, that means he didn't have Asperger's. This is what annoys me about the spectrum-- regardless of whether or not you fit the criteria or how you think, people like to define AS as "really high-functioning and bluntly honest" and autism as "awful soulless shells" and then deny that someone who fits the diagnostic criteria is autistic (must be AS) because they're not a dead end or worthless.

Screw the criteria. I'm a dandelion, which I am now defining as a person who fits all or all but one of the following criteria:
1. At least half the time has one or two special interests, or historically has had them
2. Uses or interprets body language in one or more nonstandard ways
3. Has one or more of the following:
i. Unusual sensory perceptions (hypersensitive, hyposensitive, etc.)
ii. Difficulty recognizing faces (prosopagnosia)
iii. Perceives things as raw sensory data, rather than with meaning (e.g., "that is a rectangular patch of light comprised of many rectangular patches and some that look like rectangles with holes in them in which the other rectangles fit, as well as some blue and green marks toward the upper left, some gray marks toward the center but kind of toward the right, some light blue vertical bars..." as opposed to "oh, look, that's a computer screen on which someone's composing a message on WrongPlanet")
iv. Difficulty with or nonstandard use of language
4. One or more of the following:
i. Odd stuff like not letting the things on your plate touch, or always visiting a specific place at a specific time on a specific day of the week
ii. Sensitivity to fluorescent lights
iii. Lacks in-group/out-group dichotomy (favoritism)
iv. Less than normal need/desire for friends
v. IQ tests fail to predict performance in life, or fail to predict performance on other IQ tests
vi. NTs react as if this person has offended them, despite the dandelion being sure that the NT's offense is completely out of the blue, or believing it's deserved but not having any idea what they did to deserve it

In fact, I think I'll make a thread about this.

I'm in agreement with Dandelion Fireworks. This proposed merger sucks ass.

The hidden agenda behind it is purely political - a cheap excuse for cost-cutting on the part of elitist, penny-pinching governments who intend to use the recession as a moral basis for cutting off financial and moral support for anyone who isn't obviously disabled enough to be confused with Stephen Hawking after a lobotomy.

Merging AS with high functioning autism will lead to fewer AS diagnoses, less practical support for AS diagnosees in the workplace, which in turn will lead to higher unemployment amongst the undiagnosed who still struggle with the same symptoms and - by extension - a higher rate of alcoholism, heart disease and suicide.

Maybe we should call someone as having an Aspie personality that makes it very hard to utilize your abilities/talents in social context because of the inherent nature of your personality-type (sensory, executive function, verbal memory and social anxiety issues). I really don't care about fullfilling DSM criteria. All I care about is understanding why it's so difficult for me to fit into society, especially in the workplace.

I don't know. DSM-V works a bit differently from previous versions of the DSM in the sense that they're going use a dimensional scale rating from severe to mild. They've also said that they want to design it in such a way that anyone who qualified and received support for an AS diagnosis before, should still fall on that scale now. So I wouldn't worry about losing support just yet. However, there are also some valid concerns about merging Asperger's with autism in one diagnosis - both Tony Attwood and prof Simon-Baron Cohen are not happy with it.

The thing is, though, this thread is about them being merged, not about the criteria they're using to merge them. The criteria suck, completely and totally, beyond all doubt. But the idea of Asperger's being eliminated is wonderful and long overdue according to most autism experts including the one who invented Asperger's. They're two separate issues, and I really don't like the fact that they're being conflated so that a person seemingly can't like one and hate the other.