Asperger's is entirely different from autism?

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I just had someone try to tell me that Aspie's are NOT autistic, that he's 'sick of autistics trying to associate themselves with Aspies', that neurotypical brains are closer to autistic brains than Aspie brains are. (He also seemed to think that Aspies are some sort of "superior human".)

I'm not aware of any medical/scientific facts that support his ideas, are you? Especially about brain structure?

Person is competently wrong. Core traits are the same except with Aspergers "there is no clinically significant general delay in language (E.G. single words used by age 2 years, communicative phrases used by age 3 years)" Some clinicians will diagnose those all with more "mild" autism or autistics with Average to Above average intelligence with "Aspergers"

Person should go to to some remote island and start his Aspergers supremacist society and leave the rest of us human Aspie-Autistics alone. He and his ilk caused many aspies to disassociate themselves from the Aspergers label because of the stereotypes they propagated. He and his ilk are partially responsible for us losing the Aspergers diagnosis due to the sterotypes they propagated. Aspergers could have been useful as a subcatagory of Autism but that is gone now.

Depends on how you want to separate the groups.

For the most part, it's no different than HFA. Which is why it's just ASD now.

Back with the DSM-IV-TR, even though some of the criteria were written the same, the manifestation of each disorder was different for each criterion; people often overlooked the expanded text which explained it all in detail (mainly self-diagnosers overlooked this as the actual text from book is harder to find).

Where it is that I reside, "Asperger's Syndrome" is no longer an extant diagnosis. You are either determined to be on the spectrum for autism or not.

The other posters are correct. "Asperger's" no longer exists. It's all just the Autism Spectrum, with varying levels of support.

That's fine. I wasn't the one making the claims. I was dumbfounded, tho' about his assertions. While I'd argued a bit with him, privately I started wondering if there'd been some recent "breakthrough" in studies that I wasn't aware of.

Nothing anyone here knows of, I guess?

I don't understand the ''Autistic brains are more similar to NT brains than Aspie brains are'' theory. I was diagnosed with mild Asperger's and I feel a lot like an NT person than I do an Autistic person, meaning emotions and behaviour.

Well, being an aspie does not preclude you from being a nutjob with delusions of supremacy and an X-men boxset.

And while I disagree with the decision, previous posters are indeed correct; what used to be termed Aspergers Syndrome is now lumped in with the more general term "Autism Spectrum Disorder".

Ummm...

I found something...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/0 ... 07791.html

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/08/0 ... ces-found/

http://www.livescience.com/38630-autism ... ivity.html

One comment I noted was 'this means the two conditions are obviously related, but not identical'.

Well, I suppose that's nothing new. We've always known there was SOME type of difference in Aspies, since the telling point is the absence of a loss or delay of language.

I suppose the claim could just as easily be made that Asperger's IS still a form of autism, it's just that there's a brain difference that accounts for that key difference in symptoms.

Be warned there is some weird social politics around the issue. Some parents want the more "HF" folk to STFU ("my kid is completely different from you so I'm not going to listen to anything you say") and some "HF" types have delusions of grandeur or for other reasons don't want to be associated with "ret*ds." The founder of GRASP is one example of the latter.

Nope. I was diagnosed as autistic in the early nineties. I probably would have been diagnosed Aspergers a decade later. I think the new revisions are a clearer picture of similarities and differences throughout the spectrum.

Haha! I can just imagine all that being spoken with Cornfed's voice.

Yes, this seems to be a double sided problem. Neither extreme is good, and damages rapport of the general autism community, both high and lower functioning. I am gifted in a very specific area, but everything else in life is a real struggle. I don't think that makes me any super human, or grand being. My NT friend is very gifted in sales, and things of that nature.

Also, too many parents have this ideal of "normalcy", and when their children don't quite match that, or they require extra care and TLC, then they grumble, and look for every way to ease their own burden in life. It seems quite selfish to me. Perhaps God gives people low functioning, or severely handicapped children, to teach the parents how to love that which may seem unlovable. Are the parents loving their children, or craving their comfort and relief from "extra burdens"? I wonder about what drives people to these extremes that they would want to shut out any side. I think a loving person would at least give thoughtful consideration to every situatuation and not jump to things so rashly.

As to the OP's post, the guy you talked to seems to be willingly ignorant of the facts and the literature. Somehow he has come to a very off the wall conclusion that does not line up with the rest of the psychiatric world.

Asperger's, up until it was lumped into Autism Spectrum Disorder, was actually considered a high functioning form of autism, or closely related. That's how it has ALWAYS been presented to me as, and how I've always read it as from many different sources.

Just do your research, and you'll have no qualms from people like the one you encountered.

Not true on several levels. It is the DSM 5 manual that dropped Aspergers as a diagnosis. Not all clinicians go by the DSM 5. In some regions of the world they go by the ICD manual which still uses "Aspergers" as a diagnosis. Even in locations such as America where the DSM manual is considered the bible some clinicians are still diagnosing people with Aspergers as per reporting on this website. The DSM has no power as far as I know to take the licence away from a clinician who diagnoses somebody with Aspergers.

What the DSM means at most is that the expert consensus is that Aspergers should not be used as a diagnosis. Even if the overwhelming consensus among experts is that Aspergers does not exist that does not necessarily mean that Aspergers does not exist.

As you know if you have read my opinion on this matter I believe the DSM IV erred in making Aspergers a wholly separate diagnosis and further compounded the error by taking it away entirely in the DSM 5. Aspergers should be a sub-category of Autism

Technically Asperger's is exactly Autism Spectrum Disorder. Good luck finding any important differences.
And at least by the time people are adults, it's functionally the same as well.

Because there are wide variances of functionality on several dozen likely symptoms it's pretty much impossible to lump everybody into only two groups.

If you've met one autistic person...
you've met ...one autistic person.

Not aware of any non-verbal or partially verbal autistic people tripping over themselves to be associated with Aspies? Come to think of it my autistic daughter has no interest in being anyone except herself. Tell your friend social conformity is a silly primitive concept.

Cyberdad?

That guy is NO friend of mine.

I was being polite above, but from the stuff he said, he came across as possibly delusional. Still, I'm no doctor, so I wanted to be respectful to at least some extent.

That didn't last long.