Hans Asperger

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And occasionally, through a combo of luck and skillful work, a person can hit a humanitarian home run!

But I think going for singles and doubles is probably the better percentage play.

Grunya Sukharev and her pioneering work was largely unknown until recently. That is likely because she was Jewish in the Soviet Union so the Soviets did not brag about her. “Asperger’s Syndrome” and “Kanner’s Syndrome” were occasionally used informally in psychology journals to distinguish between “high functioning” and “low functioning” autistics. In 1981 British psychologist Lorna Wing proposed making Aspergers Syndrome a separate entry in the DSM and lobbied successfully its inclusion. It was not a mistake, both Asperger’s Nazi complicity and Sukhsrev’s work were unknown to her.

As Wing understood it Autism and Aspergers were not separate conditions. Wing proposed the addition of Aspergers Syndrome after doing a prevalence survey and discovering there were many people struggling with Autistic traits who could not meet the diagnostic criteria of the time. Wing concluded correctly that parents would agree to an ASD assessment if you do not call it Autism with its “ret*d” stigma.

That said I do not think we should disassociate ourselves from our more severely Autistic brethren because the NT world’s confusion about autism makes it more uncomfortable to label ourselves Autistic. Doing so has a wiff of Aspie Supremacy about it. There are widely varying traits and severity in all sorts of human conditions but we don’t label them as separate things. As science advances it may very well be discovered what we call Autism is in fact separate conditions. If that happens we will have to deal with it. In lieu of that possibility what I would prefer is that we further subcategorize Autism but by predominant traits of the individual. As for Aspergers syndrome I would hope eventually it would be seen as an historical label that was useful and liberating for a lot of people. That time is not here as the term is still preferred by many of us.

I think that it has more to do with the fact that she was Russian (so like the German speaking Asperger her work wasnt known in the English speaking world), and that she was Soviet ( the cold war antipathy was already gearing up prior to 1945), than because her work was ignored within the USSR.

Here's a video that I had uploaded over a year ago explaining the Han Asperger controversy since there are a hand full of toxic autism advocate dismiss him as a war criminal. I had incidents when my autistic YouTube content had been boycotted since I have "Aspie" as the name of the channel, did have one who requested me to delete my channel without any regards of my three years of hard on this channel.

I am aware about this controversy and was praised by other people for speaking out against toxic autism advocates.

Aspergers did some morally suspect things; you didn’t.

You have a good channel. I’ve watched about 20 of your downloads. You come across as somebody who tells us about Aspergers without being a jerk about it.

As I mentioned earlier I do agree that the bullying of people who prefer to use Aspergers or identify as Aspie is wrong. As most of us have been victims of bullying the last thing we should be doing is bullying other Autistics. This unfortunately is not new. Back in 2014 the year after the DSM subsumed the Aspergers diagnosis this was constantly going on here at WP. Those of us who identified as Aspie were not called Nazi’s so much because the revelations about Hans Asperger were not known yet. But we were assumed to be clueless elitists who looked down on other autistics. It was assumed we were either faking Aspergers for attention, or were not real autistics who had the label due to over diagnosis. When the revelations of about Hans Asperger came out it “confirmed” what the think they know about Aspies.

That said the stuff about Asperger is not speculation but the results of research by two historians who are experts in that time and place.

It is not Godwin’s Law in that this is not a conversation that inevitably ended up having a Nazi allegation recklessly thrown around.

As far Asperger being a war criminal 1. That is beyond my expertise 2. He was not prosecuted 3. It’s too late for anything to be done about it beyound making personal choices about usage “Aspergers” and “Aspie”.

And Myers-Briggs is yet another way to understand things.

For example, I understand there’s a lot of overlap between those of us on the spectrum and the INTJ personality type.

And many schools seems to have this big need to classify students as either “high” or “low” functioning, with nothing in-between!

So much so that it might almost be a radical political act for parents to insist that their child be treated as middle-functioning.

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For example, most “normal” people stim, and baseball players and poker players certainly do.

And yes, I’m all in favor of time and place, and useful differences and distinctions between public and private stimming behavior.

But—

Stimming by itself is not a problem, instead part of the solution. Just like a poker player stims to maintain concentration and to self-manage stress.

* not such thing as “normal” anyway and how boring the world would be if there were!

Perhaps the Russians are more sympathetic to our cause.

I very much doubt it and we would probably be next in line after Trans* people for the beating and a bullet.

Me too. The important thing to me is the information about the syndrome. I don't much care who discovered or rediscovered it. It's not as if I've got anything to thank him for. He was presumably paid for his work, and it was just a matter of chance that he noticed something was going on. He's dead anyway, so he won't care whether we put up a shrine to his glory, spit on his grave, or completely ignore him as a person.

Was he accurate about his findings/research? I wish I knew, but I don't know much about what he found out. He said some of the young people he dealt with were like little professors. That seems to have more than a grain of truth in it. I gather he also figured that those same young people seemed to have symptoms rather like those of autism, only less severe. That also seems accurate.

In russia, having any disability diagnosed bars you from doing most jobs and you're classified as "invalid". Since soviet times, Russia strives to create a "society free from abnormalities".