I am being dismissive? I don’t think so. I think I am frustrated and am speaking as someone with a lot of skin in this game, as my 2 Aspies are also Jewish…
Apologies though if you felt I was dismissive of your feelings. I don’t like to hurt people’s feelings, and would never do so intentionally.
I have to agree with dfbdfb. I am willing to bet few people care. I don’t know anyone who sits there and frets over whether Doctors Crohn or Down or Tay-Sachs or Paget or Tourette or Cushing or Addison were good guys or not-good-guys in the light of today. It’s not being called Hitler’s syndrome, for goodness sake. There are people who look to be upset by anti-Semitism wherever they go.
My uneducated guess is that the DSM eliminated Aspergers as an official diagnosis for political reasons. There are many laws that mandate special services for autistic individuals and I believe (but don’t know for sure) that including Aspergers in a general autism category provides a basis for arguing that the Asperger kid is entitled to an expanded range of services.
The divide between clumpers and splitters often is drawn for political reasons. The clumpers want to clump to justify more research dollars being spent on a particular constellation of arguably related syndromes. The splitters want to maintain distinctions because sometimes recognition of the severity of the most severe diseases in the constellation get lost.
I don’t really know much about autism but I’ve seen fights play out in other arenas.
Aspergers still has a vital role to play as an informal term in everyday parlance even if the formal diagnostic category has changed.
It’s like what we use to call Reiter’s Syndrome after Dr. Hans Conrad Julius Reiter. He was associated with the Nazis so now it’s called Reactive Arthritis.
Believe it or not, there were people back in the 1930s and 1940s – and when they named the syndrome in the first place – who thought that murdering disabled children was a bad thing. Why do you think those who named Asperger’s Syndrome went to such lengths to try to find out if he was a Nazi? This has zero to do with “in the light of today.” Your comment is completely misplaced.
You think I look to be upset by anti-Semitism? Do you enjoy insulting people? You do know, right, that we’re not talking about anti-Semitism here? That it wasn’t Jewish children being exterminated under these programs? (FYI, there were other ways of getting rid of Jewish children, whether or not they were disabled.) Another misplaced comment.
Look, as I said, you’re entitled to continue using the term if you want to. But the idea that “few people care” is belied by the article I linked, if you read it. And, in any event, there’s no need to justify your position by making insulting comments that don’t even bear any factual relationship to the issue.
I’m curious about the difference between Social Anxiety Disorder and Asperger’s and how they will tell the difference now that it doesn’t have a name.
I just finished the book, but haven’t yet read the citations in the index. There are several chapters that further explain the evolution of the concept of a spectrum, the directions that research has taken and the fight for research dollars, and the conflicts between parent advocates for what some used to call “classic autism” and self-advocates.
All this seems remarkable to me when I consider that over two decades ago, when my non-verbal S was diagnosed, I was told that high-functioning autism was exceedingly rare. A few professionals even seemed to marvel at my confusion when I protested that this did not make sense to me.
It seems that while many self-advocates have taken note of Asperger’s WWII activities, for now many - at least those who have written reviews - seem to be more disturbed by flattering depictions of ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) and Ivar Lovaas, and parental desires for a cure.
fwiw, I did not see the depictions of Lovaas as being especially flattering.