Everyone has Aspergers to a degree?

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Is it true that everyone has Aspergers to a degree, but just the worst cases have it strong enough to get it recognized as a condition? I'm strongly suspecting that this is the case with ADHD.

And if it isn't, then what is the medical explanation for that? It seems to me strongly unlikely that something like that can either exist, or not exist, but if it exists, its degree might vary strongly. I don't say it's impossible, but I'd like to see an explanation - a sound hypothesis would be sufficient.

No, if everyone had aspergers it would not be considered a disorder.

If we define "mental retardation" as insufficient intelligence, then we can say that even geniuses have mental retardation, to a degree, because they would have been more efficient if they had more intelligence.

However, only people with a very strong deficit of intelligence get a diagnosis for mental retardation, despite the fact that everyone would benefit from a higher intelligence. Therefore, it is entirely possible for everyone to have something that is considered a disorder.

If this wasn't clear, by saying that everyone has a mental retardation, I meant that mental retardation isn't a yes/no thing, it's more like being extremely short - everyone has it to a degree, but only the extremely short people would qualify.

lack intelligence <----- average -------> gifted?
( Retardation )
(mentally deficient)

This is a generalized view as technically intelligence has many attributes collected within it.

& a IQ test is useless in measuring it accurately.

( over all score would be the real number (intellegence) , for the measure. )

Okay, then I have officially failed to explain to you what did I mean. Any further attempts would only water-down my thread, and if someone shares her opinion, you can't answer my question, because I didn't explain it clear enough for you to understand, so please don't try to do so.

There is such a thing as ''shaddow mental illness''. If you have Asperger, for example, then you are likely to have relatives who show some signs but are too mild to be diagnosed. Now, if you take these relatives of yours and look at their relatives, then perhaps they have even milder signs, and so forth. So it is possible that everyone on the entire planet have some signs. If so, then it is exactly like you said: we all have it, but only the ones who have it to sufficient degree get diagnosed.

Now, the same is not only true about Asperger; it is true about all mental illness. Take schizophrenia for example. It has already been recognized that Schizotypal Personality Disorder is actually a mild version of schizophrenia, too mild to be diagnosed as such. Now, the patients with that disorder don't hallucinate. They just have superstitious beliefs and so forth. Now if you take someone else who has superficial beliefs but is not ''weird'' enough to warrant the diagnosis of Schizotypal Personality, it might still be true that they, too, are affected by schizophrenia, just to yet milder degree. Now, we ALL have superstitious beliefs, at least most cultures do. That might be due to the fact that we all have schizophrenia to some degree and only ppl who have it severe enough get diagnosed.

Now we know that some mental disorders, such as autism and schizophrenia, are more common in men, while others, such as mood disorders, are more common in women. Now if we all suffer from all of these disorders to ''mild extend'' then it makes sense to assume that ''the degree'' to which autism/schizophrenia affects average ''normal'' man would be slightly more severe than the degree to which it affects average ''normal'' woman; on the otehr hand the degree to which mood disorders would affect average ''normal'' woman would be more severe than the degree to which they affect average ''normal'' man. This makes it possible that what we normally think of as gender-related traits are actually the shaddow traits of tehse respective disorders. Men are more logical than women due to being affected by shaddow autism, and women are more emotional then men due to being affected by shaddow mood disorders.

Going back to autism, it seems that some cultures are being affected more than others. For example, if you take Jewish culture, you will find that they are very strict about their observances -- they spell out exactly how many grams you are allowed to carry on sabbath and exactly what distance, and so forth. Also, they have a habbit of rocking back and forth during prayers. Both are the habbits associated with autism. It is possible that, while ''shaddow autism'' affects everyone, it affects Jews slightly more than others, and this is what accounts for these rituals to be sustained. Now, since we are only diagnosing autism when it is severe enough, most Jews are NT by ''our'' standard. But it is possible that the few who invented these rituals were autistic. But, at the same time, the fact that NT Jews are affected by autism slightly more than others, they were ''autistic enough'' to ''sustain'' such traditions even though they are not ''autistic enough'' to ''invent'' them.

Anyway, the bottom line is that all disorders, including autism, affect every single person on a planet to some degree or the other. But it affects different people by different degrees. So we have a bell curve type of thing. The more we ''raise'' the ''degree of autism'' we are ''looking for'', the fewer people we find that have it. So if we set up ''autism threshold'' to be ''very low'', then we would diagnose everyone. If we set it slightly higher, we will diagnose Jews, Buddhists and perhaps few ohter groups of people, If, on the other hand, we set it even higher, then Jews and Buddhists will be NT, while the diagnosis will be reserved ''only'' to the people who are ''actually'' diagnosed today. If we set it even higher, than people diagnosed today will be NT. And there is nothing wrong with this either -- in fact a century ago most of us would have been considered NT. In fact, the patients that Asperger originally had, have classical autism by today's standards (there is an article called ''did Asperger's cases had Asperger's Syndrome?'') The bottom line is that it is all relative and all depends on where you set threshold, and that threshold is man made anyway.

Basically, Autism is NOT Downs. You can't just single out a chromosome and say ''thats it this is the ultimate definition of autism''. Rather, autism involves several different groups of genes and researchers don't even agree which ones. So thats why the line between autism and normal is very blury. And if autism involves hundrids of genes then OF COURSE everyone in the world will have a couple of them. So, of course, everyone in the world will be affected at least to some very mild degree.

Everybody is on the spectrum.

Well it's a matter of over-diagnosis and not being able to separate symptoms from simple human quirks and nature.

After I was diagnosed with it my Mom got some books on it, and they all went over what is called "The Triad"—three categories of symptoms that a person must show or else they are not on the spectrum.

You can see The Triad here.

In matters of ADHD, I think it's over-diagnosed because it's mostly pediatricians that diagnose it, instead of psychologists. And of course, every child is more hyper and has more energy than an adult.

Everyone is always hot then. Sense cold just means absence of heat, but nowhere on earth is there complete lack of heat. Now if it turns out we are from the wrong planet...