Is Aspergers trendy?

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If I was more .gif savvy, I'd be posting a Mr. Burns "Excellent" image right here as a sign of support.

I wonder what mine is......

If I knew how to post a cat picture, I would simply post a cat picture now.

Now I am checking the video of myself to see how many frames it takes for me to open and close my eyes during blinking, and indeed the blinking is verry merry berry fast, the eye closing only for 1 frame, and the whole process of closing and opening eyelids taking only 3-4 frames, while for others, it is more like 3-4 frames of closure and 8-10 frames for eyelids. The closing of the eyelid takes much less time than the opening for others, but for me, it is symmetrical, 1 frame to close, 1 frame closed, 1 frame to open, the end.

Most ASD diagnoses are made in children, which means that the impairment criterion is not that important, because children with some developmental problems usually have impairments. For children, what is important is whether they have the autistic traits or not and whether their problems are caused by autism, and that seems to be hard to determine in many children who are borderline with mild autistic traits that may be due to some other disorder such as ADHD or social anxiety or due to environment and circumstances growing up or due to learning disability like NVLD or due to abnormally high or low intellectual functioning. It is even more important for childhood diagnosis to figure out a set of objective tests specific for autism.

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Well, I think the impairment is important too. If there's no impairment , no medical diagnosis is needed. More objective measures are needed too, it'll be good when they're developed.

Here you go.

My point is that for children, the impairments are usually obvious, like the child is behind in XYZ, but whether or not the impairments are caused by autism is harder to figure out, if the autistic traits are mild, and the child is social/communicative, has language, and normal intellectual functioning. Mild autistic traits can be caused by many different conditions, and possibly contributing to overdiagnosis of ASD, which I am not sure if it is overdiagnosed, but possible based on lack of objective tests, and ASD is sometimes diagnosed for ASD services in cases where eberryone knows that the child has some other condition but they think that the child can benefit from ASD services.

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Yeah, I definitely think there's a potential overdiagnosis of autism in children until we get more objective measures and some kids might be diagnosed just to get particular services.

The impairment is important to be sure of when anyone is diagnosed (but maybe obvious in children if referred by the school or something) but of-course it's important to be sure autism is causing the impairment and not something else. Impairment is necessary but not sufficient for autism. You must be impaired to have ASD but impairment doesn't equal ASD.

Cute cat daydreamer!

Thanks.

You're welcome

I always had at least one cat and one dog, often more than one of each lol, I love them both.

Nice cats☺️

There is a journal devoted to case studies of children who have some autistic behaviors, some neurotypical behaviors, some ADHD behaviors, and the question at the end of the abstract is what should the clinician do?

When it comes to real-world issues of trendiness or misdiagnosis of mental disorder, it's not adults who self-diagnose and have no impairments that contribute to the numbers, but large numbers of children being officially diagnosed with borderline/ambiguous/mixed traits and where to draw autism line that matters. It seems hard to draw it at traits or impairments. Traits are often mixed for high-functioning or borderline or mild children or those with other disorders. Impairments can be caused by all kinds of things. Intellectual functioning plays a role, since it becomes hard to distinguish between intellectual effects and autism at the lower and higher IQ tails. Then there is motivation of getting services available only for autism, which seems to have broader array of services than most other mental or physical disorders, and there is huge system of services in california, and wherever services are more available, diagnosis rates are higher. It's so complicated, will take much work to sort out, hopefully eventually...

I read that only 12% of people with the high functioning end of the autism spectrum disorder, equivalent to whats called Aspergers, are mentally gifted. Good examples include Temple Grandin and John Robison, both who wrote books about their autism. I read one post somewhere on WP that the poster didn't like the books written by the authors above because they don't accurately portray the lives of the majority of those on the autism spectrum. Most even on the high functioning end are unemployed or underemployed. The majority of people who self diagnose as Aspies are just the mentally gifted type, they are socially awkward because their mindsets and interests don't fit with the majority of the population, yet they fit very well with others their type, and they can still understand the basics of body language and they also tend to be good with humor. Maybe many of them have a tiny bit of autism, but it would be the broad autism phenotype, not quite on the clinical spectrum.

Some of those authors (and I am not referring to Dr. Grandin here) describe childhood and adult experiences and activities that seem extremely high functioning (a least to me). So much so, that I wonder what their impairments truly are.