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Now what's going to happen to PDD-NOS again?

"Try looking up "successful aspies" on google."

What's that got to do with what I had to say? All I'm saying is that Aspergers is part of the autism spectrum, so it's accurate to describe an aspie as autistic. Therefore, this merging of the criteria makes sense.

_"_biro wrote:
I think it's a great idea to merge AS with the ASD diagnosis. Then people with AS will be more recognised as being on the spectrum


There are people with AS who can pass as NT's, far from every aspie gets diagnosed, so, being mroe recognized as one on the spectrum will not improve anything."

Yes, but that doesn't mean that they're not part of the spectrum. Also, sometimes certain situations can worsen the symptoms of aspergers. When I was 12, there were so many changes going on in my life that all my sensory problems became extremely disabling and I developed an anxiety disorder. That's one example of a situation when a person can be more obviously autistic.

By the way, I'm curious; why are you so concerned about this distinction between AS and Autism? I've read that autism will be recognised by severity anyway.

Last edited by MindBlind on 17 Jan 2010, 2:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

That just damages me, not 3/4 of the description fits me, and take notice to what I said; "The aspies that are diagnosed are less than half of the ones that doesn't".

Take yourself, for example, you're a nurse-something, and that takes a large amount of social skills to get a job like that, so I don't understand why you compare YOURSELF to autists who can't take of their socks.

May I use an example to answer your question?:

Person A suffers from Major Depression. Person B suffers from Dysthymia. They both suffer from depression- just different kinds of it.

I hope that helps

You can't compare the two things.

No offense, but if this continues, I'm going to use youtube examples of AS and autism.

I think I know what autism is; I spent my entire life around people all over the spectrum. Some of the ones I knew/know are as you described (having litle to no communication skills, verbal communication, self help skils, etc), some of them just get by and some of them are doing better than I am at the moment in certain things (even though their autism affects them more profoundly than mine does).

I know that there are differences. I'm not suggesting that AS is the exact same as severe autism. However you need to understand that autism is a spectrum disorder.

Aspergers is part of that spectrum whether you like it or not.

I had no idea I was opening a can of worms - I apologize.
In the interests of attempting to provide information to decrease speculation, I read the link on the APA site. Here are my comments:
The first panel addressed the question what are the core symptom domains in autism?
I read this part, and honestly don’t understand it.
The second panel addressed the question how are fixated interests and stereotypes related to each other, to autism, and to obsessions and compulsions?
This section I was able to understand a little bit. Currently the diagnostic criteria place a heavier emphasis on social impairments than disabling repetitive behaviors: “Why should a child with mild social and communicative impairment whose main impairment is disabling restrictive and repetitive behaviors be considered to have less likelihood of autistic disorder? Is our lack of emphasis on severity of this area justified by the data or is it based on our “preoccupation” with social and communication function?”
The third panel addressed the question how does the presentation of autism change across the lifespan?
"It is only recently that significant information on the early presentation of ASD in very young (birth to 3 years of age) children has been reported. He called for similar efforts to develop developmentally sensitive criteria and diagnostic algorithms across the lifespan, especially in early and middle adulthood. Dr. Wright recounted how his clinic has been getting referrals for evaluation of adolescent and adult family members (e.g., older siblings, uncles) of young children diagnosed with autism but there are no guidelines for making a diagnosis of ASD in such older individuals; adult examples are needed for the various autism criteria. This may be a particular issue for African-American families who are typically referred at a later age than their Caucasian counterparts."
That part I don’t think needs translating, and I think that is an admirable goal of the new criteria.
The fourth panel addressed the question how does developmental regression (and particularly Childhood Disintegrative Disorder) fit into the autism spectrum? This mostly has to do with infants/small children.

Now we get to the part that I think is the most concerning for us:
The fifth panel addressed the question Asperger’s Disorder – is it Autism? "These questions include: is there an ‘Asperger’ subgroup of autism with distinct cause, course, cognitive profile, and intervention needs, and if so, what is its relation to other ASDs?"
Unfortunately, it appears from my reading that there is still dispute among the researchers as to how this question will be answered, and I couldn’t really figure out from reading it which way they are leaning. Perhaps someone else can read it and make better sense of it.

There are four more panels/questions, but I don’t feel up to trying to read them.

The overall sense I get is that the goal is for clinicians, including people who are not autism specialists, to be able to make a correct diagnosis throughout the lifespan, and that there is concern that they get it right. They are actually using a lot of experts to work on this, and relying on actual studies done on people on the spectrum.

Autists; [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDMMwG7RrFQ&feature=fvst[/youtube]

I already told you that I have personal experience with people all over the spectrum.

However, if you wanna watch videos, here's one of a girl with AS doing those things that you claimed that aspies don't do:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT1k8yAbiIA

Also Autism Speaks suck when it comes to portraying autism in the media.

I'm afraid that Aspies are already disabled--the definition of Asperger's describes a disabling condition. The ones that aren't, are so close to the brink of diagnosis that they are more culturally autistic than anything else--which is important in its own right, naturally, but doesn't determine the best way to diagnose people.

This is an Asperger's stereotype. I am Aspie and I melt down all the time. I rock back and forth to calm myself. I have prosopagnosia, and a highly unusual sense of humor. Also, "too smart to have autism" is really, really offensive to autistics. There are a great many very, very smart people with classic autism, and a great many people with symptoms identical to Asperger's with the single exception of a low IQ.

All of your criteria to tell apart Asperger's and autism are basically stereotypes. What you're talking about doesn't even apply to actual people diagnosed Asperger's versus diagnosed Autism.

Well, there's a lot of symptoms associated with autism--speech stuff, communication stuff, activities, behaviors, sensory processing, semantic/pragmatic, social relationships... etc. All of it is really kind of a big, confused mess at the moment, and they're trying to figure out which symptoms are important, and how to group them so that they make sense.

I thought autism is just an inability to socialize with others? If there is a criteria for the degree of seriousness, why not use communication as a criteria? The rest of the dirty work requires some thought though.

There's a lot more to it. Simple speech/language disorders are not autism, for one thing. Neither are social phobia, social anxiety disorder, avoidant personality disorder, or reactive attachment disorder.

There's also the activities/interests angle--stimming, special interests, routines. And the sensory angle--hypersensitivity, hyposensitivity, and just plain weird sensory processing. There's a link to movement disorders, with stimming and dyspraxia. The easily overloaded stress tolerance plays a big role. There are some cognitive problems, like problems with imagination/creativity or answering "what if" questions or coping with uncertainty. There's a big element of executive dysfunction.

If your particular case is mostly social interaction issue, then you may not realize all the other stuff that goes into autism. The mistaken belief that autism is just a language/communication issue doesn't help the diagnostic process any. I honestly think some people with simple social phobia are mistakenly diagnosed as Asperger's... especially if they're also nerdy. About as often as people who really have Asperger's aren't diagnosed because they don't seem nerdy enough, actually. That's one more thing that getting rid of the Asperger's label would help--you wouldn't be excluded or included on the basis of whether you fit the Asperger's stereotype.

what is the glaring pdd-nos problem?

Well, "NOS" (not otherwise specified) is supposed to be the "miscellaneous" category. It's supposed to hold the small percentage of cases that don't fit into any other category. So, with autism, that would be all the cases that can't be described by Autistic Disorder, Asperger's Disorder, Childhood Disintegrative Disorder, or Rett Syndrome. If the diagnostic categories are solid and useful, there shouldn't be a lot of cases that fall into the PDD-NOS "atypical autism" category.

But that's not the case. Over 60% of autism diagnoses are PDD-NOS.

Yeah... so, basically, the categories we have now are so useless that they can't even cover the majority of autism cases. Something seriously needs to be done about that.

Can we add new conditions in the PDD-NOS? Do we need a new label for the currently unknown types of autism that we see now?