WhittenKitten wrote:
Maggiedoll wrote:
There was one who stopped posting much after she had some problems with some kind of harassment a few months back.. which particularly stinks because she was one of the most well-liked members here.
How exactly are you defining classic autism, though? Officially, I think the only current distinction is major developmental delays (particularly speech.) By the time you meet somebody on a forum, it's not going to be very obvious whether or not they started talking at a normal age. The next version of the DSM isn't expected to make a distinction between Asperger's and Kanner's autism, only levels of functioning. By "classic" do you mean stereotypical?
Erm, as far as i know besides the fact that you have to have speech delay and more of a developmental delay you have to have more qualifications to be diagnosed with Autistic Disorder/Classic Autism, there has to be criteria that I believe is 6, while.. Asperger's has less? I think that is what i have read, however I do not understand the diagnostic criteria.. I just know or have heard you don't have to have as many "criteria's" or "symptoms" if you have AS compared to Classic Autism. *shrug*
don't take my word for it. i'm not educated in this area.. it's hard for me to grasp.
I think the whole thing is a grey area, some professionals think that HFA and AS are the same thing, some don't.. and since they make the diagnosis based largely on their own opinions and interpretations, you can't really figure out the differences based on what people are diagnosed with, because the difference could be more in the differences between the people who diagnosed them than the people who were diagnosed. The developmental delay is a criterion that applies to Kanner's but not to Asperger's.. I'm not sure to what extent meeting additional criteria means having different symptoms and to what extent it means more severe symptoms. That's fuzzy too, because a symptom can also
exist without being clinically significant.. It's pretty impossible to define the differences between two different sets of criteria when the professionals using them don't agree on the differences (or lack of differences) between the disorders.
06 Feb 2010, 1:03 pm
