Asperger's is not an illness!

Post Reply New Topic

Ok but Asperger's is not like a mental illness that is generally treated with medication and has a goal of going into remission like depression or anxiety.

If there were as many aspies as there are neurotypicals currently, and as many neurotypicals as there are aspies currently, would neurotypicality turn into an actual "syndrome"?

Just wondering....they would likely have much more difficulty having their social needs met....which would probably turn many of them crazy...seeing it that way it really depends much on the environment.

The main reason aspies have problems is probably because of the enormous social demands in society today.

As I see it, we Aspies are like immigrants in a new culture. Life is challenging, not because we are 'diseased' but because the culture is not designed to meet our needs at all and people have ridiculous over-the-top stereotypes of who we are. With a little understanding as a child it would have been a much easier ride and I wouldn't have had an anxiety attack at the tender age of 10. If we were the majority, NTs would be seen as disordered and would be having all the trouble, just like my extroverted brother can't go 5 minutes alone without getting depressed.

That would probably explain why many of my friends growing up were children who just moved to the country.

It's not an illness, though it is a disorder. An autistic brain is healthy, but developed differently--it is fundamentally different even when functioning at peak efficiency. That makes a big difference when it comes to treatment, which consists primarily of education designed to teach skills that will be useful to a person trying to live in a world that wasn't designed for their cognitive traits.

It also means treating things that can be described as illnesses--things that change the way the brain works, reduce its efficiency, such as depression and social anxiety disorder. These things make it much, much harder to deal with autism.

Although Asperger's Syndrome is not, strictly speaking, a 'disorder' and it's quite wrong to refer to it as an 'illness' it is, nevertheless, not at all easy to live with, so I can sympathise with the comments made by DVCal and Matt62. Yes, I know, I'm stating the obvious when I say that 'it is not at all easy to live with', but the widespread belief here that it is nothing more than a 'neurological difference' - well, that's just crap!

I, for one, am sick to death of this 'neurological difference'; it causes nothing but trouble for me, and if it were at all possible I would get rid of it. It is not an 'essential part of who I am' (as some might argue), it is nothing but a nuisance, a constant reminder of personal failures and defeats that were caused primarily by my innate inability to understand others. If I did not have this problem I would be a much better person, a person who could (for example) tolerate the imperfections and idiosyncrasies of others, but instead I have become a grumpy old pedant who can barely tolerate anyone else. It has cost me my jobs (I've had at least seven of them over the last ten years), friends (I can't make any, even though I try my hardest to not annoy them), and, as timatron alluded to - 'stuck living with my parents at 29' - you will find that the majority of those who never leave home (like me) are afraid to, and they are afraid because they have this curse known as 'Asperger's Syndrome'. I have never been in a relationship either, even though I am now almost 45! How pathetic is that!

Asperger's sucks, and I hope that someone develops a treatment for it soon so that no one will have to 'live' like this ever again!

We teach neurotypicals, too, don't we? They're not born knowing how to do math or drive a car or make spaghetti. They have to learn things to adjust to their world, even though the world is made for the neurotypical skill set.

The difference between NTs and autistics is that an autistic person needs to learn different skills--skills which neurotypicals will not need formal education to learn. NTs naturally pick up things like face-reading and conversational flow. Autistics usually do not.

The point of education is to teach you the skills you will need to survive in the world that you are in. For autistic people, education needs to include therapy which teaches those missing skills, just as a neurotypical person must be taught to read or count or pay attention to detail.

If we'd been born with Down syndrome or dyslexia, we'd have healthy brains too--structured differently, but not out of balance. There would be deficits, as there are with autism, and it would be a disorder, and therapy would be needed--but it would not be an illness.

It is really a matter of connotation... On the face of it, "impaired" may seem to mean the same thing as "defective", but they are subtly different in a very important way.

Think of the word "defective" in terms of the quality check at a factory. A "defective" item is one that wasn't made quite to specifications, and therefore cannot be sold because it does not match the item that the customer wants. The core idea is that there is a theoretical ideal, and that this item is defective because it does not match up to that ideal.

It makes sense to use the term "defective" for manufactured items because someone has set the standard for these items, and probably margins of error within which the item can still be deemed acceptable. Some engineer is the authority who is allowed to define what those items are supposed to be.

But with humans, that doesn't apply. Who's qualified to judge which humans are defective, and which are not? And how do you define the standards by which you choose that judge of human defectiveness? It all goes around in a circle. No idea of what a "defective" human is can ever be absolutely defined, because no human being is the ultimate authority on any other. You want to say that good social skills make an acceptable human? Fine; I'll come back and declare that a human is defective unless they can understand calculus. Someone else may decide that humans are defective if their skin is too dark, or they are too old or young, or the wrong gender. Yet another may get pseudoscientific about it and declare that anyone who is on the losing end of natural selection must be defective, ignoring completely that judging the worth of a person by his ability to survive and reproduce is as arbitrary a standard as any other.

Someone who did create design specifications could judge the worth of a human. I believe that God has declared us all equally valuable, because he did in fact design us, and judges us not by what we can do but by what we do with what we have been given; and that, in order to do that, he needs to know everything about a person, something that no other human can ever do. Even with God in the picture, human beings simply are not equipped to judge each others' worth, because they cannot gather all of the relevant information--only God can ever see a person's heart.

Ranking human beings by worth is impossible and meaningless, and can never do more than reflect your own preferences. When the majority of the people in a culture judges a minority as defective (a phenomenon we call prejudice), all it can ever be is a judgment made by the majority--as meaningless as any other judgment of human worth made by another human.

There is an actual underlying cause for our impairments. Its not just natural variability as so many people seem to use, as a means of denial IMO. There is a disorder and our behavior is how we react to it. Obviously, a person who can barely communicate has limitations. But as I can attest to, we can move up & down on the Spectrum.
The fact that my symptom/behaviors completely REGRESSED during/after a high fever 14 years ago reveals a malfunction in my brain/CNS. Saying its some sort of natural variation is really wishful thinking.

Sincerely,
Matthew

It's a natural variation that causes impairment.

The idea is that the genes for autism are found in the general population; in small doses they're useful, but gather too many of them in one person and you get autism. The genes themselves are not defective; nor is the person with autism sick. However, they are still disabled.

I know it sounds like just semantics, but it has practical importance: If an autistic person is disabled rather than ill, the best approach is to teach them how to cope with the disability, rather than trying to cure their illness.

Regardless of the causes of autism (which appear to be quite varied), what matters is that in this society, the configuration of our brains prevents us from naturally subscribing to behavioral norms, leaving us with a marked disadvantage. That definitely qualifies as an impairment/disorder in my book, though the jury's still out on "illness" or "defect".