"Suffers from Asperger's Syndrome"

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I also dont think aspergers belongs in the disease category. When i was in college it was even said infront of 300 psychology students. The disease of Aspergers he said, good going there psychology teacher. Technicly they have all the right to say aspergers is a disease.
Of course he knows better, but to say this to students who take his words to the letter. Was just insane to me.

This was also one of the reasons i stopped the study, even in a place where you would expect people to go beyond superficial stereotypes it was no different (im talking anything in the dsm).

Lets turn everyone into super aspie then! It's a spectrum disorder and the thousands of people with an ASD who are judged incapable of work need societies protection. Super aspies will just have to learn to deal with a few words that are offensive to them and then get on with their already fulfilling lives.

No, it's not. Black people do not suffer from a condition that limits their function in everyday life. Skin colour makes no difference to how a person lives. People with the mildest touches of AS often don't feel limitations in their functioning either. I am not one of those people. While I am not a "cure AS now!" kind of person (and am involved with AS self-advocacy), I am not blind in thinking that I have no limitations whatsoever. I do have limitations, I am delayed in some areas, and I don't function like average NT people can. If you do, that is fantastic! But for me, it is a disorder. It is a disorder that I accept-- it is part of my just as much as my "lack of african pigmentation" skin is, but the difference is: my skin is just a colour, not affecting me in anyway. My AS has kept me in my parents house, made me not able to work at the level of a job someone my age should be able to keep, keeps me quite dependent upon others, and has caused me an almost total lack of social relationships. Yes, for that, I do "suffer" in many ways.

That I agree with, but I do think it is a legitimate disorder, at least for those who have it moderate to severely.

Last edited by littlelily613 on 15 Apr 2011, 11:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It isn't censorship to critique a word usage one finds problematic, nor to suggest alternatives.

When the word is consistently misused, it is a good idea to examine that usage and critique it, rather than focus on one particular meaning that is not actually being used. Admittedly, a significant part of one of my interests is how society positions disabled people as both suffering under a burden and being a burden to everyone around them, with little to contribute. Thus some are framed as exceptional, unique cases - such as Temple Grandin, Stephen Hawking, Christopher Reeve, and so on -while others are framed as contributing little or nothing, as suffering, as burdens.

Obviously no one can control what language is used, however. No one is going to excise words from the language or force people to use the words they prefer. There's no danger of this.

I don't think language should be the primary or only focus for activism, though.

I think the comparisons to race in here make zero sense, and maybe there's a significantly better way to make the point in question without comparing being AS to being black.

I can wrap my brain around this. Basically you are not allowing 'suffer' to fully define a recognizable social issue. Critiquing the usage of the word within the context of this social issue makes perfect sense. It is an exercise with value and should be performed. I start to have problems when I am told that ANY use of the word suffer in the context of Asperger's is somehow a betrayal of the neurodiversity creed. Nearly every significant impediment to my living a successful life can be directly traced back to my ASD. It astonishes me that others on the spectrum can be so blithely judgmental if I characterize that dynamic with a word that does not meet with their approval.

Old people whom are sick might be seen as burdens but they are also seen as neccessary burdens to people with an ounce of respect and compassion who love their elderly relatives. People suffer. Are we to pretend that they don't in order to appease the horrid prejudices of societies real "dregs", who think of suffering people as too burdensome to care for?

Yeah, eliminating any use makes no sense at all. And people should be able to say "I suffer from this."

I do not get, and I will probably never get, the resistance to admitting that ASDs are legitimately disabilities, or calling them disorders or syndromes. It seems to me that it's a kind of positivity grounded in denial: Instead of acknowledging the reality of having a disability, one claims to not have a disability at all.

Imagine Mississipi, 1960 (or Zimbabwe, today, for the European Pigmentation Syndrome).

Ugh. If a thread is going to be side-tracked by poor comparison, it should at least be done so based on accurate facts. Blacks are most definitely NOT more likely to commit suicide than whites. In fact, it is just the opposite. Below is just one link, but if you read it, you will see that whites in the US are 2.5 more likely to kill themselves than blacks or Hispanics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_suicide

But anyway, I strongly feel as though there are parts of my AS that I "suffer from." If everything was just perfect in my life, I would have never been inspired to figure out the source of my problems. There are physical and psychological issues that go along with Aspergers that I wouldn't miss if they disappeared tomorrow. But at the same time, as I'm going through this time of renewed self-discovery, I'm pretty much realizing that autism is one of the main engines that has driven my entire life ... and my life is pretty good all things considered. So I guess I'm pretty much solidly "on the fence" in terms of the characterization of AS as being something we suffer from.

Last edited by Catamount on 15 Apr 2011, 1:14 pm, edited 3 times in total.

I guess the situation is different for every Aspie, but I can honestly say that having AS has caused me a hell of a lot of suffering every day of my life.

Yeah. This!!

AS is a social deficit. My social life has always been satisfying to me, therefore I do not consider AS an impairment.

I have had problems with depression which may have been caused/exacerbated by other people's reaction to AS, but AS itself has never been a problem for me.

o_O

You really consider it censorship to wish that people used a different phrasing for something? Avoiding "suffers from" language is actually already in the disability portion of style guides used by journalists and the like. And the reasons for avoiding it have less to do with whether or not people suffer, and more to do with how people receive the word and therefore change their thinking about disabled people (it tends to cause pity and adds to the assumption that all disabled people have a limited capacity for happiness, which then leads into some really terrible things that are done to disabled people in the name of ending our suffering... it's not that the word magically causes all this, but that it adds to an impression that already exists, and it's an impression that in its strongest form can lead to our death). To you, or me, it may be "just a word", because I find words rather meaningless in and of themselves, but to a lot of people it can be one piece of what adds to a destructive stereotype of disabled people.

Here's the style guide that I mentioned, by the National Center on Disability and Journalism, although there are lots of similar style guides (or portions of larger style guides) out there:

http://ncdj.org/styleguide/

Nobody writing that style guide is censoring anyone. Censoring anyone would mean they were actively forcing people to do certain things, as well as making it so they could not go somewhere else and say that thing without being censored there as well. (Censorship tends to imply government-level control, not personal preferences or even web board policies.) Nobody's doing that and I am not sure anyone suggested that.

I don't agree with everything in that style guide, BTW, but I do agree with a lot of it. And there's a reason they tried to eliminate "suffers from" and "victim of" and so forth where possible, because in the minds of people who are more influenced by words, those things do cause stereotypes to be reinforced.

Oh and I forgot to mention, anything with a * next to it in that style guide means it's in the Associated Press style guide as well. That includes "suffers from" and "afflicted with" among others. Meaning it's fairly widely disliked, not just by a few autistic people but by enough people that the style guides have been written this way.

I suffer in some respects. (AKA sensory problems.)

When the concept of utopia was invoked that seemed to me to be a bit of a stretch so I was responding with hyperbole.