How common is AS?

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We should remember that diagnostic catagories like "schizotypal" and "schizophrenea" are not real things that anyone has ever pinned down. They are conseptual constructs to describe observed behaviors. What underlies these things remains a mystery but people go on talking about it like it really exists just because they have given it a name. Think back a hundred years when people were labled "hysterics" or "neurotics". Back then, people believed these were real things. These lables are now defunct and it turned out that they were not real things in the concrete sense. People take a label like this and start talking about it like they know what it is, rather than accepting that it's just a handle to describe an observed behaviour. My guess it that in a hundred years from now we will have figured out that many of these things are really forms of a neurological subtype that we are now calling "autism".

Also, "trained mental health professionals" being the source of clarification- what a joke, to me. Most of these people are egotists who like to think they know what the hell they are talking about and go around telling people they are "schizotypal" or "schizoid" or whatever as if that is a real, known entity. Just as Freudians were so sure that someone was a "hysteric" or go back a thousand years when certain behaviors were "known" to be inhabitation by a demon or incubus.

We should worry less about names and concentrate more on the person and what they need to feel understood and be happier and productive in some way.

Exactly like "autism" and "asperger's syndrome"; and...?

The only difference is that, while "schizotypal" and "schizophrenea" are called "psychiatric disorders", autism and AS are called "neurological disorders" (in spite of being diagnosed by behavior and psychological traits), giving the illusion that there is some special "objectivity" or "hard science" in these diagnosis.

Somewhere between one in a hundred and one in a hundred thousand. 97% of all statistics are made up anyway.

It could be more common then what the statistics suggest.

Even about the schizophrenia / schizotypal thing - even if these conditions appear in adolescence or adult age, the negative symptoms (like social isolation, avolition, laconic speach) tend to appear before the positive symptoms (delusions, hallucinations); if you look to the biographies of schizophrenics, it is frequent that they are solitary, "absent" and/or "daydreamers" as children - enough to match the first part of criteria for AS; join some unusual interest (normal in a social isolated person who is less subject to peer pressure) or an normal solitary interest pursued more hours a day than the usual (again, also normal in a social isolated person, who has more time to their hobbies), or even the "philosophical" devanations or bizarre fantasies that are also common in pre-schizophrenics, and, voilá, we have a "special interest".

For example - look for a John Nash; for I know, their childhood/teenage behavior were very aspie-like (of course, could be argued that he have both AS and schizophrenia, but this theory does not pass my Occan Razor).

When I first rear your post (before reading the following discussion), I was convinced that what you was saying is that most self-diagnosed aspies were (classical) autistics or PDD/NOS.

I suspect that this is the case, because the recent "romancization" (this word exist in English?) of Asperger's Syndrome (and to the fact that, in popular culture, there is only two ways of being autistic - or you live in an institution for mentally disabled persons, or you have AS).

Returning to the main point - How common is AS?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8294522

[bold mines]

I think Fnord is deeply underestimating the number of accurate self-dxes. I do not know why people are so fixated on demonstrating that they are most likely wrong when they very well may not be, and even professionals say that most self-dxes are likely correct. I would love to see research on this.

I picked AS because it seemed to be the best fit (I started speaking early). With more information, I think that is perhaps inaccurate, but then it is inaccurate for a lot of people who are professionally diagnosed with AS and PDD-NOS (they fit the criteria for autism) so it's not that big a deal, at least not until someone assumes that a diagnostic label means one can do more than one actually can.

But PDD-NOS is merely a placeholder of sorts for either an Autism diagnosis...or an Aspergers diagnosis. When a doctor gives, say, a two year old who has a speech delay that diagnosis, they're essentially saying "It's too early to tell if it's autism" for whatever reason...if that two year old doesn't fit the criteria. If a doctor gives a 5 yr old (who does not have a speech delay) a PDD-NOS diagnosis, they are essentially saying "the child is showing some symptoms of Aspergers, but they don't fully meet the criteria." PDD-NOS is kind of "we don't really know yet" diagnosis. Obviously, the 5 yr old (who had normal speech development) who has been diagnosed with pdd-nos is not going to suddenly get an autism diagnosis...either they end up meeting the Aspergers criteria down the road...or.....?? I don't know what. This is what I'm confused about, since that label is dissapearing in a couple of years.

I was led to believed that you don't keep a pdd-nos diagnosis forever,..even without the DSM changes.,.that it either becomes something....or it's dropped. Now, PDD is a different story.

I don't know, but imagine a possible case:

- 2 symptoms in social skills
- 1 symptoms in restricted interests
- speech delay

This is hard than AS, but below the line for autism - then I suspect that a person with this profile will be PDD/NOS is entire life (unless the spech delay is "forgotten" in a future evaluation)

I guess what I'm saying, is that when a PDD-NOS diagnosis is given, it means that they are showing some symptoms of an ASD, but don't meet the criteria. If they don't end up meeting the criteria down the line, then they don't meet it...and that's that...either they doc was just wrong, or they're just quirky kids, or just late to develop....or whatever. If the symptoms persist or they start showing more symptoms, they are retested for an ASD and then either given an Autism label or an Aspergers label.

And then there's this woman I know whose granddaughter has all the signs of autistic disorder, but because she'd had some ABA-type therapy before she was finally diagnosed, a psychiatrist diagnosed her with PDD-NOS instead, to reflect her "improvement."

This make sense for the people who receive a diagnosis of PDD/NOS because they are between Asperger and "normal"; but the PDD/NOS who is between Asperger and Autism (like in my hipotetical example)?

I have no idea. Would it just be a kid who has bad social skills who also happened to have a speech delay? I wonder how often this scenario appears?

Oh gosh. I just don't know what's going to happen to the PDD-NOS in a couple of years. Does everyone with a PDD-NOS label go get retested, or does it automatically become an autism diagnosis? This is confusing.

My understanding is that everyone who has a PDD diagnosis now (as in autistic disorder, asperger's syndrome, PDD-NOS, and childhood disintegrative disorder) will automatically have an ASD diagnosis. The assumption is that most people diagnosed with any of these already fits the autism criteria, and the distinctions are not actually helping so much as creating confusion.

Like I see a lot of discussion here about how PDD-NOS is treated a certain way, but what I read about it and hear from others is that it's extremely inconsistent. I also know of many people who have received multiple ASD diagnoses over time, and that seems to come down to whichever diagnosis you get depends on who diagnoses you and what information they have for the diagnosis.