Why is aspergers syndrome grouped with autism?

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Is there some cosmic meaning to starting a new page more than a third of the time?

Like a Thread Killer?

This is a link to a good reason Asperger's is considered a form of autism.

Read through those bits and ask yourself if any of those kids would be considered AS today (I'd say, yes, one almost definitely, others quite possibly). For that matter, read through it and see how many of them would be considered "high functioning" today. (By most standards, all of them could be by one standard or another, and as far as how it'd probably play out, all but one of them probably would be.)

And... they were the original autistic children studied by Kanner. If so many of them are similar to kids now regarded as Asperger's, why on earth would Asperger's not be considered a form of autism?

Write that diagnoser off as a twit.



Pretty close - if your IQ is noticibly below average, it would turn an aspie diagnosis to HFA.



Again, close but fixated on the childhood identification of HFA because it's easiest to identify then, rather than as an adult.



It's a pity he died.. I don't understand the rest of the sentence though but it sounds wrong.



Aspies and HFAs can both develop fascimiles of eye contact, gestures and tonality.

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I guess what they're trying to say is that if, as a child, your speech was delayed significantly by your condition then the IQ is affected (however slightly) and it's probably HFA not Aspergers. As an adult however, it's too hard to tell.

Thanks

Think you mean the verbal IQ or espresso one? I once recall testing 148 IQ, but no words till three and parents to document development. Diagnosis of "probable autism" removed at age 5 for too smart. I remember being hit frequently when I tried to talk and believe it was for echolalia ("sassing"), so was not conversing even when starting school at six. I was alot like Kanner's descriptions, not others descritions of Kanner's aurtism. Maybe my savant skill was taking IQ tests.
Don't like the ASD which is what I have now. I probably am being ODD I think I am HFA but Asperger's Autism would be fine with me.

Sadly and Paradoxically, IQ Tests are not a great way to test IQ

The best definition of IQ is: IQ is whatever is tested on IQ tests. The problem is that IQ tests do not measure all possible indicants of what we call "intelligence." They are, however, reasonably accurate in predicting academic success.

I think that neurelitism, like most oppressive ideologies, works (in part) through "othering" (marginalizing) people. Black-and-white thinking is one type of marginalization. Once people become "the other," they can be dismissed. The remedy, IMO, is inclusion, especially including the many voices which have previously been largely silenced.

I think sometimes, though, that academic success is more a self-fulfilling prophecy than anything else.

Take me, for instance.

I was a hyperlexic almost-6-year-old when I was taken to my first IQ test. I was also the child of a white (sometimes subject to individual racism because white people sometimes thought we were brown but brown people all knew we were white, but basically white, in the weird set of categories people use in the USA where any hint of looking "non-white" even a little makes you get put into other "racial" categories by some people) middle-class family. I also had a very old-fashioned IQ tester.

From all accounts, I had some skills that were far ahead of what would be expected, and some that were far behind of what would be expected. The tester did not believe in such discrepancies and ignored them completely. This raised my score, and was the first self-fulfilling prophecy. I was expected to be gifted in all areas therefore I was considered to be. The test scores on the basis of that was somewhere like highly or profoundly gifted.

Keep in mind something here. I was almost six. I had already been to kindergarten. There were tests in kindergarten. I supposedly had an extremely advanced expressive vocabulary. I supposedly had an off-the-charts IQ score. I did not know the meaning of the word test. Nor did I know what IQ was. I did not know the meaning of many, many individual words that all my classmates of "normal" or even somewhat "below normal" IQ all knew. I think the tester did pick up on this, because my receptive language score was pretty low from what I remember. But I was still supposed to have this astronomical IQ.

Now I was put in first grade with other kids my age who all understood language far better than I did. I tried to do what was expected of me the same way someone would do so around people who spoke an incomprehensible foreign language. I also experienced the world visually, especially under fluorescent lighting, as painful and also as fragmented into pieces that I could not always connect together. I also experienced this in terms of hearing, I got so much information that it just ended up all sounding totally confusing. I can remember many occasions in which people said things directly to me, and I had no idea what they were saying, not even one word of it. Often I didn't even know what language precisely was, or that it was something I was supposed to be listening to in particular. I did pick up on intonation better than I picked up on the words themselves. (When I began to get a better grasp of the literal meaning of certain words, at that point I became unable to understand intonation if I was tuning into the meaning of them. Which makes me think many times autistic people's inability to listen to intonation is a problem of being unable to do both at once, not just inability to do it.) When doing handwriting, my thumb popped out to the side and my fingertip hyperextended, making it excruciatingly painful, and of course with more pain, my environment was more incomprehensible.

So I basically was perceiving everything as chaos. And there were many things I was not able to do, although there were also things (particularly music) that I was quite good at, even if I also found my musical instrument quite painful.

In this environment, there were many things I could not do, that other children my age could do. There were many things I could not understand, in fact, that young children and even babies can understand. This led to frequent frustration. I was doing things either by rote or by working things out in ways that nobody else had to work things out, using systems of pattern and such that nobody else was using because they didn't have to, and possibly they couldn't. (All of which is also how I got high scores in other areas of my IQ test without even comprehending the material consciously.)

However, from the outside, I was a child with an extremely high IQ who had been put in with my age peers. They started pulling me out to other grades for some of my classes. Then they skipped me to third grade the next year.

If I had had a low IQ and done all the things I did, then it would be considered what it was for me -- incomprehension. I would have been held back rather than pushed forward, or I would have been put in special education. For doing the exact same things. This is the second part of the self-fulfilling prophecy of "academic success".

So I was now in with children older than me. I was still having these problems. And I was being mercilessly bullied. More was expected of me, so things were more chaotic and incomprehensible than they had been even before. This continued for a couple years. I was advanced still in my grades because every mistake I made, every bit of blatant incomprehension, was seen as a gifted kid who was either underachieving or bored. This is the third part of the self-fulfilling prophecy.

However, I had to repeat fourth grade because it was thought maybe my social skills and behavior problems (which included meltdowns, extremely frequent ones, from overload, incomprehension, and overstressing myself trying to function in an environment I had close to zero comprehension of, and in which I faced daily abuse from other students) would improve that way, and so on and so forth. And I was sent to another school. The school was mostly for rich kids, my parents put themselves into debt to send me there. It required the passing of an entrance exam. I was unable to pass the exam, which would have been well under my academic abilities as predicted by my IQ test.

My parents still figured out some way to get me into that school despite not passing the entrance exam. I suspect showing them my IQ score was a major part of it. This is the fourth part of the self-fulfilling prophecy.

In seventh grade at that school, even what little ability to pass I had was thrown apart. I began behaving even more obviously autistic than before, because there was nowhere private to do some of the things I had tried to keep private. I could easily be found staring at nothing, or waving things in front of my face, or doing unusual mannerisms that helped me get through the day without screaming. These were signs that too much was being expected of me. However, they were taken as signs of being an extremely gifted child who was bored in her current environment, and since I still had serious problems comprehending things, including what I was expected to do, and since I was as always extremely passive, I just repeated that I was bored and I'm sure people believed it.

So then I was put into an accelerated program at the end of the year. This is the fifth part of the self-fulfilling prophecy.

By this point I was really worried. I knew that whatever was expected of me was failing. Failing badly. That I could not understand, could not keep up, and could not fake understanding anymore. Could not hide who I was to even the degree that I'd been trying to. Although most of the hiding of who I was, was not done by me, but it was done by others, with the aid of expectations coming from an IQ test score a long time ago. I just did what they expected, to the best of my ability to comprehend what they expected and how to meet that. I knew I couldn't meet it, starting then, and I was terrified. (Keep in mind, that this whole time, anyone who didn't know I was gifted thought I was either badly behaved or something was "wrong" with me. If "gifted" hadn't been my label, I'm sure they would've pathologized me in a heartbeat from a far earlier age. And it was hyperlexia that mostly got the gifted thing going -- see my poll thread on that, it describes many of the total lacks of comprehension I've described here, even.)

So in my accelerated program thingie, I started really failing that too. But it was supposed to be difficult, and they also thought maybe I was not challenged enough. Still. So I was now skipped to ninth grade. This is the sixth part of the self-fulfilling prophecy.

In ninth grade, at the age of 13, there I was, and I was weird, and I was obviously weird, because I could not hide my weirdness, nor the obvious freezing and obvious complete incomprehension and the obvious overload, and so forth. (Later that year I would be sent to a neurologist.) Rumors at school started flying that I was on drugs, and that the one boy (who was fat, gay, and highly insecure, and therefore understood about being different) who would hang out with me was on them too. I was heavily bullied as usual, and the teachers even joined in. I lasted 3 months at ninth grade, and I would have failed all my classes if I had stayed. The work was just moving so far beyond me there was less and less way of BSing it.

So I was removed from ninth grade altogether. But considered to be still bored, so still in need of advancement. The new idea, despite the fact that I was now being so strange and so unable to do what was expected of me that a neurologist and neuropsychologist had been called in to evaluate me (and had immediately edged towards descriptions of me as isolated and not showing emotion and etc, as well as possibly having seizures), was to send me to college. This is the seventh part of the self-fulfilling prophecy.

I went to college for a year. When I could get away with choosing classes, I chose art and music classes, which were the easiest for me to get through. I also took various required classes. I did not pass all my classes. By January, I was suicidal from the pressure to perform up to a standard no child should be expected to perform to at that age, let alone one who could comprehend less than most people. I was still bullied heavily. Etc. And I finally crashed and burned so hard that once I got home I did attempt suicide. And was finally diagnosed with autism.

If I had not had that high IQ score (which itself was the result of expectations, not just of my test performance), with the exact same set of abilities I had, I'd have been diagnosed earlier, I'd have never been passed for gifted-eccentric (I say "been passed" because it was other people passing me, not me doing the bulk of the passing), and I'd never have gotten that far in school. My extreme academic placements were the result of a combination of my failures as a student, and other people's explanation of those failures based on my IQ score. If I'd had those same failures for those same reasons minus the IQ score, the advanced academics would never have happened.

Therefore, my IQ was a predictor of my academic success, certainly. But it was because the IQ score itself was what gave me all that advancement while what I was really doing the whole time was not understanding things that even people with quite low IQ scores understand from a young age. It was not caused by anything innate in me, it was caused by the overlays that other people put over what they perceive, their stereotypes of why a "high IQ" child does certain things, and their ability to totally ignore the reality of what was in front of them when presented with a high IQ score to explain it for them. This is known as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

By the way, I was retested at 15 and 22. At 15, my score was not in the gifted range, but was high normal. At 22, my score was a score that in some situations is considered low-average and in other situations is considered borderline. No IQ test I have ever taken has replicated my score as gifted, because while I would score in the gifted range, potentially, in certain narrow areas, extreme deficits in other areas would drag the score down.

There are other self-fulfilling prophecies by IQ though. I am sure you are aware of the stuff about teachers being told that children who scored average or even below-average, were actually gifted, and the children performing up to the teachers' expectations of them. And I know many, many, many people who experienced what'd be called "environmental retardation" (that's the term one woman I know used), because as soon as they could not pass an IQ test up to a certain level, they were not presented with any academic material and therefore had no chance to learn it. Once they were presented with it, some of them ended up with extremely high IQ scores all of a sudden.

But basically, yeah. My astounding levels of "academic success" owed a lot to people's expectations of me, rather than my actual performance (which in most kids would've translated to lower grades and being held back, and in my case were put off as careless mistakes or gifted kids acting bored).

It can be, yes. However, IQ tests are, even controlling for expectation effects (like Robert Merton's concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy), competent predictive instruments. For instance, in the U.S., there is a high correlation between IQ and aptitude tests, like the SAT and ACT. No test is 100% valid (measuring what it is intended to measure).

Your own life history is interesting. It points out problems with both the testing process and with the tracking system. Psychological testing is obviously not simply a matter of filling out a questionaire (which is a potential problem with all the self-diagnosing which takes place on the Internet). Even the most seemingly obvious score needs to be interpreted and, hopefully, placed into context. The more rounded the information of the test interpreter on the client, the fewer blatant errors will probably enter into the analysis.

In terms of tracking: Well, it may be a necessary evil. Short of homeschooling or having very tiny classrooms, it is the only educational alternative (right now) to discouraging both very bright students (who will get bored) and more mediocre students (who will get frustrated). Both types of students will be more likely to drop out before graduating.



Sure. I discuss it in my Social Problems classes.

I wonder about the connection between IQ and academic success too. Are there decent studies about this connection? Everybody is talking about this, including the psychologist I saw, but when it comes to me, the people try and fail to find an answer as to why I'm not a top student, but instead in the lowest third of the year in terms of academic achievements. I was always told by people that the only possibility left why I fail in academics must be that I fail on purpose.

Is there a good study of the academic success of autistic people maybe?

Regarding bored/frustrated, that actually left me unaware of the meaning of the word bored for a long time.

Because people used the word "bored" whenever I was shutting down, burning out, frustrated as hell, and totally uncomprehending of just about anything including the material I was supposed to do. (I don't know what on earth of my typing is getting screwed up lately. I just wrote "the material I was trying to get into" instead of "the material I was supposed to do", and I keep doing that more and more these days.)

So I learned to connect use of that word to those states, rather than to boredom.

There have also been studies on correlations between different IQ ranges and years of education completed and other areas. Not sure about with autistics. However, I can see what I can find if you like.

It is important to keep in mind, however, that these predictions apply only to categories, not to individuals. It would be a misuse of statistical measurement to say, for instance, "Well, my IQ is only so and so. Therefore, I should not try to reach a certain level of education or receive a particular degree."

One anecdotal note of possible encouragement: I was a very low-functioning aspie (very low-functioning) as a child. I got a Ph.D.

Years of education completed only? Or do they say what's being done in those years?

Because (if I start counting at first grade) I've only completed 10 years of actual education, 12 if you count a year and a half of special ed (not learning anything new at all) and a half a year, before that, of sitting in a barn on too many psych drugs to stay awake and then part of the way through that, someone getting the idea of blasting books on tape into my ears to try to keep me awake (even that didn't fully work).

But the actual sequence was:

6 years old: 1
7 years old: 3
8 years old: 4
9 years old: 4
10 years old: 5
11 years old: 6
12 years old: partly-7, partly-individualized-program
13 years old: partly-9, partly mishmash homeschooled stuff
14 years old: a year at liberal arts college (mostly took art)
15 years old: uh... hmm. At home, nothing. At psych wards, usually nothing, sometimes having me do something just to keep me busy.
16 years old: half that barn, half special ed, and of course some psych ward keep-her-busy stuff
17 years old: special ed and also a sign language class, more psych ward keep-her-busy stuff
18 years old: a year at community college (mostly took math)

(I don't count the age of 15 as a year of formal schooling because I got none that year.) And I have barely retained a thing out of any of those, and that goes double for ages 12-14 when I was being accelerated beyond belief. Most of what I learned in school was sociology and things like that, but that's a class I never took.

So I got little to no retainable education at school, I got that lots of other places though.

I don't know. The data I usually look at is demographic. It did not break it down that specifically.



Again, I can't emphasize enough that statistical data does not refer to individuals, and cannot be used to make individual predictions. It only refers to categories.

For instance, American automobile insurance companies know that males under 25 have a high rate of accidents. Therefore, all things being equal, they charge them more insurance than females under 25 or people over 25. Does that mean that "Joe," an 18-year-old male, is more likely to have an auto accident than "Susan," an 18-year-old female? No. Statistics cannot be used that way.

The easy answer is always used, just like 45 years ago. And it so neatly blames the child.

I did have acadermic success, nothing else. I finally got expelled because they were afraid I would make it through. I am glad some are allowed to get the doctor title. I had alot of persons determined to stop me like a boat wake before I was stopped. Almost doctor, back for a BS, then AAS, finally forced to get a GED. I usually admit to Associate only. I plan to get an online degree now. What I really want is a job in a warehouse or filing, but keep losing them. Pdoc says capable of working, but I don't know now to keep the jobs and still taking the blame. I make coworkiers uncomfortable. Poor things

Group Theory topic

This thread got spun off on a tangen-- but an interesting one

I have always maintained that Asperger's Syndrome is on the Autism Spectrum with other classifications. Downs is also a Syndrome, and lives on a Spectrum of its own.

As for the IQ score as an indication or measure of academic success: It may measure how well someone does with classroom work but when application comes into the scenario there is no prediction of success. I scored very high in Nursing Theory in a classroom setting and even won a scholarship because of my grades. I was a theory tutor in nursing courses and helped many students who had trouble with theory courses but who did well in the practical hands-on portion. However, there was no tutoring for me in the practice in which I did very poorly. I failed two out of three of my nursing practice sections and was asked to leave the programme, and not to return. It took me a long time to come to terms with this failure. I have problems with practising what I have learned. It has something to do with CAPD and Dyspraxia. It is a shortcoming I have had to learn to accept. This was ten years ago.

Could I try something else? I have tried so many programmes that I have run out of money. I have been told I cannot take any more training. (I am thinking--I have another idea in mind.) Now all I want is any job because I have a family to support. Employment insurance only goes so far.