Should Asperger's be renamed to High Functioning Autism?

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It isn't High Functional Autism it is Aspergers silly sods. I am not a smarter version of Rain Man.

That would be only the case for NTs but we are not NTs. Aspies don't fanny around with words.

It would save a lot of explanation to put it all under the umbrella of autism.

ASD would be fine with me, too.
The degree of impairment could be clarified.

What about Rett's syndrome

I am an aspie and I enjoy playing around with numbers and letters and words but I do agree with nannarob that having it all under autism would help because of all the confusion.

The history of the term 'dementia praecox' shows a commonly accepted psychiatric category becoming obsolete.

In the first half of the 20th century the term 'dementia praecox' was in common psychiatric use. "In February 1919 the Harvard neuropathologist Elmer Ernst Southard (1876-1920) presented a paper in which he outlined his reasons for dropping the term 'dementia praecox' in favour of a competing diagnostic concept and term 'schizophrenia'. Southard's criticisms reflected the opinion of many US psychiatrists at the time, leading to the replacement of [...] dementia praecox by [...] schizophrenia in US psychiatry by the mid-1920s."

http://hpy.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abst ... /483?rss=1

However according to this wikipedia article ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dementia_praecox ),
the term dementia praecox was used interchangeably with schizophrenia until 1952 when it disappeared from official psychiatry with the publication of the first edition of the DSM-I, being replaced by 'schizophrenic reaction'.

.......and schizophrenia was then defined differently in the States and Europe for many years.... making research impossible....

Keep in mind that abnormal psych textbooks aren't always too up-to-date, to put it mildly. I've seen relatively recent ones that still used Bettelheim's case studies.



Actually one of the interesting things if you really do read Kanner and Asperger, is the presence of speech delays in some of Asperger's patients and the lack thereof in some of Kanner's patients (one of whom is the exact modern stereotype of Asperger's). There was a fair bit of overlap in what the two of them described, it was not clear-cut the way some recent writings make it sound.

As far as the HF and LF terms, that's accurate as far as how they're used, except that they often are used for IQ instead of overall functioning abilities, despite the fact that overall functioning abilities are not too well-determined by IQ, especially once you get over 70 (and not at all well-determined by IQ if you're using the least biased tests, which leave only an estimated 5% of autistic people "low functioning").

Having all autism under the same umberella would not be scientfically correct.

High Functional Autism is different then Aspergers. I could picture what Rain Man would be like if he was Higher functional, more NT like with an exceptional ability with Mathmatics but he would probably not have a more logical view of the world.

From what I've heard (from a researcher I trust more than most to not be missing important things), there's scientifically a difference between AS and autism, but not "AS and HFA" (or even "HFA and LFA" the way this person does the measuring).

And that difference apparently has to do with relative patterns of strengths and weaknesses on various parts of standardized tests.

I don't have her paper on the topic with me, because I'm not at home and I keep all my stuff like that on my desktop computer. But they did a study that basically showed that if you took all autistic people (including AS) averaged together as a group, then the strengths of each one canceled each other out and you were left with only weaknesses in common. Whereas if you separated them, then you could see two distinct and obvious patterns of strengths. (Here is the abstract.)

Of course, I think that if you select a population out of autistic people for their speech-related strengths from an early age (having both at least a typical rate of speech development, and also a typical kind of speech development), then of course they're going to be the ones who end up with the relative strengths in similar areas on standardized tests later on.

(I suspect that if you selected for some other strength from an early age you'd find something similar overall (with of course individual exceptions, but we're only talking about trends anyway).)

Anyway, one of the points she has made based on that strength-based argument, is that people normally designated as "LFA" have the same strengths on that series of tests as people normally designated as "HFA". And often even to the same degree. (In part because people are designated as "LFA" mostly based on tests that are biased towards verbal skills. If you take the bias out, only a tiny number of people can be categorized in that manner as "LFA", the number I'm remembering offhand is 5% of the autistic population, but I could be remembering wrong so look it up in The Level and Nature of Autistic Intelligence if you don't want to trust my memory for numerals.)

So based on that set of cognitive tests, and based particularly on patterns of strength, there apparently isn't good evidence for the existence of "LFA" and "HFA" the way they're currently used, but there is evidence for a discrepancy between people with two separate patterns of strengths on those tests. (Who are normally then divided up as "AS" and "autism".)

My own preference is to use autism for both, since that's the actual word Asperger used, and since in terms of everyday interactions it's very difficult to tell the difference between AS and autism. (Including, I know people with AS diagnoses who look what most people consider "LFA".) Also because autistic people of all types are disabled (i.e. shut out from participation in society in certain ways, I'm using "disabled" to mean "the intersection of a particular body/brain type with a society that doesn't adequately enable/plan for the inclusion of such people") in similar ways, and I do far more work in terms of trying to stop that from happening, than I do in terms of detailed cognitive research.

And then it could be, as others suggested, "autism type I" and "autism type II", although I don't like that because it still privileges early verbal development over all other factors in differentiating between different autistic people. I would far rather just name which specific factor is being talked about at any given time.

I'm thoroughly against functioning level labels unless they are used to denote functioning in one particular area at one particular point in time. Otherwise they are meaningless. (Says the person who fits an equal number of stereotypes of HFA and LFA, and thus finds that if people use one or the other on her, they are essentially dividing her into pieces.) If applied to one particular area, it would be even more useful to show something like, a range of minimum to maximum functioning in that area for that person for whatever chunk of time is being discussed, then the level or range the person usually functions in, or the level of everyday variability, or something. (I'm someone whose abilities are always shifting around all the time, so I know that single levels aren't very telling in predicting what I can and can't do.)

Let's change the name to High functioning pseudo autism? After all, they are different by a small margin.

Raymond Babbitt from the film Rain Main wasn't an Aspie or a High Functioning Autie. He was a High Functioning Savant. The character was supposed to have Autistic Savant Syndrome, which is identified in the movie (the directer of the institution tells Charlie in the hallway outside of Raymond's room). Hoffman based his characterizations off of actual savants.

Allthough the difference between high-functioning autism and Asperger's syndrome is small, it's not the same disorder--and thus it shouldn't be merged into a single diagnosis.

Actually, it seems to be the relative difficulties that are often in common between the two, with the relative strengths being the main things that differentiate them. So if it were entirely in terms of "disorder" (which tends to mean difficulty), they'd be very similar or the same in most areas.

I don't think I explained myself very well in an earlier post. I don't simply think it should all be called autism, but as Nannarob said, it could all come under the umbrella of autism, so maybe the word autism or a word like that could the main name and another name attached for each kind. Not that I really care what its called because it won't make mine go away whatever I know it as.

Disorder is not synonymous with disease. Allthough there are many common difficulties, there are also some differences (eg. dyspraxia).