Is Asperger's only an umbrella diagnosis?

Post Reply New Topic

DISCLAIMER: Some posters have PMed me saying they felt criticized by this thread. I don't mean criticism of anyone, but inquiry about AS. I mean only what I say in this thread. I don't mean something else. I'm not hinting. I don't hint. I can't hint, I'm socially inept. Please don't read between the lines what is not there. This is NOT a common, silly thread of "members have been nasty to me". Greentea doesn't post that kind of silly stuff, most people know that here. I'm talking about what I'm talking about in this thread, and nothing else, and the topic is whether AS is an umbrella diagnosis or not.

Something's been bothering me lately. I see huge differences among us on these forums. Sometimes those differences are so big that you can put 2 Aspies together and they'll have no (or almost no) common Aspie traits.

(A note: those who know me on WP, know that I base myself on my extensive and intensive reading here, big amount of strategic polls, PMs and huge amount of threads I start on strategic questions, plus my reduced acquaintance with some Aspies in real life - all this for the last 2 years plus.)

Examples:

- I've been rejected by some Aspies on here because of my blatant lack of social cleverness, a cleverness which they exhibit in spades. These people I talk about are very clever about who they associate with, what image they give of themselves to whom, who they should suck up to, and all the things I lack and for which I'm always fired, rejected and ultimately, belong to this community on WP. THIS IS JUST AN EXAMPLE OF ASPIES THAT SURPRISE ME AS HAVING EXCELLENT THEORY OF MIND, NOT AN ACCUSATION OF ANYONE. THE EXAMPLE MEANS THAT IN ORDER TO BE ABLE TO MANIPULATE SOCIALLY, YOU NEED EXCELLENT THEORY OF MIND, AND I ALWAYS THOUGHT 100% OF ASPIES HAD ZERO THEORY OF MIND LIKE ME

- Some Aspies here find it a bit hard to understand other Aspies' social ineptness. They're, however, living in a personal hell of sensory issues. Which I can't understand well, because my sensory issues never went beyond a momentary discomfort resulting in a cranky mood.

- There's an ongoing debate about whether AS is a disorder, a disability or a difference - which I've realized recently can't be debated at all. Because some Aspies here have symptoms of a disorder that limits their functioning regardless of what people may think of them. And other Aspies, like me, have no problems with their AS except for the negative reactions we get from people, because we're just different. AS affects people in very different ways, too different to still call it all AS. Some Aspies are disordered as per their quality of life regardless NT discrimination, others aren't disordered at all, just discriminated upon.

So, my conclusions are:

1. I'm starting to think that the differences between us are so huge that they may warrant different diagnoses. Sure, it'll probably be in the DSM -XXXIV, but still. A spectrum can only be stretched to a certain limit before it breaks, I think.
2. I'm starting to feel more self-conscious on WP, because till now I was blind to the fact that some of the Aspies here are judging me from their social "almost-NT" point of view / abilities, same as it always happens to me with NTs ("You're blunt/negative/pessimistic/too honest/not political enough/etc.") and rejecting me because I say the king is nude. I've been whitelied silly by some Aspies. I've been left out of social things here because I was too politically clueless to remain included and was shoved out by the socially brilliant ones who wanted me out. I used to feel very free to mention my social ineptness here before I realized all this. Not so much anymore. If the term Aspie includes brilliantly socially manipulative people, then you're stretching the spectrum too wide.
3. I'm starting to think that I should be a lot more general in my opinions of Aspies as Aspies, because the experience of being an Aspie is so incredibly different from one Aspie to the other on here.

I don't think you could divide Asperger's into clear subgroups. Any dividing line you choose, there'll be people smack on that line, and people very different from each other on the same side of it.

What we have are a collection of traits that you can have strongly or weakly, and all of them together make up Asperger's. That makes AS people very diverse, because they'll have those traits at varying levels.

It probably has a lot to do with the almost certain idea that AS is not just one gene, but a lot of them working together and regulating each other and being expressed differently. You get enough of them, and enough copies, and expressed strongly enough, and in just the right combination, and you've got autism. Only a few, and you're a quirky NT.

Autism isn't the only thing that works like that. Many mental and physical illnesses, as well as personality traits and physical and mental attributes, are scattered all around your DNA. We're learning increasingly that most things don't have "a gene"; they have many genes, and those many genes interact with each other and with the genes for lots of other things, and they mean more than one thing, etc... After all, you don't have genes coding for "height" or "social skills" or something easy like that. They code for proteins. Proteins do more than one thing, and any given thing probably uses many proteins. It's complicated like that.

It is like the rainbow. You can divide it into primary colors: red, green, blue. And then subdivide to various shades: orange, yellow, indigo, violet. And then further divide the 7 colors into even more shades of those colors.

If you want to get technical, each color has a different frequency on the EM spectrum. How many different frequencies (different colors) of visible light are there? Planck's constant is very small (10E-34 magnitude) so it'd be a number so large there isn't even a name for it.

There's a reason why it is called autism spectrum disorder. We've got the Rainman and Bill Gates, and everyone else in between.

Categorizing and subdividing is futile.

Perhaps a 2 digit (maybe more) co-ordinate system. Say one digit for hyper-focus and one for social interaction like AS(3,7). And of course one for body language. And one for "Aspie eyes". And one for "being weird" .

I think there is a problem that diagnosis (including self-diagnosis) compares the individual with a specific stereotype. I had read about Asperger people but never recognised myself in them because they were "really weird". It wasn't until I saw the David Jordan documentary that I saw an Aspie like me http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAfWfsop1e0

Jordan is sooo cute, I'd seen the video before. I wish I could understand more of what they talk about, but they have a very strange pronunciation in English. Is that Australian?

Callista, as usual I find myself agreeing with you. I was reminded that a friend and I both had the same illness (caused by a virus) some time ago. It's a virus that affects both the eyes and the tyrod gland. She had practically nothing in the eyes but went through hell with her tyrod. I had practically nothing in my tyrod, but I've undergone two eye operations already, and have another one or two or three to undergo. We were little help to each other, therefore.

Maybe I should start asking Aspies, before I assume so much about them, what their main affected areas are and whether they are affected at all in the Theory of Mind area. Before I make a fool of myself with them.

I still think that the areas of affectation are so disparage that sub-categories would be justified, and I'm not sure that you'd get very disparage areas of affectation within the same sub-category.

You make a valid point, though it's the kind of problem for which there may be no solution. Biological entities are notorious for not fitting neatly into pigeon-holes. Unfortunately humans seem doomed to being reductionist and to force everything into their logical compartments - it seems to be the only way the human brain can make much sense of the almost infinite complexity of the universe. A great deal is lost that way. Perhaps all we can do is to try to remain aware of the limitations of these man-made constructions and reference-grids, to try to make the best use of them without falling into the trap of thinking that (for example) an Aspie's personality is predictable simply from that binary diagnosis. Unfortunately many people out there are in a hurry and just don't keep such considerations in mind.

If you want something a little less simplistic than the yea-or-nay AS diagnosis, the Aspie-quiz gives an interesting list of different aspects of the condition, each one with its own score. So for example, if my wife had a DX for Aspergers Syndrome she would probably come out as neurotypical, but on the Aspie-quiz she has a couple of very strong Aspie traits. She has below-average "neurotypical talent" and "neurotypical perception," with above-average "Aspie activity." Even that information doesn't reveal much about the real person, at least not to me, as I can never remember what the individual categories mean. So to understand her better, I have to look at her responses to the individual questions, e.g. for "Neurotypical Talent:"

She finds verbal instructions confusing
She gets stuck on details and misses the overall picture
She finds it hard to shift attention from one thing to another
She has difficulty summarising things
She needs to do things herself in order to remember them
She finds it very hard to learn things she has no particular interest in
She finds it hard to take notes in lectures

But she's reasonably good at returning to a task after an interruption, and can follow several different people's conversations at the same time.

See what I mean? It's only when I look at the individual aptitudes that I get any kind of a handle on the actual person. Unlike the diagnosis or any concoction of sub-categories, the individual traits are "real," and would still exist even if AS itself were shown to be a meaningless piece of fashionable psycho-babble.

I think the autism spectrum is very broad and AS is only more specific in tha tit requires speech and normal intelligence. So really AS is very broad, too. I don't really mind this though.

I don't really know what to say. To call something an "umbrella diagnosis" you must first be talking about people who are diagnosed. Since a lot of people here are not diagnosed, that makes WP a difficult place to use as evidence that AS is an umbrella diagnosis.

The reason I'm having an issue with you lately is that you claim that people dislike you because you "say the king is nude" while it seems that you expect to be able to do so, but to censor what other people say. Then you claim that other people "have bad attitudes" but won't provide any actual reasons for that. (So you won't provide evidence on what you say). Just that you're older than me, so you know. I've become kinda afraid to talk to you, Greentea, because your standard of it being ok to say that the king is nude applies only to yourself. If I try to say something you don't like, you tell me to drop it, so it's impossible to provide that evidence to you without going into topics you'll simply claim you know more about than me because you're older. Or that you've made up your mind about and won't benefit from re-examining, whether you're right or not. I'm discovering that whenever I try to say something to you, I end up feeling attacked. I attempted to call that to your attention, but you didn't want to hear it.
The only people who like double standards are the ones who benefit from them.

The disability vs. difference thing may vary somewhat with age at diagnosis. Someone who hasn't gone their whole life wondering what is wrong with them may be better equipped to use the positives. Someone who has finally discovered AS as an adult because they've been disabled is of course going to view it more as a disability.

Maggiedoll, for the fifth time, please stop it. And send any further messages to me only through the moderators. You've taken up issue with almost everyone on here already.

Greentea,

While reading your message it occurs to me that perhaps not only body and mind play into the Aspie condition, but also environment and our background with our parents and social groups at a younger age. One who has grown up in a loving family environment would have quite a different outlook and functioning ability than someone abused and bullied. While I agree with you on the diversity of Aspies, I think environment plays a large role in how we see ourselves and others and our reactions to others and situations. For me, I accept that I'm different than many NT's and also from other Aspies, but I think we should share in the joy of the diversity and not be so hard on each other for our viewpoints. I am sad that you feel picked on and I will try never to do that to anyone here. I am just glad to know I'm not alone and can express myself in this forum.

Oh, definitely. Environment has an effect on functioning level even for NTs, so you can guess that it'll be even more pronounced an effect for a sensitive autistic.

Institutionalized kids do the worst of all, in almost all cases (barring those for whom home was worse).

I think it is an umbrella diagnosis until the experts have a better understanding. That's the problem IMO. Nobody really knows what autism/AS, etc. really means on an individual bases. They have their statistics that differentiate us from NT's but statistics don't represent individuals very well in such a diverse population. Not every symptom is going to apply to every person. There seem to be a lot of different "flavors" with only a partial overlap. I get this impression from being on WP.

The question is when a table stops being a table and starts being something different from a table - as they say in Social Psychology. A table is a flat horizontal surface with 4 legs, then you have tables that have more or less legs, tables without legs, drawing tables whose flat surface is not horizontal, etc. etc. etc. There are tables that, put one next to the other, hardly have any resemblence. And yet, both are still called tables. But a point comes when the differentiation is too big to still call a certain object a table. That's when a new category is created. There is never consensus. Often someone will call something a table and another will call it a trolley or whatever. I wouldn't call someone with an excellent Theory of Mind an Aspie. What with the social ineptitude being the main trait for AS dx.

BTW Greentea,

I hope I'm not on your bad list. I did say once or twice that I thought you were seeing things too cynically one or two issues. I just noticed that you don't respond much to people like me who disagree with you once in a while. I like to have a lively debate but I feel a little intimidated by you. I've been accused of being intimidating to some other members on here too (I used to get too emotionally indulgent but I've been trying to control it now) so I'm not trying to judge you

Truth be told I feel like I'm much less socially included than you are here. I tend to stay on the sidelines and only post when something really interests me but then I often feel like I get ignored.