MalchikBrodyaga wrote:
Some posters on this forum said that Kanner didn't want his condition to have a spectrum but, instead, he wanted it to cover just the most low functioning cases (as evident from him rejecting 90% people from his clinic). Personally, I am still rather skeptical: I mean Kanner DID mention that they have "high intellectual potential". But, regardless of whether that was actually Kanner's idea or not, I think the idea of having a separate diagnosis for the most severe cases would be a good idea (and then we can discuss whether to name it after Kanner or after someone else). I mean, if the most high functioning cases are being separated away into Asperger Syndrome, it would only be "symmetric" for low functining cases to be separated as well. And then of course we can separate out middle functining ones too.
Now you might ask: isn't it the same thing as breaking autism into levels of severity, the way it is currently done in DSM 5? No, not quite. If you break autism into levels of severity, what you are implying is that the most important thing is that they all lack social skills; and the fact that some of them happened to be profoundly ret*d and other ones happened to have high functioning is just a side issue. But that attitude is quite misleading. I think if you are talking about profoundly autistic person who can't even take care of themselves, saying their main problem is social skills is ridiculous. So yeah, instead of breaking autism into levels of severity I would just name them all differently.
Some of you were saying that Kanner not admitting 90% of autistics into his clinic somehow slowed down autism awarenness. But that doesn't have to be the case. So Kanner decided to "specialize" in some narrow group of autistics. Fine. Someone else would specialize in some other group. He isn't stopping them. Saying that he did is akin to saying that some doctor that studies cancer is at fault for the fact that people didn't find more effective ways to treat flu.
you're not making any sense.
Aspergers is already dissolved as a separate label, and the hard core low functioning autistics already have their own classification. And actually -so do HFAs and so do folks formerly labeled with aspergers.
The way they do it now is to divide the spectrum into three grades. Level I (needing minimal support), level II (needing moderate support), and level III (needing significant support).
The level III work out to being basically the same folks who would have been accepted by Kanner as truly autisitic (classic autism, or Kanner type autism- not official labels- but unofficial labels that mean the same thing as level one).
So your classic Kanner types do have their own seperate label now.
Folks like me (I apparently was one of the last Americans to be officially anointed as having aspergers) are now called "Level one autistic without speech delay" ( ie you are "high functioning now, and you learned to speak at the normal time babies learn to speak"). Just a long winded way to say the same thing as "aspergers". Lol!
If you're high functioning, but were delayed in learning speech as a child, you are "level one
with a speech delay". Basically the same thing as what they used label "high funcitioning autistic" (you're like an aspie now, but were different from an aspie when you were a toddler).
Actually this modern "level" system is a pretty good way to slice it(now that I think about it). And it covers the very stuff you're concerned about in pretty good systematic way (as imperfectly well as any system of labels can, even if its a bit wordy a system).
16 Jul 2018, 4:59 pm
