Aspergers referred to as a disease?

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Hi.

I was wondering why when online in say forums or anything similar people (most likely NT's I'm guessing) always refer Aspergers as a disease and not a disorder/ neurological disorder?

Thanks.

Because they don't know the difference. It's not because they are NT, they are simply ignorant.

I think that being on the Asperger's-Autism Spectrum is both a disability and a difference. There are some advantages to being 'on the spectrum,' but there definitely are some issues, too.

similar topic: http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt236886.html

Well, there are more people that aren't diagnosed and less people that are. Therefore the majority have the right to make what they want of anything.

Of course, when an NT has to admit to something embarrassing and not want to be judged for it, they get closer to understanding how people diagnosed might feel.. that's saying they want to take responsibility for themselves.

I have family members who still say things like that.

To me the distinction seems clear - a disease is something that will eventually kill you, if you don't get it treated.

Nobody dies from High Functioning Autism and there is no treatment.

I'm not diseased, I'm different. Being different is not a bad thing.

According to DSM Aspergers is a disease....defined as a disorder of structure or function in a human, especially one that produces specific symptoms or that affects a specific location and is not simply a direct result of physical injury

You may want to take this up with the psychiatric community rather than getting flustered with non-PC NTs....

It is not a disease, it is an impairment/disability.

That's subjective, at the moment disease and disorder are interchangeable terms in the psychiatric domain.

well i thing off Autism as a diseas beacuse dises ruins many lifes and Autism does that to.

In humans, "disease" is often used more broadly to refer to any condition that causes pain, dysfunction, distress, social problems, or death to the person afflicted,

It isn't so much a disease as a mutation, but mutations are often diseases. But then - albinism is a mutation, and fish growing lungs was a series of mutations.
The brain doesn't develop in exactly the right way and we get stuck with the effects of it.

It's considered a disease because it reduces the ease with which one so afflicted may live. A disease isn't an illness, though - autism isn't mental illness, it's a disorder.

It all boils down to English terminology. Different words mean different things to the scientific community than they do to the public.



But yeah, NTs often think that it's an illness in the same way that depression is. Illnesses can be cured/treated, though, and victims want to be cured. Aspies can't be cured and don't want to be cured (on average).

Yes, but it has connotations that aren't correct for autism.

A "disease" is thought of as something that throws the body off-balance, something that is either temporary and can be cured, or something that damages someone who is healthy and normal to begin with.

Autism, on the other hand, is a disability that starts from the fetal period. Autistic people have atypical development. There's nothing to damage because they were different to begin with. So to say "a healthy autistic person" is not an oxymoron; it just means "an autistic person without any illness", just like you might say "a healthy Down syndrome child" or "a healthy student with dyslexia". Autism itself is developmental.

I don't like the connotations of calling autism a "disease", because it implies that I ought not to be that way, that there is a neurotypical "true self" somewhere that I'm trying to get back to, the way I'd try to get back to a healthy self if I had the flu.

To explain this to a neurotypical, you might say something like, "Hey, autism isn't a disease; we're not sick. We're different, we have a disability, but we're not sick." Just like a short person is not a sick tall person, an autistic person is not a sick neurotypical.

I'm just sort of bullshitting here, but I think another way to distinguish ASD from what we typically consider diseases is that a disease is something separable from its host, while it's impossible to think of an autistic person without their autism. Autism does not totally define one's personality, but it certainly helps to shape it. A disease like cancer, on the other hand, is something that happens to a person, and is separable from that person. I can think of Lou Gehrig apart from the disease which bears his namesake, but I can't imagine what it would be like to be me without my autism.

It's unfathomable what a "cure" would mean to an adult autistic person. I can see how a cure, were one possible, would be desirable in an infant or a toddler, because this s**t sucks most of the time. But I can't imagine being me but not being autistic.

If we go with the Civil Rights model, which I am in favor of, autism is secondarily a disability and is first and foremost a difference.