The term "Aspie" should live on :)
I support getting rid of the term "Asperger's" in the DSM, but I also like referring to ourselves as "Aspies", so I for one will keep using the term even after the change.
It can one of those things that will not strictly make sense anymore, since the term "Asperger's" will no longer exist, but it can be explained by saying it originated from an old term for autism.
Who's with me?
OK I'll run with that, though there's still the problem of Aspies who don't like the term anyway.
Me, I don't mind it, and I refuse to be reconstructed by DSM-V. I doubt that any of my friends even know what DSM is......actually I was diagnosed using ICD10, though I suppose as usual, whatever the Yanks do, apart from being a republic, the English will do soon afterwards, so I'll have to watch out for ICD11 so I can ignore it.
There's an outside chance that I could be forced out of my complacency if my employers try to deem my DX to be obselete, but I'm not worried about that. It would be like a spouse thinking that I could suddenly cope with big parties. Don't know if the benefits people would be able to use it as an excuse to refuse payment, but as I don't get a bean out of them anyway, it's hardly going to matter.
I think "Aspie" will remain a commonly-used term for many decades to come. Many English people were still calling street lights "gas lamps" in the 1950s, though practically every lamp in sight had been electric since the 19th century.
I still call them 'sun cages'
I will probably go on using the term aspie, as I get into habits, and it's convenient.
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I doubt, because the reality is that, outside the circle of diagnosed people and a few more, almost nobody knows about "Aspies" or "Asperger's Syndrome".
Then, the name Aspie will not remain in popular language, by the simple fact that it never reaaly entered in popular language.
But if it was the opposite (Autism merged with a "great Asperger's Syndrome", instead of AS merged with a "great Autism"), yes, the words "Autism" and "Autistic" will survive many decads.
I doubt, because the reality is that, outside the circle of diagnosed people and a few more, almost nobody knows about "Aspies" or "Asperger's Syndrome".
Then, the name Aspie will not remain in popular language, by the simple fact that it never reaaly entered in popular language.
Hmm.....I agree that the size of the population that knows the term "Aspie" isn't anything like as large as the population that knows the term "street lights," but I don't see why a smaller population would make for a quicker percentage reduction of the term's usage. And as this population contains a lot of Aspies, one might expect more reluctance to change than in the general population. The general popuation will no longer be officially exposed to the term that they never really took up in the first place, and they'll mostly continue to use the vernacular terms "nerds," "ret*ds," "losers" and "weirdos," with the occasional new pejorative label as they get dreamed up, but with no input from clinical psychology or neurology.
You're right that "Aspie" has never been in popular parlance, and of course I didn't say it was. By "commonly-used" I meant by us.
Sure. Why not?
Aspie seems to be a nice fit to a certain sub-group of people on the spectrum. It helps differentiate communicative autism with non-verbal. It is such a stereotype that autistics are slobbery freaks rocking away in a corner and "aspie" seems a convenient way of describing a different experience.
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You guys do realize that the DSM really only applies to the US, right? Other nations use it as a guideline, but like how there were nations recognizing Asperger's before the US officially recognizing it in 1996 (I could be off a year or two), there were already several countries recognizing it., I suspect it will be continued to be recognized in other countries long afterward.
I am very concerned that, like the US's resistance to accepting Asperger's as an official dx, that this removal is in part political and not purely diagnostic. I bet it hinges on how diagnosticians just find it too hard to recognize the distinctions so they want a broader, more compassing, "catch-all" dx. I actually had been concerned that this would happen eventually--the way Asperger;s is dx'd in this country seems to be blurring the lines between AS and HFA anyhow. But for those of us who have dx of AS because of the distinctions that set us apart from even a generous definition of HFA, it is a genuine disservice. It seems like a lot of what's unique to AS and how we have different challenges will get glossed over or dismissed. And having lived quite a while without a dx, and knowing what it's like to have your struggles dismissed or glossed over, that really touches a nerve with me.
I keep thinking of the categories of autism that someone posted from one of Temple Grandin's books. She's HFA, so she is a respectable voice for HFA. but as someone with AS, I didn't fit any of those categories. My deficits are social, primarily, but I don't have the learning disabilities people with HFA have (according to Grandin's definition). I have seen how, for example, people with a dx of AS or HFA are told they don't feel empathy, and they accept that and try to apply it to them, even though it's not true and their own experience proves it's not true. How is that going to be when you have people with AS dx'd with HFA and are told they must also have some sort of learning disability? Are they just going to assume they do, even if there's no real evidence they have one?
What a crock.
Thanks, APA, you jackholes. After years of people going "Oh, what's Asperger's?" now I'm going to be getting, "I heard that's not a real dx anymore."
I suspect that ICD will be even more quicker than DSM in abandoning the label "Asperger's".
Nothe that, even today, the ICD-10 description of AS is:
A disorder of uncertain nosological validity, characterized by the same kind
of qualitative abnormalities of reciprocal social interaction that typify
autism, together with a restricted, stereotyped, repetitive repertoire of
interests and activities. The disorder differs from autism primarily in that
there is no general delay or retardation in language or in cognitive
development. Most individuals are of normal general intelligence but it is
common for them to be markedly clumsy; the condition occurs
predominantly in boys (in a ratio of about eight boys to one girl). It seems
highly likely that at least some cases represent mild varieties of autism, but
it is uncertain whether or not that is so for all.
This post illustrates more than anything else the problems with the category of Asperger's existing, rather than being an argument for it existing.
First off, Temple Grandin's categories don't fit most autistic people because Temple Grandin has little to no understanding of other autistic people and bases her categories on an incredibly small number of people, not because the people who don't fit her categories are some other kind of autistic person.
And... that's the problem, really. When people see the categories (usually AS and autism, although they'll call it "AS and HFA" and divide autism in two in ways it shouldn't be divided either), then they start attributing all differences between different autistic people to each of them being in a different one of the official categories. But very few differences between autistic people have anything to do with the official categories at all. And that is why the categories need to be scrapped, at least until such time as they can be reworked in a way that actually makes sense.
Here's the biggest problem with the categories: They separate people who are similar to each other, and they lump together people who are quite different from each other. You say you "don't have the learning disabilities people with HFA have," but there are plenty of people classed as Asperger's who do have those learning disabilities, and there are plenty of people classed as autistic who do not have those learning disabilities. Just about any difference you can come up with (except for one or two, and even those can be debatable at times) has nothing to do with the actual way that AS is used diagnostically.
Putting all autistic people together is not saying that all autistic people are the same. It's saying that the current categories of autistic people don't really explain how autistic people differ or how we are similar. The category of Asperger's was thought up by Lorna Wing around 1979 or 1980. She did it in order to highlight certain autistic people who (at that point in time -- certainly not in certain periods before that time, such as when Kanner first wrote his paper) were being overlooked by professionals. Today, she feels it was a mistake, that it's served its purpose of moving certain people back into the spectrum, and it's time to move on.
Anyway, I've known a very large number of autistic people. And we've found throughout time that there are similarities and differences between us. That there do seem to be groupings that naturally emerge, and these groups are separated based on differences in the way we think and perceive and interact and stuff. And these groupings rarely, if ever, match the diagnostic groupings in any way. It's rare that every single person in a given group is all diagnosed as AS, or all diagnosed as "HFA", or all diagnosed as "LFA", or all diagnosed as "PDD-NOS". And each official diagnosis likewise seems to contain people of just about every known natural grouping.
But when you don't know that many autistic people, it seems like the thing most people do, is they see some difference between them (or someone they know) and someone else, and then they name one of them, say, "AS", and another one, say, "HFA". (Or vice versa, and then it really gets confusing when more than one person is using the same grouping and opposite categories.
Before I'd met many autistic people, I used to assume that certain differences between my brother and me were attributable to him being "AS" and me being "autistic". But later I learned that most "AS" people differed from him (and some "autistic" people were similar to him), and that most "autistic" people differed from me (and some "AS" people were similar to me). I'm not saying that either he or I were misdiagnosed. I fit the "autistic" criteria perfectly and he fits the "AS" criteria perfectly. But people like me are a minority in all of the categories, and people like him... well they're more common than people like me are, but still by no means the majority in many respects. What I'm saying is that the criteria split both of us apart from those who most resemble us, while lumping us together with people who don't resemble us at all.
I know that continuing to use 'autistic' for all of us lumps a large number of people together. But then, the vast majority of types of autism have already been lumped together with those unlike them, just between 3 and 5 categories depending on how much you split it. Putting all of us together doesn't make that part much worse, it just stays almost the same. What it actually helps on the other hand, is by stopping the way that the categories drive us apart. I'm hoping they'll eventually discover the more natural categories, instead of the categories that were splitting us apart. That would be a good thing. But the category of AS only serves to split people apart in a pointless manner, and to convince people that the real differences must be due to the AS/autism split even if they clearly aren't.
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"In my world it's a place of patterns and feel. In my world it's a haven for what is real. It's my world, nobody can steal it, but people like me, we live in the shadows." -Donna Williams
I was diagnosed with Asperger's, but since I had late speech development, I should be HFA. However, seeing how such a tiny detail can change my diagnosis, and the diagnosis you get just depends on your doctor anyway, there's very little argument for caring about this, and very little argument for keeping Asperger's.
But let's stay on topic here, guys.
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