Published on 12, July, 2020
https://www.autism.org.uk/about/adult-life/resources/asperger-united/new-name.aspx
If the folk at the NAS are so easily swayed by some whiny emoting from a tiny minority of folk that seek to deny history, I don't know that I can be bothered to read the thing any more.
There was nothing wrong with the old name. It matched my diagnosis.
To avoid a load of pointless arguing, no, I really don't care what Asperger did, or whether he ate peeled, salted babies for his breakfast.
On a balance scale between logic and fact, versus the emotional burden of the entire human race throughout history, logic and facts must tip the scales every single time, or humanity is lost.
Yes, some people won't like it. So what?
Um... Greetings... Through some sort of Cosmic Coincidence, although I was not going to post today, I found out that this Thread was about ASPERGERS UNITED, and I currently have a sort of loyalty to this.
I am glad that someone else has begun a Thread about this Topic, the voting upon which closes August 31st. I do not know if AU are aware of this Thread, however. And, one of the things I have of late wanted to do with my letters to AU is to try to link AU to this "Online Community"... For in places AU is for those of us who cannot access the Internet at all. (Yes including myself even as I am here, but I cannot EMail and my devices are "old".)
... Had I not said all of that waffle, there, I would say that I do not know what to say about this Thread, really...! (I suggested and voted "Autism United" about one month and then three days ago.)
@Jonesy you’re the linesman
You better start your warm up.. ball play may be anxious but the performance spreadsheets a thing of beauty
I thought the current title was like a sports team, not something I associated with. I just voted for Autistic United just to keep the same initials. It always seemed to be styled and abbreviated AU. I'm somewhat disappointed that my suggestion 'Autistic Us' didn't make it to the final, as I'm a bit of an Ian Dury fan. Ah well, I expect the Goth knows what he's doing.
My diagnosis is AS, but I don't relate to it much. It's gone from ICD-11 as well as DSM-V, so it's only moving with the Autistic Times. For various reasons I've mentioned I object to the word 'syndrome'.
In response to Ellie, I might play left-winger.
I too am a child of the sixties and I remember growing up in the very middle of a huge post-war trauma. Should we disregard medical advancements that happened during that time? Of course not. That wouldn't make any of the horrible torture people had to endure any better. What we should do is, nevertheless, think about whom we grant a memorial, the offender or the victims? In my case, separating the merits from the faults becomes impossible at the point is when violent crimes have been committed. So yes, of course, we keep the results but we quit honoring the 'discoverer' 's name and that's a good thing to me. Would I have preferred to keep the word Asperger's as the official denomination? Yes, sure. Can I now with a clear conscience? No, certainly not. Besides, I still use the name because many can relate to it at the moment but I hope for it to change in the future and I'm sure it will and we'll be much better off without Dr. Nazi haunting our existences.
So 14 suggestions!
which I find most are offensive or demeaning.
And so what each means to me.
not intended to cause upset,,just how I perceive each suggestion.
Asperger as a term has already been written out of DSM-V
religated for new diagnosees
DSM 5 - ASPIE 0
manager sacked, languishing in division 3
@LoneWarrior is on meltdowns.
The crowd have have been told to be quiet to avoid sensory overload of the already tense players
ASC United....
Disambiguating Cynosure referee
Deepthought coach
CaptainPlastic, @CloudyMountains, @Neuxus on defence
Cassandro, @Andy, Nowhere Mat attack
@Emma physio and in charge of the magic spray
what a team. A name is a name, a club is a club, what matters is our opposition.
ill be here at half time with oranges.
Seems I may have been told lies when I was a child. I just checked Wikipedia and stand corrected, here is an excerpt from the article.
Frederik Pohl said in a 1963 editorial in Galaxy Science Fiction that despite their cruelty the Nazi experiments produced no useful results; "it was not science and it was not medicine". If the "Herr Doktors" had, he wrote, murdered pregnant women to study their ovaries the crimes would have advanced embryology, but the earliest stages of prenatal developmentwere first observed in Boston in 1942 "without either torture or killing".[53]
The results of the Dachau freezing experiments have been used in some modern research into the treatment of hypothermia, with at least 45 publications having referenced the experiments since the Second World War.[14] This, together with the recent use of data from Nazi research into the effects of phosgene gas, has proven controversial and presents an ethical dilemma for modern physicians who do not agree with the methods used to obtain this data.[31] Some object on an ethical basis, and others have rejected Nazi research purely on scientific grounds, pointing out methodological inconsistencies. In an often-cited review of the Dachau hypothermia experiments, Berger states that the study has "all the ingredients of a scientific fraud" and that the data "cannot advance science or save human lives."[14]
Controversy has also risen from the use of results of biological warfare testing done by the Imperial Japanese Army's Unit 731.[54] The results from Unit 731 were kept classified by the United States until the majority of doctors involved were given pardons.[55]
We were told the research was used to advance medical knowledge?
Maybe as children they wanted to tell us about the atrocities but did not want us to believe it was all in Vein . I am sorry I should have checked my facts beforehand.
Ok well I had no idea why Aspergers was given the name it has, I do understand from my own perspective what it is to me.
I tell people I am autistic first and before they start looking me over I tell them I am Aspergers! Although most have no idea what it is I did have a medical professional say “oh we covered autism and you Aspergers are the super clever ones”, I bit my tongue and kept quite.
I am not high functioning in a way that would see me as super clever in any way whatsoever ever, but I do struggle in all respects of having autism.
so I appear normal but do not Fit!
All forms of repetitive stimming that were visible as a child I hid or managed to stop.. mostly due to teasing and on one occasion was seen and verbally abused as being dumb and mental.
To go back to the name Aspergers, it has been around a long time and hardly any one would connect it to the man who termed and discovered it.
PLEASE DO NOT READ FURTHER IF YOU ARE EASILY UPSET !
MY STORY CONTAINS FACTS WHICH TO THIS DAY STILL CAUSE ME GREAT UPSET!
As a child of the sixties we covered both world war 1 and 2, we were shown the harrowing film footage of concentration camps. One point that hit me very deeply was how they carried out medical research on the Jewish .
When the concentration camps were finally liberated vast documents were found which very clearly documented all the barbaric research carried out, one that sticks in my mind is break a bone then allow it to heal then break it again,,to see how often it will join back together. These individuals were kept fed enough to live through it,
My point is a decision was made to destroy it all as it was so awful, then when given more thought it was thought it better that all the many people who suffered were not forgotten and that all the facts although gained through evil and barbaric acts were not lost, they should be remembered for advancing medical knowledge.
So a huge jump in understanding was made by the suffering of others,
Should we then stop practicing any medical treatment that was only advanced this way?
They paid the biggest price, not through choice but they should never be forgotten,
sorry if any of this upsets anyone, it is fact and I feel pertinent to a name only, not the man himself.
..and that really put's it into context.
I had only considered my personal view of the condition and my own staunch resistance to change. If it weren't for the Asperger Test Site then I would probably still be ignorant of Autism in it's many forms. And some of my relatives were involved in post WW2 "clear up" operations and rebuilding work so very much aware of the suffering of the Jews as well as Romany and other minorities (and even the majorities who fled the persecution).
So, perhaps the time is right for the name change, time for a clean slate so Autism can develop it's own unique identity. In the film world they would call it a reboot and, just like a computer, it would be a new start.
this is the comment I can definitely agree with. I'm personally very torn on all this. On one hand, I totally agree that the awareness for Asperger's has only reached the public and people will get confused when they are told it's now Autism. Specially when most people still solely associate Autism with Rain Man and tend to deny Asperger's as Autism due to the fact that most of us manage to fit in due to us learning neurotypical behaviour. On the other hand, I'm also a child from a family that has suffered from the ***. Many of my ancestral relatives died in the Nazi death camp, so you might say I'm a bit sensitive to anything related to Nazi science and how they got and treated their human guinea pigs.
With that last fact in mind, I tend to be actually rather favourable to the removal of Asperger's name as a main denominator for the condition. An the other hand, every other argument I read in this thread has its own value and I noticed that I earned better reactions from my surroundings when I said I had Asperger's than when I said I had Autism, which always sounds bigger than life. Nevertheless, I believe that reactions to the term 'Autism' will regulate themselves in the public mind in future years, so maybe now would be the right time to decide on the definitive name and yes, Asperger's is factually Autism, so why not call it that?
I do care what Hans Asperger did during the Second World War, however, I can separate that from his "discovering" Asperger's syndrome.
In the same way his "discovery" should not wipe out his deeds during the war, his deeds during the war should not wipe out his "discovery".
I dislike the sanitisation which is taking place.
In time, the most of the general public will have forgotten Han Asperger's deeds during the war (and I suspect a fair number have no idea about them now); I am not saying that is right or wrong, just that is what will happen.
Agreed. The poll seems heavily biased and I also think that the original name should still be an option. Really hope that the NAS moderators will take a look at this post.
The other problem is there is no option to keep the existing name in the survey (so it is already biased)
My Sister works as a carer for people with learning difficulties and she considers me to have Asperger's but NOT autism! Changing the name now would serve no purpose (other than satisfying the NTs at HQ swayed by propaganda). In my tally book, the pros far outweigh the cons for Hans Asperger - he, alone with his name, has done more for Autism than almost everybody else.
I'm proud to be Autistic, and I'm proud to be Asperger's, and I'm United!
I don't it's took long enough for people to even know what Asperger's Syndrome is. If they change the name, it will take how long for most people to understand it again? Logically it could cause setbacks. I will continue to use the term.This is exactly why I don't want it changed either. At the end of the day, undoing what progress we've achieved in the way of autism awareness is SO not worth it, however many dodgy things Asperger the person did (especially because when the average person hears the word "Asperger", you think of the ASC, not the human; so it's barely memorialising him at all at this point. The word has changed its meaning over time) and I've written to the NAS saying as such.
I'd give this more like's if I could, well said. I'm also worried that other aspects of research that have been done may be tainted by this decision. The Herwig Czech guy that started this all basically attacked Uta Frith based on her not having the information about Asperger before she formed an opinion to write a book about him nearly 30 years ago despite the information only recently being unearthed. If she didn't have the information how can she be attacked, never the less he pointed fingers at her. More concerningly some of her peers joined in.
He's a real example of what today's knee-jerk "intelligencia" stands for. He seems just as obsessed with identity politics as the Nazi's. Apparently the guy that found out the benefits of Levdopa for Parkinson's Disease is supposed to be thrown into the trash bin of history too, even though his research was done in the 1960's way after WW2. Psychology and neurology are sciences. Ideology and scientific logic generally don't mix too well. Religion told us the world was flat, that the Earth was the centre of the universe, a man flew to heaven on a horse and split the moon in half. Woe forbid the "heretics" too. Ironically he is displaying the same ideals the Nazi's did by using identity politics to influence scientific study and history. He's a hypocrite and so are the tub thumpers. The only history he will ever make is forcing revisionism. He's a talentless hack.
I have Jewish heritige. I also have Aspergers. Pretty much two strikes or supposed "causes" to shriek about how I want it changed. I don't it's took long enough for people to even know what Asperger's Syndrome is. If they change the name, it will take how long for most people to understand it again? Logically it could cause setbacks. I will continue to use the term.
DongFeng5 said:Yes, some people won't like it.
Probably the same people that will get all pissed when the general public don't understand what the new name is. Be careful what you wish for.