Published on 12, July, 2020
I have Asperger’s syndrome. Why do they class Asperger’s and autism as the same now when they are so different from each other? I mean Asperger’s is a genetic condition which affects the way someone thinks and makes them slightly different and socially awkward and more anxious. Autism on the other hand in the classic sense is a debilitating condition characterised by the inability to speak and vocalise words, intellectual disability and aggression with violent outbursts. Why do people with Asperger’s dominate the perception of autism. Everybody seems to forget about these kids who cannot talk at all. People view people like us people with Asperger’s as what autism is. This is not the case classic autism as it used to be defined was basically someone who regressed around the ages 2-4 into losing all speech and ability to function. It seemed to start around the 50s to 60s. Whereas Asperger’s has been around for maybe thousands of years. There is cases documented of people who may have had Asperger’s way before the 50s. A woman in Russia in the early 1900’s at the beginning of that decade worked with under a dozen kids who would have been declared as autism highly functioning or Asperger’s syndrome nowadays. These kids were quiet and inhibited but showed great ability to work machines and understand mechanisms of things and patterns. However it appears that people who have Asperger’s are born with it and always have it. They may take a while to develop language but they never develop it and lose it forever the same way someone with classic autism does. I have known people who had one child who lost the ability to speak and function about 2-4 years old and never spoke again and had to be put in a care home. But none of the boys other siblings had this happen to them. So how do you explain this sudden regression in some people that doesn’t happen with every other kid in that same family. Something must be causing a sudden regression especially if it’s only in a specific family member and no others. Asperger’s on the other hand is genetic and if one family member has it they all are almost garuanteed to have it more or less. If anyone has any thoughts on this please do share them as I would like to make more sense of this.
Yellow tree 118 said:she invented it based off Hans Asperger’s work.
Lorna Wing also pioneered the idea that autism is a spectrum condition.
Another factor to keep in mind is that many autistic people who were originally diagnosed with "Asperger's syndrome" (back when it was an official diagnostic term) prefer not to use it as they find it morally repugnant.
"Hans Asperger worked with the *** during the Holocaust and his abhorrent descriptions of some autistic children as being less ‘worthwhile’ than others led to dozens of children being sent to a Nazi clinic, where they were murdered.
There had previously been debate about how much Hans Asperger knew about what the *** were doing, and whether in fact his work had saved some autistic children from death. However, more recent research has discredited this narrative by showing that Hans Asperger was aware that he was sending children to their death at a Nazi ‘euthanasia’ clinic and had made statements in line with the Nazi regime’s murderous ideology of ‘racial purity’."
From; https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/what-is-autism/the-history-of-autism/asperger-syndrome#:~:text=Hans%20Asperger%20worked%20with%20the,clinic%2C%20where%20they%20were%20murdered.