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.
There is support (some of it genetic) for viewing what might be considered 'profoundly autistic' people as autistic people with 'comorbid' intellectual disability. After all, those people with intellectual disability who are sociable and outgoing are not called 'profoundly neurotypical'. Unlike intelligence in neurotypicals, which follows a standard bell curve, most being near the middle with few at the extremes of intelligence, the graph of autistic intelligence distribution is saddle-shaped, with fewer people falling in the middle and more on the extremes of high intelligence and low intelligence.
Very interesting about the saddle.
I am wondering if this is because there are far more autistics in the middle who go unnoticed and/or have no issues and so never get tested and included in the statisics? I think there should be an ASD Level 0 category. It is so rare for stats to not form a bell curve, so I wonder if it is in fact really a bell curve, but missing the middle.
There is a certain amount of evidence that some of the common genetic variants, usually affecting single nucleotides, associated with autism are also associated with high academic attainment. Which might account for the higher intelligence peak. Conversely, the rarer, often spontaneously generated, major genetic changes, such as deletions, transpositions and repeats, are more often associated with profound effects on intellect, which could account for the lower intelligence peak. Other factors are probably in play, however.
They tend to be biased, often culturally, but bias would not, I think, produce a double-peaked distribution without some underlying cause.
Not to forget the IQ tests themselves being unintentionally biased. (Is that what firemonkey's article said?)