355113 said:
This is simply not true. I know at least a couple Kanner's autistics who have been academically successful. It may be that Kanner's autists less commonly succeed academically, but saying that none do is wrong. Remember, all absolute statements are false.
And that's why I never make absolute statements.
Hehe. OK.
That's actually a pretty good question. I suppose I don't, or at least I don't know what would conventionally be considered a good sense of humor as I find different things funny than others seem to.
Hm... I disagree, not all Asperger's humor seems to make sense to the general population. What other explanation could there possibly be for people not laughing at my jokes?
But basing such perceptions on whether someone finds a joke funny isn't necessarily accurate... there are plenty of jokes that I intellectually understand but just don't consider to be amusing. I know why they are supposed to be funny, I just don't think they've succeeded. Most people on seeing such a reaction will tend to assume that I just didn't get the joke.
Humor is context dependent. There is no such thing as an inherently funny joke or utterance. The success or failure of a remark intended to be funny depends on the humorist's ability to size his audience up then and there; take their pulse, so to speak, and pitch something to their taste, level of perceptiveness, all in the context of the situation at hand. To the extent that what you laugh at, and what you pitch to others to amuse them, is an indicator of how sensitive you are to who you're with and the immediate situation, it has potential as a diagnostic tool.
And I think they are fundamentally the same thing, or at least on the same spectrum, that are artificially separated by arbitrary markers such as verbal intelligence when in fact they should not be regarded as separate. Indeed, some new evidence seems to indicate that autism itself is not a discrete condition, but merely a collection of certain traits at a certain intensity. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7841808.stm"
Well, yes, and that is the nature of psychology. The disease model really does not apply too terribly well to the autistic spectrum. Physiological problems would be difficult or impossible to identify, and then the practice of labeling all autistic traits as "problem" has been vocally opposed by a number of prominent researchers, as well as most people who are themselves autistic.
It will be interesting to see neurology advance that far someday, but for now that field is still in its infancy and we have to go with the best we currently know.
Not quite as good as any, since you have to take into account whether the diagnosis makes sense and is consistent. I mean, no psychologist or psychiatrist could realistically diagnose me as schizophrenic, bipolar, or depressed. A crappy psychiatrist might be capable of misdiagnosing me with ADD or even possibly OCD, but it should be readily apparent that neither of those diagnoses would account for all my idiosyncratic behavior or markedly unusual profile of IQ subscores, whereas some variant of autism does.
All the same problem again: without physiological data to point to, any diagnosis in the DSM is an arbitrary agreement of experts on what apparent symptom constellations are going to be called what. There is a never ending series of papers proposing causes and mechanisms for the constellation of symptoms called
schizophrenia with no conclusions to be drawn. Therefore, it is also often suggested that a large number of rather different neurological problems can manifest with these symptoms.
Contrast this with seizures. Because seizures have long been accepted as purely physiological in origin it was long ago recognized that there is no disease,
Epilepsy. Seizures are always a symptom. They always indicate either tissue damage, or any of the myriad "chemical" problems that can trigger neurons to fire this way. "Epilepsy" is a label that simply means the seizures are likely to be chronic, to continue happening unless there is intervention.
In the absence of physiological data what makes sense and seems consistent to a given doctor in arriving at a psychiatric diagnosis is much more open ended. The differences I perceive between Asperger's and Autism that strike me as important are not persuasive to you, and the similarities which strike you as important are not persuasive to me. At this point it has to be considered a difference in value judgement. My "delusional disorder" example was meant to be one you would agree was absurd, simply to mock the fact that all diagnoses are unchecked by "objective" data: lab results, EEG's, brain scans, etc. (They go some distance in ruling out gross physiological problems like brain tumors, thyroid, drug abuse, and so on, but there is no provision for the fine parsing of neurological cause and effect in the absence of know gross causes of psychiatric symptoms.) You are confident that psychiatrists will be guided by good reasoning skills in coming to a diagnosis. I, however, don't think that anyone with good reasoning skills would end up in psychiatry ;) . Of all the medical sciences it is the least scientific. It's a kind of impressionistic medicine, in the way Aristotle's physics was a kind of impressionistic physics. I think both autism and Asperger's are clear neurological conditions and shouldn't be in the DSM at all.
I've heard rumors of people "outgrowing" AS but that does not actually occur; rather, people develop effective coping mechanisms. I'm not quite sure what to make of Ackroyd- I've heard claims that he was kidding when he said he was diagnosed with AS, though that wouldn't make much sense. Anyways, yes, AS does tend to allow for more self-awareness and ability to analyze one's own strengths and weaknesses, and this is helpful in figuring out how to compensate for the weaknesses.
That's what I figure as well: the apparent "outgrowing" actually probably results from successful coping mechanisms.
We can't really know, so I'm don't bother with it. Certainly some people had AS before it was recognized as a diagnosis, but it's futile trying to diagnose them in retrospect.
