@ Holly: Too ad Hans Asperger has ascended to that big nuthouse in the sky (probably right next to Freud, Jung & all the other fruit loops who spent too much time analyzing off-kilter folks...)
I'd like to see Asperger's categorized as an entirely different specrum in its own right. Anyone who has spent time around (if it is even possible!) real Aspies knows that we are a ...condition...unto ourselves. Many if not most of us are unusually intelligent or at the very least average. We do tend to stim like Auties do BUT look at humans in general. NTs stim all the time! Tapping their feet, twiddling their thumbs, bouncing the eraser of their pencils up & down...We tend to have developed many strategies for disguising ourselves a la NT when we must BUT like Cinderella's get-up, it comes with an abrupt expiry date before we revert to Aspiedom.
We Aspie women tend to blend in more simply because female fashions are so diverse & permissive that you'd really have to look completely bizarre before we'd stand out (unless you live in a small conservative 'everyone looks alike' type town). Our voices & experiences are grossly under-represented in the Spectrum discourse. Now that we're about to be lumped in with all Auties, we'll be further undermined.
Another thing that I see here, the venerated compilers of the DSM 5, in having eliminated all those absurd NOS diagnoses remind me of the short-sighted Catholic church in their eliminating of LIMBO (NOT the dance, but I wouldn't miss that either). Used to be, they intoned, that unbaptized babies who die go directly to Limbo (do not pass go, do not collect $200). Okay....now that there's no Limbo, where are they? Do they get sent to Purgatory? No can do: they hadn't had the chance to commit a bunch of sins that they must do penance for & earn karma points. Hmmm...do they vanish? Get fast-tracked to heaven or what?
THink of all the PDD NOS people who will now abruptly cease to exist (in diagnostic terms). Where do they go: do they get crammed in with Auties? Are they no longer certifiable but merely weird? What about all us Aspies? The new 'criteria' will push some of us out of the 'diagnostic circle' because we aren't that far gone. Some of us do well in some areas but score really poorly in others. Depending upon how the individual practitioner 'weights' the categories or how he perceives the patient, they won't get the diagnosis.
Seems like the DSM's compilers are working quietly in conclave with big pharma to add & broaden 'conditions' for which readily available medications can conveniently be prescribed. Soon, with the new DSM, a person in mourning of the loss of a loved one will be certifiable IF s/he remains in that state for the amount of time the DSM states & if their mourning 'symptoms' meet those described. What the hell are they doing?!? Someone who loses a child SHOULD be devastated & inconsolable: they aren't sick & don't need to be chemically 'rescued' from their emotions! The diagnostic age for Asperger's used to be 11 or so. Now, with us being lumped in with Auties, shrinks will be diagnosing infants (like tantrum throwing, anti-social, narcissistic 2 yr olds) with a treatable medical condition when all they have is a bad case of normal. Since there are no known medications for Asperger's, now that we're all Auties, they'll be plunking us full of chemical concoctions. I don't think we Aspies sick: just wired differently like left handed people & gay people (now, if you're a gay left handed Aspie, you've got really really nifty wiring indeed!).
Most of the 'co morbid' issues many of us have are due to having to force ourselves, like square pegs into round holes, to constantly cope & adapt to cultures & societies designed by others for others. We have different operating systems & the NT world just does not compute for us.
