HaganWill+Asperger's+soon+disappear?

For the last few years it seems, the American Psychiatric Association, has been debating the merits of Asperger’s Syndrome as a valid diagnosis and the experts who are revising psychiatry’s medical lexicon have proposed to eliminate it from the 2012 edition. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders added Asperger’s in 1994 and its short life may be soon folded into the category of “autism spectrum disorder”. The diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome, affects approximately 1% of American children and has been given to more than four times as many boys as girls. It has become an increasingly common diagnosis. Public awareness and understanding of the struggles of both Asperger’s syndrome and autism have been highlighted in recent years through many books and films. The proposed new diagnostic criteria, describes the severity and functioning along a single continuum, and allows for one explanation for the often unpredictable changes among children with autism. People who now have a diagnosis of Asperger’s can be just as socially impaired as those with autism. It seems that the diagnosis of Asperger’s has been synonymous for “high functioning” and the data is not conclusive on this. “In a Powerful Identity, A Vanishing Diagnosis” (2009//)//, Claudia Wallis quotes Catherine Lord, director of the Autism and Communication Disorders Centers at the University of Michigan, “Nobody has been able to show consistent differences between what clinicians diagnose as Asperger’s syndrome and what they diagnose as mild autistic disorder. Asperger’s means a lot of different things to different people,” Dr. Lord said. “It’s confusing and not terribly useful.” Dr. Lord is one of the 13 members of the group evaluating autism and other neuro-developmental disorders for the manual. Dr. Lord states, “the inconsistent use of these labels has been a problem for researchers recruiting subjects for studies of autism spectrum disorder.”

In interviews, the Asperger and autism community were divided on the prospect of changing the manual. Ray Richard Grinker, in a //NYT// Op Ed column“Order out of Chaos” (2010) feels that the stigma of autism is fading and the change to the manual is welcome, “careful study of people with Asperger’s has demonstrated that the diagnosis is misleading and invalid, and there are clear benefits to understanding autism as one condition that runs along a spectrum”.

The goal of the panel is to make sure there is a clear and concise way to cover all the different conditions in one spectrum since many states will provide medical coverage for autism but not Asperger’s. Not all people with Asperger’s have extraordinary abilities, and some are crippled by anxiety and social limitations and cannot hold down a job or live on their own. The proposed plan is to define autism by two core elements — impaired social communication and repetitive behaviors or fixated interests — and to score each of those elements for severity.

Sources: Wallis, C. (2009, November 2) A Powerful Identity, A Vanishing Diagnosis. Page D1. Retrieved from []  =

Grinker, R. (2010, Febraury 10) Disorder Out of Chaos. Page A 23. Retrieved form [|www.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/opinion/10grinker.html?scp=3&sq=&st=nyt]