Asperger's syndrome Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Asperger's disorder or Asperger's syndrome (AS) is a pervasive developmental disorder most closely related to autism, and commonly referred to as a form of "high-functioning" autism. The term "Asperger's syndrome" was coined by Lorna Wing in a 1981 medical paper; she named it after Hans Asperger, an Austrian psychiatrist and pediatrician whose work was not internationally recognized until the 1990s. "Aspie" is an affectionate term used by some with Asperger's syndrome to describe themselves; others prefer "Aspergian," or no name at all. Asperger's also has an especially significant part in the controversies surrounding the autism spectrum.
Characteristics
Non-autistics (neurotypicals) possess a comparatively sophisticated sense of other people's mental states. Most people are able to gather a whole host of information about other people's cognitive and emotional states based on clues gleaned from the environment and the other person's body language. Autists (or autistic persons) do not have this ability, and the individual with Asperger's can be every bit as "mind-blind" as the person with profound classical autism. For those who are severely affected by "mind-blindness", they may, at best, see a smile but not know what it means (is it an understanding, a condescending, or a malicious smile?) and at worst they will not even see the smile, frown, smirk, or any other nuance of interpersonal communication. They generally find it difficult or impossible to "read between the lines"; that is, figure out those things a person is implying but is not saying directly. It is worth noting, however, that since it is a spectrum disorder, a few with Asperger's are nearly normal in their ability to read facial expressions and intentions of others. Those with Asperger's often have difficulty with eye contact. Many make very little eye contact, finding it overwhelming, while others have unmodulated, staring eye contact that can be off-putting to others.
Asperger's syndrome involves an intense and obsessive level of focus on things of interest and is often characterized by special (and possibly peculiar) gifts; one person might be obsessed with 1950s professional wrestling, another with national anthems of African dictatorships, another with building models out of matchsticks. Particularly common interests are means of transportation (for example trains) and computers; dinosaurs are another favourite topic. These interests are often coupled with an unusually high capacity to retain and recall encyclopedic amounts of information about the favoured subject.
In general, things with order have appeal. When these special interests coincide with a materially or socially useful task, the individual with Asperger's can often lead a profitable life. The child obsessed with naval architecture may grow up to be an accomplished shipwright, for instance. In pursuit of these interests, the individual with Asperger's often manifests extremely sophisticated reasoning, an almost obsessive focus, and eidetic memory. Hans Asperger called his young patients "little professors", based on the fact that his thirteen-year-old patients had as comprehensive and nuanced an understanding, within their area of expertise, as university professors. It is because of this that individuals with Asperger's are considered to have a higher intellectual capacity while suffering from a lower social capacity.
Autists have emotional responses as strong as, or perhaps stronger than, most "neurotypicals", though what generates an emotional response might not always be the same. What they lack (or are markedly slower to develop) is the inborn ability to perceive the emotional states of others or to express their own emotional state via body language, facial expression and nuance in the way that most neurotypicals do. Many people with Asperger's report a feeling of being unwillingly detached from the world around them; they lack the natural ability to see the subtexts of social interaction, and equally lack the ability to broadcast their own emotional state to the world accurately.
This leads to no end of troubles both in childhood and adulthood. Apserger's children are often the target of bullying at school because of their idiosyncratic behaviour, language and interests, and because of their lower or delayed ability to perceive and respond appropriately to non-verbal cues, particularly in situations of interpersonal conflict.
When a teacher asks a child with Asperger's, "And did the dog eat your homework?", the child with Asperger's will remain silent if they don't understand the expression, trying to figure out if they need to explain to the teacher that they don't have a dog and besides dogs don't generally like paper. The child doesn't understand what the teacher is asking, cannot infer the teacher's meaning or the fact that there is a non-literal meaning from the tone of voice, posture or facial expression, and is faced with a question which made as much sense to him as "Did the glacier in the library bounce today?" The teacher walks away from the experience frustrated and thinking the child is arrogant, spiteful and insubordinate. The child sits there mutely, feeling frustrated and wronged.
Those affected by Asperger's may also manifest a range of other sensory, developmental and physiological anomalies. It is common for Asperger's children to evidence a marked delay in the development of fine motor skills, and they may also display a distinctive 'waddling' or 'mincing' gait when they walk, and may also walk with their arms held out in an unusual manner. Compulsive finger, hand or arm movements, such as flapping, are also observed.
Some Asperger's children have also been observed to suffer from varying degrees of sensory overload, and may be pathologically sensitive to loud noises or strong smells and may dislike being touched -- for example, certain Asperger's children exhibit a strong dislike having their head touched or their hair disturbed. The 'sensory overload' factor may exacerbate problems faced by Asperger's children at school, where levels of noise in the classroom can become almost intolerable.
Another noted behavioural characteristic is echolalia. It has also been observed that children with Asperger's often display advanced abilities for their age in language, reading, mathematics, spatial skills or music, and that these sometimes extended into the 'gifted' range, although as noted above, they may be counterbalanced by appreciable delays in other developmental areas.
Asperger's can also lead to problems with normal social interaction between peers. In childhood and teenage years, this can cause severe problems as a child or teen with Asperger's can have difficulty interpreting subtle social cues and as such be ostracized by his/her peers, leading to social cruelty. A child or teen with Asperger's is frequently puzzled as to the source of this cruelty, unaware of what he is doing "wrong". Recent efforts in the field of special education have worked to correct this problem, achieving only moderate success. The social alienation of some people with Asperger's syndrome is so intense in childhood that they create imaginary friends for companionship.
In adulthood, the person with Asperger's may find it difficult to differentiate between the smile of a waitress waiting on his table and the smile of a woman at the next table who is interested in him. He may well wind up asking the waitress out for a cup of coffee and ignoring the woman at the next table.
Asperger's syndrome hardly guarantees a miserable life, however. Often the intense focus and tendency to work things out logically characteristic of Asperger's will grant them a high level of ability in their field of interest. Despite their difficulty with social interaction, many people with Asperger's possess a rare gift for humor (especially puns, wordplay, doggerel, and satire) and written expression. In fact, sometimes their fluency with language is such that a number of them also qualify as hyperlexic. While many people with Asperger's will probably not have lives that are considered a social success by common standards, and there are a large number who will remain alone their entire lives, it is possible for such people to find understanding people (sometimes also on the autistic spectrum, sometimes not) with whom they can have close relationships. While they face enormous obstacles, some overcome them and prosper in society. Many autistics are married and have children, in which case their children may be neurotypical or may have an autism spectrum disorder. Many autists are unaware of their autism, because milder forms of autism are widely misunderstood and often undiagnosed or misdiagnosed by professionals.
Asperger's is defined in section 299.80 of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) as:
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual's diagnostic criteria have been roundly criticized for being far too vague and subjective: what one psychologist calls a "significant impairment" another psychologist may call insignificant.
Experts today generally agree that there is no single mental condition called autism. Rather, there is a spectrum of autistic disorders, with different forms of autism taking different positions on this spectrum. But within certain circles of the autism/AS community, this concept of a "spectrum" is being severely questioned. If differences in development are purely a function of differential acquisition of skills, then attempting to distinguish between "degrees of severity" may be dangerously misleading. A person may be subjected to unrealistic expectations, or even denied life-saving services, solely on the basis of very superficial observations made by others in the community.
In the 1940s, Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger, working independently in the United States and Austria, identified essentially the same population, Asperger's group being perhaps more "socially functional" than Kanners as a whole. Some of Kanner's originally identified autistic children, might today get an Asperger's syndrome diagnosis, and vice versa. It is a mistake to say that a "Kanner autistic" is a child who sits and rocks and does not communicate. Kanner's study subjects were all along the spectrum.
Researchers are grappling with the problem of how to divide up the spectrum. There is no easy way to do this. It would appear that one can divide the population of autistics in any particular way and define the group accordingly. Autistics who speak, those who don't. Autistics with seizures, those without. Autistics with more "stereotypical behaviors", those with less, and so forth. Some are trying to identify genes associated with these traits as a way to make logical groupings. Eventually, one may hear about autistics with or without the HOXA 1 gene, with or without changes to chromosome 15, etc. Traditionally, Kannerian autism is characterized by significant cognitive and communicative deficiencies, including delays in or lack of language. Often it will be clear that these people do not function normally. An individual with Asperger's on the other hand will not show delays in language. It is a more subtle disorder and affected individuals will often only appear to be odd.
Kanner's syndrome is described in the article autism.
Asperger's syndrome and other forms of autism are often grouped together in a Pervasive Developmental Disorder family.
Amongst several competing theories are the underconnectivity theory developed by cognitive scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, the Neanderthal theory, the extreme male brain theory by Simon Baron-Cohen, the lack of theory of mind, and the Pre-operational autism theory, which states that autistic people are those who get neurologically stuck at the pre-operational stage of cognitive development, where much of information processing is at a holistic-visual level and largely non-verbal and -musical. This also addresses the issue of the theory of mind where children at the pre-operational stage of cognitive development have not attained decentralisation from egocentrism.
The Monotropism hypothesis argues that the central feature of Autism is attention-tunnelling, monotropism. The hypothesis is founded on the model Mind as a Dynamical System: Implications for Autism. In this model of mind, the fundamental and limited resource is mental attention. Mental events compete for and consume attention. In a polytropic mind, many interests are aroused to a moderate degree. In a monotropic mind, few interests are very highly aroused. When many interests are aroused, multiple, complex, behaviours emerge. When few interests are aroused then a few, intensely motivated, behaviours are engendered. From monotropism hypothesis, autism results from different strategies of distributing attention in the brain.
The underconnectivity theory indicates a deficiency in the coordination among brain areas. Since the brain is known to be modular. With the aid of (fMRI), it was seen that white matter which connects various areas of the brain like cables, have abnormalities in people with autism.
The underconnectivity theory holds that autism is a system-wide brain disorder that limits the coordination and integration among brain areas. This theory is parsimonious, in that it explains why autistic people are matured on certain dimensions eg: visual information processing and logical analysis, and yet are socially and sometimes neuro-physiologically, significantly younger to their chronological age. The underconnectivity theory can be regarded as monotropism in the brain.
Other theories address the rise of autism in recent times. They suggest that the rise of visual media and thereby the increasingly central role of visual information processing in the breakdown of language contributes to the increase of autism. Other theories involve the effect of toxins and poisons on neural development. and it has been suggested that high levels of heavy metals such as lead may be a causal factor, and lead poisoning has been strongly linked to some cases of severe autism.
One of the most controversial claims is that conditions such as autism and Asperger's are caused by adverse side-effects of immunisation -- particularly the so-called triple antigen vaccine -- and from the heavy-metal preservatives that (in the past) were used in their manufacture. Although this theory has a degree of popular currency and has been discussed in a number of documentaries on the subject, it fails to address the basic empirical observation that Asperger's and related disorders are overwhelmingly predominant in males, yet children of both sexes are immunised in roughly equal numbers.
The significant others of people with Asperger's are more prone to major depression than the general population because people with Asperger's often have trouble showing affection or understanding the need to show affection, and can be very literal and hard to communicate with in an emotional way. It is very helpful for those involved with someone with Asperger's to read as much as they can about Asperger's syndrome, Obsessive-compulsive disorder, hyperlexia and other "comorbid disorders". It also helps to visit support groups' websites on line and talk with others involved with people with Asperger's syndrome. A significant other will often be much less angry or depressed if he or she understands that the Asperger's symptoms are not intentionally directed, but are part of a neurological condition. That someone does not spontaneously show affection does not necessarily mean that he or she does not feel it. Thus the significant other will feel less rejected and be more understanding. Light will be shed on the nature of the misunderstandings. They may figure out ways to work around the problems, for example being more explicit about their needs.
Recently, some researchers have speculated that many well-known people including Glenn Gould, Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton had AS, as they showed some Asperger's related tendencies (such as intense interest in one subject and social problems); such diagnoses remain controversial, however (cf. BBC News, Einstein and Newton "had autism", 30 April 2003). The obvious social contributions of such individuals has led to a shift in the perception of Asperger's and autism away from the simple view of a disease just needing to be cured towards a more complex view of a syndrome with both advantages and disadvantages. There is a semi-jocular theory within science fiction fandom, for example, which argues that many of the distinctive traits of that subculture may be explained by the speculation that a significant portion thereof is composed of people with Asperger's. A Wired Magazine article called The Geek Syndrome suggested that Asperger's syndrome is more common in the Silicon Valley, a haven for computer scientists and mathematicians. It created an enduring myth popularized in the media and self-help books that "Geek Syndrome" equals Asperger's syndrome, and precipitated a rash of self-diagnoses. Though these conditions do share traits, there is a consensus that most geeks are arguably "variant normal" and do not exhibit autistic-spectrum behaviors.
Some people, including people diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, argue that Asperger's syndrome is a social construct. Professor Simon Baron-Cohen of the Autism Research Centre has written a book arguing that Asperger's syndrome is an extreme version of the way in which men's brains differ to women's. He says that in general men are better at systematizing than women, and that women are better at empathizing than men. Hans Asperger himself is quoted as saying that his patients have 'an extreme version of the male form of intelligence'.
This is an Article on Asperger's syndrome. Page Contains Information, Facts Details or Explanation Guide About Asperger's syndrome Social interaction and cognitive patterns
DSM definition
N.B.: Please read the DSM cautionary statement.Relationship to autism
discovered another form of autism around the same time as Hans Asperger.]]
Some clinicians believe that communicative and/or cognitive deficiencies are so essential to the concept of autism that they prefer to consider Asperger's as a separate condition altogether from autism. This opinion is a minority one. Uta Frith (an early researcher of Kannerian autism) has written that people with Asperger's seem to have more than a touch of autism to them. Others, such as Lorna Wing and Tony Attwood, share in Frith's assessment. Dr. Sally Ozonoff, of the University of California at Davis's MIND institute, argues that there should be no dividing line between "high-functioning" autism and Asperger's, and that the fact that some don't start to produce speech until a later age is no reason to divide the two groups, as they are identical in the way they need to be treated.Possible causes and origins
The causes and origins of autism and Asperger's syndrome are subjects of continuing conjecture and debate, and there is still considerable debate on these topics, alongside the broader debate about whether Asperger's and other conditions (such as ADHD) are part of the so-called autism spectrum or not. Effect on relationships
A gift and a curse
Asperger's Syndrome Community Websites
There are a variety of website communities for individuals with Asperger's Syndrome. Currently, the most popular of these is WrongPlanet.net, which has a wiki (based on Mediawiki) and many other features. The second most popular site is Aspergian Island, which only has a forum (the most popular of these websites used to be Aspergia.com, but this site was recently closed). AspiesForFreedom is another website that has a MediaWiki Autism wiki.Criticisms
References
See also
External links
Community forum sites
Support Groups
Informational
Humor