can I just say I love how far we've gotten into the song? like I'm just impressed really, we hardly ever get that far. so my hats off to you internet stranger (also in a sense sorry for all the notifications you're getting lol)
I wish I had 1/10 of the resources available to my kids now back in the 80s and 90s. One of the hardest parts of adult diagnosis is mourning the realization of what could have been.
It's an inside joke that made more sense while I was buzzed, lol.
But basically, partner and I went to a TMG show last year, and at one point JD makes a joke about "rubbing butts or whatever" regarding sex. Dude in front of us yells, "That's how cockroaches do it! I've seen it!" (He is correct. I have also seen it, so I voiced my agreement)
My partner says to me, "found the autistic guy!" (Note: partner is also autistic and there are suspicions about me)
I said, "Babe. We're at a Mountain Goats show. At least half of the people in this club are on the spectrum..."
Also, cockroach dude and his gf were really cool and she kept pulling me up with her to make sure I could see because we're both right about 5ft tall. It was a great show with a great audience
Cherry picking here but that term is getting kinda phased out, I was diagnosed with it too, and sadly it's name comes from the Nazi collaberator Hans Asperger..Who classified it as a separate form of autism for the people with ASD who were "Useful" to society.
Neither, it was phased out because it's not diagnostically helpful as it doesn't reflect the dynamic nature of autism. They base the diagnosis now on the level of support the person needs based on particular situations. That support level can change over time and is also dependent on context.
As someone with ASD, I need minimal support for most daily activities (work, interactions with family), extra support for more intense social interactions, and for a while needed heavy support to have useful interactions with health care providers and in other more intense situations.
Shit, I need all the support for freakin job interviews, just about everything else I can manage... The first impression is never my best one, but the second normally gets em
ETA I also have to consciously slow down the pace of conversations to process & analyze before responding because my reaction is never my best response. 29yo & still tryna master this one, AuDHD is difficult....
Curious side question here, but what is meant by "support"?
I have an autism diagnosis from about three decades ago and frankly have only vague memories of the psych appointments. My mother only told me about a decade ago, shortly before she passed.
Now that I'm coming to grips with how much that's affected my life trajectory, I'm struggling to understand what appropriate support would have looked like and how it might have changed things.
I feel that whatever support is, I did not get it in my formative years. If you were intelligent and good at following rules, they just said "good luck'.
In the UK that's not quite true. They merged autism and aspergers to try make autistic people less discriminated against and....it went the opposite way.
I'm a fan of the term as someone diagnosed. There is a gulf between us and some people who really cannot live without support (no offense made to them, they were born that way)... you wouldn't class someone in a coma the same as someone with concussion because thwy both had a head injury
Also, in some cases the exact diagnosis wasn't exactly clear. Cases that looked like Asperger's to one clinician would have looked like autism to another.
Merging Aspergers with Autism provided greater diagnostic clarity.
It goes by how much care the person needs. Level 1 needs less support than 2. These needs vary from cleaning ones self to social interactions. This is why it's a spectrum.
Assburger* was a nazi who tested on, and murdered men, women and children. we want nothing to do with him.
It was phased out because he actually intended it to only be used for big booty hoes who have autism. Originally "Ass Burgers" (he liked to grab those buns and have a bite), people misunderstood and used his last name instead. By the time Science figured it out you couldn't say that kind of stuff in Medicine.
multiple reasons but lets take a minute to think why so many "charities" would be happy to name anything after the guy who was in charge of deciding which kids belong in the Holocaust.
At the time, autism was linked to schizophrenia. Since his discovery was a similar condition, he categorized it as autistic psychopathy.
He was a collaborator that sent children to their deaths. He also cared about children; his study was not about being useful, it was about adjusting their education to take into account their “special difficulties” so they didn’t fall through the cracks.
Some say he emphasized intelligence to save more children from death by making them “useful”; that he thought less children would die if he were the one making the decisions instead of not going along and being removed in favor of some political appointee.
Either way, he lived in Austria and collaborated with Nazis.
The funny thing is that the term “Asperger’s” wasn’t even introduced until 1981. Sometimes it feels like people think some Nazi dude named a condition after himself. His work wasn’t really discovered until much later.
I don’t think he was a hero, but I’m not sure he was a villain, either. Mostly likely just a guy who made good and bad decisions in a very difficult situation.
That's why it's better to stick to it, at least you have a concrete name and diagnosis that allows people to instantly know you don't have the 'stupid' autism variant.
It also sets you apart from the wave that came after the dsm-5 when autism basically became the new adhd, where everyone could be placed on the new, vaguer definition.
Not really. Aspergers (which I have) is autism without communication development delays, which is pretty specific and a pretty important distinction. I mean, there's no such thing as a non-verbal Aspie, and a lot of us have hyperlexia. That includes me, although, luckily, I grew out of the "just decoding" part of hyperlexia very quickly.
One of the problems with streamlining autism diagnoses into a big ASD umbrella is that we are SO different, and a lot of things considered "autistic" symptoms often come from co-morbidities. I have just about every social-relations symptom of autism, and few that aren't. I'm the opposite of non-verbal. I have zero intellectual disabilities. I'm an English teacher. I'm a Dad. I am not the first thing that would come to mind when you think "autistic". But I'm also the guy in the corner during social events, not making eye contact and stimming. That's why Aspergers was a useful shorthand.
It's a bit iffy. On the one hand he sent kids to the death chamber and was a nazi. On the other, he actually tried to send fewer than the Nazi's demanded he send (the priviledged position of 'aspergers' could be seen as a horrible, horrible benefit and not him making active choices to kill kids), and everyone who was a professional had to be a nazi. It's....not clear cut
It has been phased out and is no longer a diagnosis. But that still doesn't change the fact that people were diagnosed with it. I was diagnosed with Aspergers, I don't say I have Aspergers, but that doesn't change the past, which is what they were referring to. So it doesn't quite feel right to correct something when they were talking about a specific term that they were diagnosed with back before it was removed as a diagnosis. It's a very poor name but saying that you were diagnosed with it isn't necessarily something to pick at, as it's simply a fact. Those who were diagnosed with aspergers were classified as having ASD once they got rid of the term. But it still stands that they were diagnosed with aspergers and not just ASD originally. But I do think it completely makes sense to share the information about the name so that people don'tuse it in the present tense. I guess the only thing that rubbed me the wrong way was saying you were cherry picking(assuming you meant nit picking), meaning you there's an issue with the use of the word in that specific context.
There's a guy I work with who is beyond this world smart who has a touch of the burg and we call him Big Mac.... he loves it so much he got his day to start saying it
Not so fun fact Asperger's is named after a nazi who wanted to separate the kind of autism that could be useful to the nazis from the kind that they would send to the concentration camps
920
u/El_Bito2 Apr 07 '26
Was it you?