Re: @Trevor
Both my parents are psych nurses. My family is littered with psychologists, psychiatrists, psych nurses and sociologists. "Fashionable diagnoses" is not nearly the problem you make it out to be, at least not outside of the god 'ol USA. You see, in countries where patient outcomes are the measure of success - not the amount of money that can be charged per incident - this is way less of a problem then you seem to be making it out to be.
There is a very real risk of mental health professionals diagnosing someone with Asperger’s when they meet only some of the criteria and that is indeed something we need to keep pushing education on. That said, however, few people actually want to be diagnosed with this, though you are correct in noting that many here on The Register identify with it.
Why that shocks you I simply don’t understand. Autism spectrum disorders – including Asperger’s – affect only a small portion of our society…but “IT professionals” only make up a small portion of our society. People with disorders like Asperger’s eventually end up somewhere. There is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that they disperse throughout the working population with the same statistical frequency as they disperse in the general population.
Quite the opposite: all evidence to hand indicates that individuals with Autism spectrum disorders gravitate in a highly disproportionate manner to the STEM and music disciplines, with IT having taken the lion’s share in the last 25 or so years. (Music is often hypothesised to be a repository of Autistics because of the very mathematical nature of the craft.)
You are diagnosing people without a license. You are accusing them of – for lack of a better term – lacking on to something you view as “fashionable” and self-diagnosing. You don’t have any actual evidence that people here are doing this, but you keep reiterating this. As though by restating your falsehoods over and over you can somehow make them true.
There is a damned good chance of finding a highly disproportionate number of individuals with Asperger’s – or who at least have some traits of Aspergers and live elsewhere on the Autism spectrum – amongst El Reg’s commentardiat. Your personal predjudices and unfulfilled fantasies about “fashionable diagnoses” won’t make individuals with living with Asperger’s any less frequent here, it won’t make them more likely to have self-diagnosed nor will it make real the delusion that people want to be diagnosed with Asperger’s.
You want to know why I’m angry? It’s because I watched my parents devote their lives to dealing with mental illness in the everyday community. I watched them deal with prejudice from the assholes and the well-meaning, even with prejudice from practitioners.
The worst prejudice of all is the very Protestant belief that mental health issues are either non-existent…or so very rare that people who feel they should get checked out once in a while are somehow lazy, unworthy, “seeking a quick out/excuse” or otherwise morally or ethically bankrupt. The worst prejudice that exists regarding mental health is the outright fallacy that you can simply “will yourself normal,” or that there even is a “normal” to will yourself towards!
You say ADHD used to be a “fashionable” diagnoses. Yet outside the US the rates of diagnoses never really dropped off much. We simply learned more about how prevalent it really was. We learned to deal with it in a number of fashions, that is existed on a spectrum of impact and we began to accept it as “normal” within our cultural framework. We are on the cusp of this with Asperger’s today.
The more we learn about the human mind the more we realise that “normal” is an ephemeral myth; one that we keep chasing to no tangible end. We are all so different that the best we can hope for is to establish a relatively arbitrary set of error bars around behaviour, neurotransmitter levels, membrane permeability and so forth then try to keep the bulk of our population within those points.
The very last thing anyone trying to deal with Asperger’s – which entails a lifetime of learning to cope with it so as to be accepted by “normal” society – needs is some asshole accusing them of faking it…or their doctors of misdiagnosing them due to “fashion.”
You sir, are that asshole.
Given the prejudice that my extended family have collectively given lifetimes to combatting, I find your choice of words, your manner, your approach, your lack of empathy and your outright prejudice offensive.
Help, don’t hinder. It’ll make you a better person.