Quad Immigrant Dies After Deportation

February 2012  A 21-year-old undocumented immigrant, deported from a Chicago-area hospital after an on-the-job accident left him a quadriplegic, died Jan. 1 in a Mexican hospital that advocates say was ill-equipped to handle his injuries.

Quelino Ojeda Jimenez was injured in a 20-foot fall on his construction job in August 2010. When his family became unable to pay his medical expenses, a battle ensued between Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, Ill., and immigration advocates. He was deported to Mexico in an air ambulance on Dec. 22, 2010. The small hospital where he was sent was not equipped to properly treat high-level SCIs, and over the course of one year, Ojeda suffered two cardiac arrests and developed a septic infection before being transferred to a larger hospital in Mexico on Dec. 19, 2011. He succumbed to sepsis and pneumonia less than two weeks later.

“He never even made it to his home,” Jesus Vargas, a friend of Ojeda’s in Chicago, told the Chicago Tribune. “He was always in the hospital stuck to that machine that helped him breathe.”

Following Ojeda’s death, Advocate Health Care issued a statement expressing regret and announcing plans to reexamine its policies for treating international patients, including undocumented immigrants.

(c) Copy Written: New Mobility: The Magazine for Active Wheelchair Users 2012

 http://www.newmobility.com/newsDetail.cfm#article12067

Bloggers Comments:  Currently there is a heated national debate in the United States over illegal immigration. I take no opinion on this matter. I would, however, like my readers' perspective on the following: given a situation such as Ojeda-Jimenez's should extenuating circumstances (his disability and survival risks)  suspended his deportation?

Please keep your posts clean and tempered. Hostile and vulgar posts will be removed.

Hysteria and the Teenage Girl

Opinion

Vanessa Davis

By CAITLIN FLANAGAN

Published: January 28, 2012 

 

CHEERLEADERS with Tourette’s syndrome. Like a fly buzzing against the window, this weird arrangement of words flitted across the edge of my consciousness last week. I kept thinking I should take a minute to track down the Onion piece from which this kooky phrase surely emanated, but finally committed some desultory Googling, and discovered that the buzzing idea correlated (more or less) to an actual event. A break in the case — and the appearance of two of the girls in a television interview — brought the story to national attention.

One afternoon last October in a small town about 50 miles from Buffalo, a high school cheerleader lay down for a nap, and woke up changed. She had been struck not with Tourette’s but with a host of symptoms that resembled it: facial tics, uncontrollable movement, stuttering, verbal outbursts. Several other schoolmates have been afflicted, for a total of 14 girls. One boy reported symptoms.  

Parents, school officials and doctors investigated possible organic causes of this troubling event, and serially ruled out potential suspects, from vaccine reactions to environmental hazards. (Erin Brockovich is looking into possible toxic causes.) The girls continued to suffer, dropped out of school and gave television interviews in which their arms looped around wildly and their voices broke and warbled.

Well, that’s the kind of nutty story that only happens once, or so I briefly thought, until more focused Googling quickly led me to an almost identical episode, this one in 2002, in a high school in rural North Carolina. Once again, a cheerleader was first to manifest the strange symptoms, and once again other girls, some of them cheerleaders, were struck with the same condition.

There are famous cases that closely mimic these strange events. In 1962, in a girls’ school in Tanzania, a laughing epidemic spread to 95 students and lasted for months. In 1965 there was a fainting episode at a girls’ school in Blackburn, England, that landed 85 girls in the hospital. In 1983, when there was a widespread fear of chemical warfare in the West Bank, more than 900 Arab schoolgirls and a few female Israeli soldiers exhibited the symptoms of having been gassed, but doctors found no specific cause for the outbreak.

In all of these cases, the ultimate diagnosis — unpalatable in our post-Freudian age — was good old-fashioned hysteria. In the cheerleader cases, the first girl seems to have suffered from some kind of mental or emotional distress, which she expressed through otherwise unrelated physical symptoms. The other girls — victims of yesteryear’s mass hysteria and today’s mass psychogenic illness, in which the symptoms of hysteria pass from person to person, like contagion — believed the condition to be communicable and “caught” it.

Hysteria is the most retrograde and non-womyn-empowering condition. It’s not supposed to happen anymore (we have Title IX!), but it won’t seem to go away. Both history and myth are filled with stories of girls exhibiting bizarre symptoms around the time of puberty — from Cassandra and her raving, to the girls of the Salem witch trials, to the girls whose households were believed to be the site of poltergeist hauntings, to cheerleaders in New York and North Carolina. Pubescent girls, it seems, are manifestly more likely to exhibit extreme and bizarre psychological symptoms than are teenage boys.

What no one has been able to determine is why this is so, why it is the cheerleaders and not the linebackers who come down with tics and stuttering. Female adolescence is — universally — an emotionally and psychologically intense period. It is during this time that girls become aware of the emergence of womanhood, with both the great joy and promise that come with it, and also the threat of danger. Much on their minds is their new potential for childbearing, an event that for most of human history has been fraught with physical peril. Furthermore, their emergence as sexual creatures brings with it heady excitement and increased physical vulnerability. They are also sharply aware that soon they will have to leave home forever, and at the very moment when they are most keenly desirous of its comforts and protections.

Most parents of adolescent girls will never have to contend with episodes of hysteria of the kind experienced by the cheerleaders. But anyone with a teenage daughter can attest that this is a time of emotional extremes and high drama, of girls who are one moment affectionate youngsters and the next screaming banshees. “What’s gotten into you?” the perplexed mother in “The Exorcist” wonders about her demonized daughter; it’s a question that the mothers of non-possessed girls often ask during the teenage years.

What girls need during this time is a stable and supportive space in which to work out all of this drama. In many respects a teenage girl’s home is more important to her than at any time since she was a small child. She also needs emotional support and protection from the most corrosive cultural forces that seek to exploit her when she is least able to resist. Most of all she needs some privacy to work to make a way for herself as a strong and confident young woman. The emotional swings of normal female adolescence attest to its intensity, and they are also the reason girls need and deserve more protection during this time of their lives. As a neurologist treating the New York girls said: “These girls will get better. We have to give them time and space.”

Caitlin Flanagan is the author most recently, of “Girl Land.”

(c) Copy Written New York Times 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/opinion/sunday/adolescent-girl-hysteria.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=upstate%20girls&st=cse

Bloggers Commentary: This unraveling situation in an upstate New York school has many baffled. Among the baffled and newly involved is Erin Brockovich. She, like me, wonder if there is an environmental explanation. What I question is why this population? Why predominately girls? Why 'this' school? And most importantly, why are doctors and officials so quick to assert these girls are expressing hysteria? Is a hysteria diagnosis a gender bias label? I use the term 'diagnosis' loosely as I do not know if official diagnoses have actually been determined in any of these cases. Hysteria, according to this NYTimes article states that girls are more likely the target of such diagnosis and my web search corroborated this finding. Hysteria disagnoses go as far back as to the early 1900s. So I ask again, is the fact that these symptoms are reported more in girls the reason why a nearly defunct and gender-biased DSM IV TR diagnosis is being applied to the situation? What are your thoughts?

Older parents more likely to have an autistic child: study

Analysis & Opinion

By Kerry Grens

 
NEW YORK | Thu Feb 2, 2012 4:24pm EST

(Reuters Health) - Children born to a parent over age 35 are at greater risk for developing an autism spectrum disorder -- but the risk is the same whether just one or both parents are older, according to a new study of Danish families.

 "Parental age doesn't appear to be synergistic. That is having an older mom and an older dad doesn't increase risk more than having one or the other," said Marissa King, a professor at the Yale School of Management, who was not involved in the study.

"The data clearly demonstrate that older parents are more likely to have kids with autism, but it doesn't establish why that is the case," King told Reuters Health in an email.

The findings throw a monkey wrench into the idea that perhaps older sperm or eggs have more mutations that could increase the odds of having a child develop autism.

Erik Thorlund Parner at the University of Aarhus School of Public Health in Denmark said that if genetic problems arising from older sperm or eggs explain the results, then having both an older sperm and an older egg together should total up to an even higher risk of autism for the child.

Yet Parner, who led the study, and his colleagues did not find a higher risk of autism among kids with two older parents compared with just one.

The researchers collected information on more than 9,500 children in Denmark who had been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder.

These disorders range from mild Asperger's Syndrome to severe mental retardation and social disability.
In the new study, kids born to fathers in their late thirties had up to a 28 percent higher risk of being diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder than kids born to dads under age 35. The increase in risk was not tied to the mother's age.

For kids born to dads over age 40, the risk for developing an autism spectrum disorder was 37 to 55 percent greater than for kids of dads under age 35, and the mother's age didn't seem to matter.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 10 in 1,100 children have an autism spectrum disorder. A 55-percent increase in risk, for instance, would push that number up to about 15 out of every 1,100 children.

Similar to the findings on dads, children whose moms had them in their late 30s were 21 to 37 percent more likely to develop autism than kids with moms under age 35, and the dad's age did not change the numbers.
And just like with dads over age 40, kids born to moms over age 40 were 28 to 65 percent more likely to have autism than kids with moms under age 35, regardless of the age of their dad.

"The result was surprising in that there was no additive effect of maternal and paternal age," Parner said in an email to Reuters Health.

"We do not really have a qualified guess on the explanation to the non-additive effect," he said. "I don't believe that one can yet say anything conclusive about whether (having an) older parent is biologically related to autism."

Some earlier studies have also found that older parents are more likely to have a child with autism, but they have not had consistent results.

For example, one study found that having an older mother increases a child's risk of autism, but having an older father only increases the risk if the mom is under the age of 30 (see Reuters Health report of February 8, 2010).

Parner said he and his colleagues are planning on an even larger analysis of autism and parental age using data from Denmark, Finland, Israel, Norway, Sweden and Western Australia.

SOURCE: bit.ly/wFRsAK Annals of Epidemiology, online January 24, 2012.

 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/02/us-autism-idUSTRE8112A820120202

(c) Copy written Reuters 2012

Bloggers Commentary: Research has already shown that some childhood disorders such as Down Syndrome, have been linked to parents age at gestation.  However, where much of the current research on Autism has been targeted toward environmental causes, to what extent does genetics play in its development? Biological vs. Environmental?  Can environmental causes like Bisphenol A in baby bottles, or food additives be examined more in relation to existing research on other disorders?  What are your thoughts?

I Had Asperger Syndrome. Briefly.

New York Times: Op-Ed Contributor

By BENJAMIN NUGENT

Published: January 31, 2012

FOR a brief, heady period in the history of autism spectrum diagnosis, in the late ’90s, I had Asperger syndrome.

There’s an educational video from that time, called “Understanding Asperger’s,” in which I appear. I am the affected 20-year-old in the wannabe-hipster vintage polo shirt talking about how keen his understanding of literature is and how misunderstood he was in fifth grade. The film was a research project directed by my mother, a psychology professor and Asperger specialist, and another expert in her department. It presents me as a young man living a full, meaningful life, despite his mental abnormality.

“Understanding Asperger’s” was no act of fraud. Both my mother and her colleague believed I met the diagnostic criteria laid out in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition. The manual, still the authoritative text for American therapists, hospitals and insurers, listed the symptoms exhibited by people with Asperger disorder, and, when I was 17, I was judged to fit the bill.

I exhibited a “qualified impairment in social interaction,” specifically “failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level” (I had few friends) and a “lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests, or achievements with other people” (I spent a lot of time by myself in my room reading novels and listening to music, and when I did hang out with other kids I often tried to speak like an E. M. Forster narrator, annoying them). I exhibited an “encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus” (I memorized poems and spent a lot of time playing the guitar and writing terrible poems and novels).

The general idea with a psychological diagnosis is that it applies when the tendencies involved inhibit a person’s ability to experience a happy, normal life. And in my case, the tendencies seemed to do just that. My high school G.P.A. would have been higher if I had been less intensely focused on books and music. If I had been well-rounded enough to attain basic competence at a few sports, I wouldn’t have provoked rage and contempt in other kids during gym and recess.

The thing is, after college I moved to New York City and became a writer and met some people who shared my obsessions, and I ditched the Forsterian narrator thing, and then I wasn’t that awkward or isolated anymore. According to the diagnostic manual, Asperger syndrome is “a continuous and lifelong disorder,” but my symptoms had vanished.

Last year I sold a novel of the psychological-realism variety, which means that my job became to intuit the unverbalized meanings of social interactions and create fictional social encounters with interesting secret subtexts. By contrast, people with Asperger syndrome and other autism spectrum disorders usually struggle to pick up nonverbal social cues. They often prefer the kind of thinking involved in chess and math, activities at which I am almost as inept as I am at soccer.

The biggest single problem with the diagnostic criteria applied to me is this: You can be highly perceptive with regard to social interaction, as a child or adolescent, and still be a spectacular social failure. This is particularly true if you’re bad at sports or nervous or weird-looking.

As I came into my adult personality, it became clear to me and my mother that I didn’t have Asperger syndrome, and she apologized profusely for putting me in the video. For a long time, I sulked in her presence. I yelled at her sometimes, I am ashamed to report. And then I forgave her, after about seven years. Because my mother’s intentions were always noble. She wanted to educate parents and counselors about the disorder. She wanted to erase its stigma.

I wonder: If I had been born five years later and given the diagnosis at the more impressionable age of 12, what would have happened? I might never have tried to write about social interaction, having been told that I was hard-wired to find social interaction baffling.

The authors of the next edition of the diagnostic manual, the D.S.M.-5, are considering a narrower definition of the autism spectrum. This may reverse the drastic increase in Asperger diagnoses that has taken place over the last 10 to 15 years. Many prominent psychologists have reacted to this news with dismay. They protest that children and teenagers on the mild side of the autism spectrum will be denied the services they need if they’re unable to meet the new, more exclusive criteria.

But my experience can’t be unique. Under the rules in place today, any nerd, any withdrawn, bookish kid, can have Asperger syndrome.

The definition should be narrowed. I don’t want a kid with mild autism to go untreated. But I don’t want a school psychologist to give a clumsy, lonely teenager a description of his mind that isn’t true.

Benjamin Nugent, the director of creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University, is the author of “American Nerd: The Story of My People.”

New York Times (c) Registered Trademark 2012 

Bloggers Comments:  Can someone be misdiagnosed with Autism? If not Autism, what? If the diagnostic criteria changes, what happens to the current children receiving education and support services and to future children that fall into the gap between the old and the new diagnostic criteria?  What about the children?

New Definition of Autism Will Exclude Many, Study Suggests

New York Times

New Definition of Autism Will Exclude Many, Study Suggests

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Mary Meyer, right, of Ramsey, N.J., said that a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome was crucial for her daughter, Susan, 37.

By BENEDICT CAREY

Published: January 19, 2012

Proposed changes in the definition of autism would sharply reduce the skyrocketing rate at which the disorder is diagnosed and might make it harder for many people who would no longer meet the criteria to get health, educational and social services, a new analysis suggests.

James C. McPartland, an assistant professor in the Child Study Center at Yale University, is answering your questions about this possible new definition of autism.

DOCUMENT: How the Definition of Autism May Change

The definition is now being reassessed by an expert panel appointed by the American Psychiatric Association, which is completing work on the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the first major revision in 17 years. The D.S.M., as the manual is known, is the standard reference for mental disorders, driving research, treatment and insurance decisions. Most experts expect that the new manual will narrow the criteria for autism; the question is how sharply.

The results of the new analysis are preliminary, but they offer the most drastic estimate of how tightening the criteria for autism could affect the rate of diagnosis. For years, many experts have privately contended that the vagueness of the current criteria for autism and related disorders like Asperger syndrome was contributing to the increase in the rate of diagnoses — which has ballooned to one child in 100, according to some estimates.

The psychiatrists’ association is wrestling with one of the most agonizing questions in mental health — where to draw the line between unusual and abnormal — and its decisions are sure to be wrenching for some families. At a time when school budgets for special education are stretched, the new diagnosis could herald more pitched battles. Tens of thousands of people receive state-backed services to help offset the disorders’ disabling effects, which include sometimes severe learning and social problems, and the diagnosis is in many ways central to their lives. Close networks of parents have bonded over common experiences with children; and the children, too, may grow to find a sense of their own identity in their struggle with the disorder.

The proposed changes would probably exclude people with a diagnosis who were higher functioning. “I’m very concerned about the change in diagnosis, because I wonder if my daughter would even qualify,” said Mary Meyer of Ramsey, N.J. A diagnosis of Asperger syndrome was crucial to helping her daughter, who is 37, gain access to services that have helped tremendously. “She’s on disability, which is partly based on the Asperger’s; and I’m hoping to get her into supportive housing, which also depends on her diagnosis.”

The new analysis, presented Thursday at a meeting of the Icelandic Medical Association, opens a debate about just how many people the proposed diagnosis would affect.

The changes would narrow the diagnosis so much that it could effectively end the autism surge, said Dr. Fred R. Volkmar, director of the Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine and an author of the new analysis of the proposal. “We would nip it in the bud.”

Experts working for the Psychiatric Association on the manual’s new definition — a group from which Dr. Volkmar resigned early on — strongly disagree about the proposed changes’ impact. “I don’t know how they’re getting those numbers,” Catherine Lord, a member of the task force working on the diagnosis, said about Dr. Volkmar’s report.

Previous projections have concluded that far fewer people would be excluded under the change, said Dr. Lord, director of the Institute for Brain Development, a joint project of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, Columbia University Medical Center and the New York Center for Autism.

Disagreement about the effect of the new definition will almost certainly increase scrutiny of the finer points of the psychiatric association’s changes to the manual. The revisions are about 90 percent complete and will be final by December, according to Dr. David J. Kupfer, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and chairman of the task force making the revisions.

At least a million children and adults have a diagnosis of autism or a related disorder, like Asperger syndrome or “pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified,” also known as P.D.D.-N.O.S. People with Asperger’s or P.D.D.-N.O.S. endure some of the same social struggles as those with autism but do not meet the definition for the full-blown version. The proposed change would consolidate all three diagnoses under one category, autism spectrum disorder, eliminating Asperger syndrome and P.D.D.-N.O.S. from the manual. Under the current criteria, a person can qualify for the diagnosis by exhibiting 6 or more of 12 behaviors; under the proposed definition, the person would have to exhibit 3 deficits in social interaction and communication and at least 2 repetitive behaviors, a much narrower menu.

Dr. Kupfer said the changes were an attempt to clarify these variations and put them under one name. Some advocates have been concerned about the proposed changes.

“Our fear is that we are going to take a big step backward,” said Lori Shery, president of the Asperger Syndrome Education Network. “If clinicians say, ‘These kids don’t fit the criteria for an autism spectrum diagnosis,’ they are not going to get the supports and services they need, and they’re going to experience failure.”

Mark Roithmayr, president of the advocacy organization Autism Speaks, said that the proposed diagnosis should bring needed clarity but that the effect it would have on services was not yet clear. “We need to carefully monitor the impact of these diagnostic changes on access to services and ensure that no one is being denied the services they need,” Mr. Roithmayr said by e-mail. “Some treatments and services are driven solely by a person’s diagnosis, while other services may depend on other criteria such as age, I.Q. level or medical history.”

In the new analysis, Dr. Volkmar, along with Brian Reichow and James McPartland, both at Yale, used data from a large 1993 study that served as the basis for the current criteria. They focused on 372 children and adults who were among the highest functioning and found that overall, only 45 percent of them would qualify for the proposed autism spectrum diagnosis now under review.

The focus on a high-functioning group may have slightly exaggerated that percentage, the authors acknowledge. The likelihood of being left out under the new definition depended on the original diagnosis: about a quarter of those identified with classic autism in 1993 would not be so identified under the proposed criteria; about three-quarters of those with Asperger syndrome would not qualify; and 85 percent of those with P.D.D.-N.O.S. would not.

Dr. Volkmar presented the preliminary findings on Thursday. The researchers will publish a broader analysis, based on a larger and more representative sample of 1,000 cases, later this year. Dr. Volkmar said that although the proposed diagnosis would be for disorders on a spectrum and implies a broader net, it focuses tightly on “classically autistic” children on the more severe end of the scale. “The major impact here is on the more cognitively able,” he said.

Dr. Lord said that the study numbers are probably exaggerated because the research team relied on old data, collected by doctors who were not aware of what kinds of behaviors the proposed definition requires. “It’s not that the behaviors didn’t exist, but that they weren’t even asking about them — they wouldn’t show up at all in the data,” Dr. Lord said.

Dr. Volkmar acknowledged as much but said that problems transferring the data could not account for the large differences in rates.

Amy Harmon contributed reporting.

New York Times (c) A registered trademark 2012

Asperger’s History of Over-Diagnosis

New York Times: Op-Ed Contributor

By PAUL STEINBERG

Published: January 31, 2012

Asperger syndrome and Aspies — the affectionate name that people diagnosed with Asperger syndrome call themselves — seem to be everywhere.

Considered to be at the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum, Asperger syndrome has become more loosely defined in the past 20 years, by both the mental health profession and by lay people, and in many instances is now synonymous with social and interpersonal disabilities. But people with social disabilities are not necessarily autistic, and giving them diagnoses on the autism spectrum often does a real disservice. An expert task force appointed by the American Psychiatric Association is now looking into the possibility of changing the way we diagnose Asperger. True autism reflects major problems with receptive language (the ability to comprehend sounds and words) and with expressive language. Pitch and tone of voice in autism are off-kilter. Language delays are common, and syntactic development is compromised; in addition, there can be repetitive motor movements.

Eventually, biological markers, now in the beginning stages of development, will help in separating autism-spectrum disorders from social disabilities. For example, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have recently developed three-dimensional brain scans that look at brain wiring. In preliminary studies people with autism-spectrum disorders appear to have too much wiring and disorganized wiring in areas involved with language acquisition.

Nevertheless, children and adults with significant interpersonal deficits are being lumped together with children and adults with language acquisition problems. Currently, with the loosening of the diagnosis of Asperger, children and adults who are shy and timid, who have quirky interests like train schedules and baseball statistics, and who have trouble relating to their peers — but who have no language-acquisition problems — are placed on the autism spectrum.

In recent years speculation has abounded that Albert Einstein must have had Asperger syndrome. Christopher Hitchens speculated that his intellectual hero George Orwell must have had Asperger. Indeed, Orwell had major problems fitting in at British preparatory schools — not surprisingly, he hated the totalitarian tenor of teachers and school administrators — but someone on the autism spectrum could probably never have become a police officer in Lower Burma, as Orwell did. Similarly, writers like Charles Morris have noted that Warren Buffett is thought to have a condition on the autism spectrum, presumably Asperger syndrome.

A 1992 United States Department of Education directive contributed to the over-diagnosis of Asperger syndrome. It called for enhanced services for children diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum and for children with “pervasive developmental disorder — not otherwise specified (P.D.D.-N.O.S.),” a diagnosis in which children with social disabilities could be lumped. The diagnosis of Asperger syndrome went through the roof. Curiously, in California, where children with P.D.D.-N.O.S. were not given enhanced services, autism-spectrum diagnoses did not increase. Too little science and too many unintended consequences.

The downside to this diagnosis lies in evidence that children with social disabilities, diagnosed now with an autism-spectrum disorder like Asperger, have lower self-esteem and poorer social development when inappropriately placed in school environments with truly autistic children. In addition, many of us clinicians have seen young adults denied job opportunities, for example in the Peace Corps, when inappropriately given a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome instead of a social disability. George Orwell might never have been able to write his brilliant essay about the shooting of an elephant if Asperger syndrome had been part of his permanent medical record.

Given that humans are social animals, interpersonal intelligence is perhaps the most important natural human skill — as valuable as or more valuable than verbal-linguistic intelligence and logical-mathematical intelligence (to use the terminology of the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner), the skills focused on in school. Social disabilities are not at all trivial, but they become cheapened by the ubiquity of the Asperger diagnosis, and they become miscast when put in the autism spectrum.

In his 2009 book “Parallel Play,” Tim Page, a former music critic for The Washington Post, describes his relief in being given an Asperger syndrome diagnosis as an adult and thus having an explanation for his longstanding social difficulties. But the rubric of a “social disability” would be more accurate than “autism spectrum” for people like Mr. Page, and potentially just as relieving. In addition, adults and children who have normal expressive and receptive language skills can benefit more fully from social-skills programs than adults and children with true autism. In fact, Tim Page learned a large measure of his social skills from an Emily Post course, just as Warren Buffett credits a Dale Carnegie program with changing his life.

For Mr. Buffett and Mr. Page, these social skills do not come naturally and automatically. But these men are able to compensate more completely than a truly autistic child or adult whose language deficiencies and cognitive deficits can often put him at a level of functioning in the mentally retarded range.

Many people, now inappropriately labeled as Aspies, make the world a richer, more interesting place. Their quirky absorptions in, say, physics, baseball stats or investment strategies add enormously to human advancement. Unlike adults with a Peter Pan syndrome who never move beyond adolescence, children and young adults with significant social disabilities tend to grow quite effectively into their adult lives. Their seriousness and singularity of focus fit more compatibly with the interests of older adults rather than the interests of their childhood or young adult peers.

For better or worse, though, Asperger syndrome has become a part of our cultural landscape. Comments about a person’s having “a touch of Asperger’s” seem to be part of everyday conversations. Even an episode of “South Park” last year was devoted to Asperger syndrome. We can only hope that better physiological markers distinguishing between the autism-spectrum disorders and pure social disabilities can stem this tide of ever more pathologizing.

But, as Martha Denckla, a pediatric neurologist at Johns Hopkins University, has lamented, the only Americans in the future who will perhaps not be labeled as having a touch of Asperger syndrome will be politicians and lobbyists. Members of the political establishment may have other kinds of psychopathology; but, unlike the rest of us, they at least cannot be thought of as Aspies.

Paul Steinberg is a psychiatrist.

New York Times (c) Registered Tradmark 2012

Albert Einstein and the Autism Connection

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRRNeAilrnM