February 8, 2012: Casey Schwartz, writing in yesterday's Daily Beast, reports that Asperger's syndrome is overdiagnosed, "ill-defined [and] may not be a syndrome much longer."
According to the plan, when the DSM V—the fifth edition of the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the profession’s standard diagnostic reference for mental disorders—is published next year, it will not contain Asperger’s syndrome at all. Instead, all diagnoses of autism—of which Asperger’s is currently considered a subset—will be collapsed together onto one spectrum, and rated in gradations from mild to severe....
A few excerpts:
It wasn’t until the 1980s, when British psychiatrist Lorna Wing translated [Austrian physician Hans] Asperger’s original paper into English, that the idea of [Asperger's] took hold in the United States.
Wing’s phrase for describing the essence of the syndrome has become famous: Asperger's kids, she wrote, are “active but odd.”
They don’t have the language or cognitive impairments seen in autistic disorder, but they do have the social handicap—the inability to relate normally to others—that also characterizes autistic disorder. Many doctors feel that the introduction of Asperger’s syndrome enriched clinical thinking, adding something that had not been available before....
Many doctors believe Asperger’s is significantly overdiagnosed—so much so that it might singlehandedly account for why there has been such a dramatic uptick in the total number of autism-spectrum diagnoses handed out each year.
Bryna Siegel, a child psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, was a member of the DSM IV working group. She says she “undiagnoses” Asperger’s far more frequently than she diagnoses it. For every 10 children who come to see her with a diagnosis of Asperger’s, she “undiagnoses” nine....
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