The mystery that is Aspergers: history and questions of definition.
What is Asperger or high functioning autism?
Now this may seem like an easy question to answer. Asperger’s or High functioning autism is:
“A developmental disorder characterised by social and emotional deficiencies but accompanied by normal or above average verbal skills and cognitive ability”.
Did you understand all of that? It’s the definition that is given in the Collins dictionary and most other definitions of Aspergers comprise the same thing, a bunch of empty yet intelligent sounding language that leaves you with even more questions than you started with. Also “social and emotional deficiencies”, ugh does anyone else find how that’s phrased slightly offensive or is it just me? I mean I know I struggle with social and emotional cues, but I don’t think it’s because I’m deficient if anything I have a surplus of emotional and social awareness which makes it harder to understand and comprehend everything I am feeling and seeing all at once; also known as sensory overload? Anyway, enough rambling (sorry about that) lets get back to answering this question.
So are Aspergers and high functioning Autism the same thing? The answer is it depends on who you ask. They seem to be pretty interchangeable terms and are both thought of as being under the Autism umbrella. I’ve found that what someone calls it mostly depends on their generation and their knowledge of the history of autism studies. Personally I don’t mind either, but I say Asperger’s not because I like that term, but because most people I know where born in the 90s when the term Asperger seems to have come back into use or they’re university faculty who grew up in the 90s and therefore are more familiar with the term Asperger’s and its general meaning especially if they’re from Britain or Europe. However, because of the origins of the name Aspergers, it is a word that falls in and out of use because of the negative connotations associated with the man who coined the term.
The second question is why is there so much debate and confusion surrounding whether it’s called Asperger’s or High functioning Autism. is there a legitimate reason for this debate or is it simply because of research being done in different generations and people only seeing the differences and not the similarities between what they thought are different disorders? Or maybe it’s the opposite problem and people are putting too much stock in the shared traits of autism and Aspergers while ignoring where they differ. Or perhaps it’s because people wanted to step away from being associated with the more than questionable practices of Hans Asperger.
The best way to explore these questions, particularly the second one, is to take you on a journey through the history of the study of autism or autistic spectrum disorder. I know! Yawn history is so boring!! But hopefully I’ve written enough history essays on Roman political debates and Greek philosophers to make even the most boring history sound exciting.
As suggested above, Asperger’s is named after the Austrian paediatrician Hans Asperger. And yes he identified the defining characteristics of what would become known as Aspergers, but in the early 1940s Hans Asperger, was an Austrian physician worked in Vienna, which at the time the time was under Nazi occupation with Austria having been annexed by them in 1938. Hans Aspergers is known widely for his early work focusing on mental health, which focused specifically on children. Well, so far he sound pretty okay, doesn’t he? For a while that was all he was known for, but researchers in 2018 discovered some increasingly questionable details about Hans Aspergers, which confirmed what others had suspected but hadn’t had the evidence to prove. Warning things get very iffy from here on…
To begin with, Aspergers first called the condition he was describing Autistic psychopathy. The definition of psychopathy can easily explain why there seems to be this enduring stereotype that people with aspergers are emotionally cold and lack the ability to consider others.
Aside from this, there’s also the fact that despite being the person who first identified the traits that suggest someone may be on the spectrum and therefore quite the impressive paediatrician from that perspective, there is a darker side to Asperger’s past.
It is now known that while the Am Spiegelgrund clinic was open in Vienna, Hans Asperger sent at least two children there. The history of this clinic is fraught with horrific secrets, the ones we know are gut churning and there are probably many more that we may never know, but is mostly known for not only being endorsed by Adolf Hitler, but perhaps even more significant than that is that it’s known for the deaths of at least 789 sick and disabled children as a part of the child euthanasia programme. The actions of those involved with the clinic were not only horrific but inhumane, so despite Hans Aspergers scientific contributions and work as a paediatrician, his involvement with the programme rightly overshadows that.
But I am not an expert on this topic, as I focused on French history prior to 1850 in my modern history degree and, well, my for ancient history and archaeology. I focus predominantly on ritualistic burials and behaviour in bronze age to early Roman Europe. Therefore, if anyone is interested in the annexation of Austria or looking into a more detailed account of the Am Spiegelgrund clinic, then I encourage you to do some research yourself, but please ensure that you read reputable sources that are reliable that way you’ll be less likely to fall prey to any conspiracy theories, or as I like to refer to them: the bane of a historians existence!
So I suppose that answers the second question at least partially of why we often switch between different names for what seems to be the same condition or at least within the realm of being similar, history along with the humans races need to place everything into a box has meant that Aspergers and autism have become merged. And I’m not saying they shouldn’t be. They seem to share more similarities than differences, but the differences should not be ignored. For instance, one trait of autism is language delay, but language delay doesn’t occur in people with Aspergers. There are differences that need to be recognised not only by the professionals but also by others as well, because placing someone in a box only helps you, it doesn’t help them or show them how to go through life dealing with these traits that result in them being thought of as ‘Abnormal’. So what about the first question? Are Aspergers and High Functioning Autism the same thing? Yet again, I am not an expert, but I would tentatively say, not really….
Well, like most things, it really depends on who you ask. For decades, Aspergers has switched between being viewed as a part of the spectrum and being thought of as something else which shares similarities with ASD. There are actually two theories concerning autism that we tend to focus on. Hans Asperger’s ideas have only really become well known since the nineties, but another physician studied autism not long after Aspergers did. Leo Kanner, however, seems to have focused on children who had more severe cases of autism and could easily be placed up on the spectrum. The children that Aspergers refers to, however, fit in more with what is thought of as high functioning autism and, to some extent, Aspergers. According to the autism society website aspergers is so difficult to place in a box because although it shares traits with autism, it is at the same time a very different condition: for instance, as mentioned above one of the defining traits of autism is a speech delay, but that isn’t found in aspergers. People with aspergers tend to have good language and cognitive skill and are also known for having a higher intelligence quotient. In fact, people with Aspergers on average have a significantly higher IQ than the national average. Signs of aspergers tend to be much more subtle than the signs of autism. For instance, children with aspergers show talent in many primary school activities such as learning how to read or numeracy. Therefore, they don’t stand out as having any specific difficulties and as for their social difficulties, people usually just assume they are shy. The average age for children being diagnosed with autism is 5 but for aspergers it 11, however this mostly relates to boys. The studies by Hans Aspergers and Leo Kanner focused on boys and therefore there is a very limited understanding of how aspergers or autism presents in females. Females also portray them slightly different basically just because females are different to males and don’t fit the stereotype. There is this frankly ridiculous view that in order to have something, you need to portray every single trait on the list and if you’re missing one, then you don’t have it. Essentially, both autism and aspergers present differently in girls and females are often better at hiding it, which means they usually go undiagnosed for a long time. Overall, some researchers have concluded that children with aspergers and high functioning autism have different neurophysical profiles, but other researchers have found that there is nothing exactly which places the two in different boxes. Aspergers has its own diagnostic criteria as set forth by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, however, as the treatment for these is very similar, if not the same, it is perfectly okay to think of them as being the same disorder.
Well, that’s it for this post. I hope I answered some questions, although I think I raised more questions than I answered. Hope you all enjoy reading this and I’ll try to post again soon.
see you all soon hopefully
Elle
Reference
Hopkinson, T. (2023). What is Autism? – Autism Q & A, Blog, Caregivers. [online] AutismBC. Available at: https://www.autismbc.ca/blog/what-is-autism/.
