A couple of months ago, a post discussed ridiculous speculation that Romney is on the spectrum. At New York, Benjamin Wallace writes of terminology:
But this is not a story about Asperger’s, autism, or the spectrum—those very real afflictions that can bring untold hardship to the people who suffer from them and to their families. It is, instead, a story about “Asperger’s,” “autism,” and “the spectrum”—our one-stop-shopping shorthand for the jerky husband, the socially inept plutocrat, the tactless boss, the child prodigy with no friends, the remorseless criminal. It’s about the words we deploy to describe some murky hybrid of egghead and aloof.He links the phenomenon to DSM-IV, which aimed to add precision to psychiatry:
The science writers hired to draft the DSM-IV text inexplicably dropped one of the criteria the committee had agreed distinguished Asperger’s: gross motor clumsiness. And, arbitrarily, they decided that the criteria for Asperger’s would be the same as for autism, with simply a different number of criteria needing to be met to qualify. “Asperger’s got put in at the last minute,” recalls working-group chairman Fred Volkmar, head of child psychiatry at the Yale–New Haven Children’s Hospital, “with a lot of tweaking of it by powers on high … There’s so much of a rush to get the finished book done and copyedited and out. Things happen.” Volkmar says that for the PDD-NOS diagnosis, a copy editor who happened not to like an “and” replaced it with “or,” a seemingly tiny change that significantly expanded the diagnosis.Simon Baron-Cohen suggested that parents in science and technology are more likely to have kids on the spectrum:
Baron-Cohen has come in for criticism by scholars and some autism advocates who view his methods as unrigorous. Other researchers have pointed out that so-called autism clusters tend to be in areas with more highly educated people—who tend to marry older (a factor that correlates with higher autism rates) and who have the money to have their kids tested. “I don’t think Baron-Cohen understands the rudiments of genetics,” says Jonathan Mitchell, a high-functioning autistic who writes the Autism’s Gadfly blog. But Baron-Cohen’s work gets all the media play. In 2001, Wired published an article, “The Geek Syndrome,” popularizing the autistic-nerd meme. It was accompanied by Baron-Cohen’s 50-question self-diagnostic questionnaire, and afterward, says Bryna Siegel, whose clinic is a short drive from Silicon Valley, “we had an incredible number of phone calls. I told my assistant, ‘If someone has their secretary call, don’t call back. If they have a secretary, they don’t have Asperger’s.’ ”Back to reality:
For clinicians in the trenches, the more exuberant efforts to link autism with genius can be exasperating. “Do blind people hear music more exquisitely than people with sight?” asks Siegel. “We don’t have any neurophysiological evidence that they do.” Similarly, most people with Asperger’s have average intelligence, with high IQs the exception. And many with ASD, and the families who care for them, suffer terribly. “There clearly are people with ASD who marry,” says Catherine Lord, director of the Center for Autism and the Developing Brain at Weill Cornell Medical College, “but they are not many. More and more people with ASD have jobs, but the majority are underemployed, or have jobs that don’t use their capabilities as much as possible. So these references to Einstein and Jefferson are not helpful.”
