[charlieflowers]

"... Asperger's is being abandoned.... Now it's slated for removal from the next edition of the DSM"

REALLY??! Wow. I sure thought I was seeing a bunch of misguided hullabaloo, but I'm surprised to see the "industry" itself is aware of it and addressing it. Do you have a link or any kind of substantiation?

[lutusp]

> Do you have a link or any kind of substantiation?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/health/03asperger.html?pag...

The above is just one of the many links to this topic -- here's another:

http://www.npr.org/2010/12/29/132407384/whats-a-mental-disor...

It's important to say that DSM-V (the new edition of the diagnostic manual) is being compiled in secret, contrary to the open nature of science, and demonstrating that the psychological community are circling the wagons against what is certain to be a storm of criticism once it's published (slated for May 2013).

One of the tidbits that has slipped out of the secret process is that grief over the loss of a loved one will qualify for a depression diagnosis, which will allow the prescribing of drugs to treat this new "mental illness."

Further reading: http://arachnoid.com/trouble_with_psychology

[polshaw]

    >Asperger’s syndrome... will be folded into a single broad diagnosis, autism spectrum disorder

^ FTA quoted as a source. It's not going anywhere, just re-labelling. There are definitely things behind AS, it's certainly not all just 'hullabaloo', even if a lot of cases might be.

[lutusp]

> It's not going anywhere, just re-labelling.

Not really. Two things are happening:

1. Asperger's is being dropped as a diagnosis.

2. ASD diagnostic criteria are being redefined with the specific aim of reducing the number of diagnoses, to avoid another epidemic of nonsense treatments of people who, apart from being intelligent, are otherwise normal.

Further reading: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/health/research/new-autism...

> There are definitely things behind AS ...

Yes, there certainly are. It's a gold mine for clinical psychology, because anyone to the right of the mean population I.Q. can be diagnosed using the present criteria, and because of this kind of abuse, it's being abandoned -- it's just too tempting to apply it to everyone. As one of its prominent critics has said, "It's not an evidence-based term."