Aspies For Freedom

November 17, 2005

Nancy Andreasen, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, says her profession have become overly dependent on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the industry's diagnostic bible that's now in its fourth edition, and which Andreasen helped write an earlier version of.

Speaking to New Scientist magazine, Andreasen says the book was never meant to be "the absolute truth" and that there's a tendency in psychiatry today to "make diagnosis through checklists, with less emphasis on the interesting uniqueness of each individual patient and on the humanism that lay at the heart of early psychiatry".

Citing the example of schizophrenia, Andreasen says that following the recommendations of a working party she chaired, DSM IV keeps things simple and lists 8 general symptoms for the illness. But she says "This is not a complete description. You have to know much more than just those DSM criteria before a patient can be reliably diagnosed".

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2005/11/ag...tic_c.html

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opin...825262.400

I agree that too much emphasis is placed on people meeting *all* the criteria, but they are useful guides.

The problem in my case recently was a psychologist who thought I didn't have AS because I didn't appear to meet one of the criteria, even though the different section of the DSMIV say things like 'meets two out of four of these criteria', he wanted me to meet all of them. :roll:

I agree too.  Very few people, I have found, meet all the criteria.  For me most of them applied but there was some that I did not meet at all.

When I first went to visit a local GP about getting a referral to a psychologist, he said that I couldn't possibly have AS because I was too high achieving.  How wrong he was.  Obviously he couldn't have both high and low achieving on his 'checklist' so he only assumed people with AS were always low achieving.

When people equate being Aspie with low-achieving or whatever, I always inform them that Einstein's status as an Aspie has been all but confirmed (I heard this second-hand but bear with me). The look I get from some of them is hilarious. I wonder sometimes if Hans Asperger actually met Albert Einstein.

I fit pretty much all of the diagnostic criteria as far as I am aware. About the only one I dispute is that I have far too many hobbies and ideas to be narrowly focused. Even if I do involve myself in them so deeply that I have to do them one at a time.