Why Did Asperger’s Stop Being a Diagnosis? Asperger's syndrome was named after an Austrian pediatrician, Hans Asperger, who in 1944 described four children who were highly intelligent but socially awkward and physically clumsy. However, he did not coin the term. It was a British psychiatrist, ...
I mentioned in my autism self-diagnosis episode that I did NOT understand social situations when I was a child, particularly in high school. I think it didn't help that my Mum died in my last year at primary school. And the year after that was kind of a blur for our family, I coul...
A diagnosis isn’t always apparent, and most serious complaints require invasive testing. Treatment is rarely as simple as a nasal spray, and everything I do is shrouded by the specter of medical-legal ramifications. Nonetheless, as I reflect on my fictional mentor, it becomes apparent how ...
I am pretty sure Sherman would qualify for the canine diagnosis of an introverted personality. Ask any veterinary psychiatrist (yes, they exist) and they will tell you that dogs suffer from almost every psychiatric disorder that afflicts humans—all except one: schizophrenia. If we played the qu...
The more intelligent a person is, the less comfortable they may be with revealing too much about themselves to people then don’t know well. This is the logical thing to do in many ways, as we all know that there are people around who might use personal information against a person. ...
Sacks loved to “discover potential in people who aren’t thought to have any,” as he put it in a 1986 interview.Sacks’ writing about autism revealed an inner world that most assumed didn’t exist. “When Greta Thunberg described her Asperger’s as being like a super power, I thought...