> No, because there's little that connects the Asperger Syndrome traits with those of autism. is pretty out there.

If it weren't true, psychologists would have argued against dropping the diagnosis. But they argued in favor of it -- they realized they had made a mistake.

> Like, I can't imagine you could find a single psychologist that would strongly agree with it.

That's a classic non sequitur in mental health. It's uncontroversial that you can find a psychiatrist or psychologist who will, seriously and at length, agree or disagree with any position whatever. It's a simple matter of looking. I can quote any number of examples -- a Harvard University professor who took alien abduction reports at face value, as though they represented reality. A department of psychiatry chairman who interviewed children about their past lives on Planet Earth, in complete seriousness. And so forth.

Saying that a psychiatrist or psychologist holds a particular view on a topic isn't exactly evidence for the proposition.

> I know you have your issues with psychologists, but a fair criticism requires an accurate characterization of what they say.

Oh, I agree, because evidence rules and my opinions shouldn't make any difference to the objective evidence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_E._Mack

Quote: "John Edward Mack M.D. (October 4, 1929 – September 27, 2004) was an American psychiatrist, writer, and professor at Harvard Medical School. He was a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, and a leading authority on the spiritual or transformational effects of alleged alien abduction experiences."

" ... the BBC quoted Mack as saying, "I would never say, yes, there are aliens taking people. [But] I would say there is a compelling powerful phenomenon here that I can't account for in any other way ..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Weiss

Quote: "Brian Leslie Weiss (born November 6, 1944) is an American psychiatrist. His research includes reincarnation, past life regression, future-life progression, and survival of the human soul after death."

I could go on like this for hours, but surely you realize where it would lead -- my original remark was correct.

> Because difficulty with social interaction, apparently because of differences in brain function, is a pretty big piece of autism and also factored heavily into Aspergers.

Yes, but without knowing the actual cause of (a) autism and (b) Asperger Syndrome, we're drawing conclusions based on superficial similarities that may not be connected in any deep way. Sort of like the fable of the blind men and the elephant -- each blind man comes to a different conclusion based on the same evidence.

That's the new direction in mental health -- the field's opinion leaders are recommending a change in direction that searches for causes, rather than a continued emphasis on symptoms. About this change, NIMH director Insel recently said, "The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity."

"Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment. Patients with mental disorders deserve better."

Source: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...

If we knew what causes autism, and what causes Asperger Syndrome, this conversation would be rendered moot by actual scientific evidence, something in short supply right now in psychiatry and psychology.