Why discard Aspergers?
Asperger’s Disorder is named after Hans Asperger, an Austrian pediatrician who, in 1943, published a paper describing Autism, and then, in 1944, a paper about what was later to be called Asperger’s Disorder. At the same time, Leo Kanner, an American psychiatrist who immigrated from Austria, published a paper describing Early Infantile Autism, sometimes also referred to as Kanner’s Syndrome. Published in English, Kanner’s work received wide-spread recognition, while Asperger’s works, published in German, were largely ignored until 1981, and was not published in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) until 1994. (Source: Ontario Adult Autism Research and Support Network.) Although there are key physiological differences between the brains of people with Autism and those of us with Asperger’s Disorder, at this time diagnosis is made on the basis of observable behaviors, and in this respect the two differ, according to the Asperger’s Disorder Homepage, in eight way
