National Post (National Edition)
Nazi revelation a branding crisis for Asperger’s advocates
When the diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome was officially struck from the medical books in 2013, the Asperger’s Society of Ontario was faced with a curious branding problem.
How could it continue to advocate for people with a disorder that does not even technically exist?
That problem now seems quaint in hindsight. A new marketing dilemma has arisen for the ASO and similar groups around the world. This time, though, it has been supercharged by the most toxic association in modern Western culture — Nazis.
Hans Asperger was an Austrian pediatrician whose clinical observations of children in 1940s Vienna were resurrected and promoted by psychiatrist Lorna Wing in 1981, the year after his death. A little over a decade later, those observations became the basis of the formal diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome, a sort of high-functioning autism, sometimes described as “mild.”
The years since have seen an explosion in public attention to the condition, so much so that the character with Asperger’s has become almost a TV trope. Asperger himself came to be regarded as a visionary hero.
But there was a skeleton in the closet. Asperger was not a member of the Nazi party, but was a willing accomplice in the murderous euthanasia program of the Third Reich, aimed at purifying society by removing it’s those it judged “genetically inferior.” The nail in the coffin of Asperger’s historical reputation was the revelation he referred disabled children to the Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna, where hundreds were murdered by poisoning in a scheme that came to be known as Aktion T4.
This was documented by historian Herwig Czech in an article in Molecular Autism called Hans Asperger, National Socialism, and ‘race hygiene’ in Nazi-era Vienna. Historian Edith Sheffer has expanded on it in a new book, Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna.
Both cite documents about two children, Herta Schreiber and Elisabeth Schreiber (unrelated), whose referrals Asperger signed with comments calling them both unbearable burdens.
For the Asperger’s Society of Ontario, and others like it, this is a crisis.
A name change was discussed at a recent ASO board meeting, and an external consultant is going to be contracted to help them make that decision, according to board member Jodi Echakowitz.
“As an organization, we do not want to be aligned with someone associated with the Nazi regime. At the same time, we support a community that is resistant to change and have to take this into consideration,” the ASO said in a statement.
Autism and Asperger’s advocates are accustomed to weathering the storms of awkward public attention. Often this follows a brutal crime, such as those of Newtown, Conn., school shooter Adam Lanza or alleged Toronto van attacker Alek Minassian.
In those cases, the attribution of autism spectrum disorders to criminal villains can build stigma and false stereotypes, and conceal the fact that people with mental illness are more likely to be victims than perpetrators, Echakowitz said.
But this dilemma seems worse. On the one hand, changing a name can be distressing for people naturally resistant to change because of their psychiatric disorder. That is partly why a name change was rejected in 2013, when the newly published manual of psychiatric diagnoses subsumed the distinctive symptoms that lead to an Asperger’s diagnosis into the broader category of Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Aspergers had also become very well known in mainstream culture.
“The community exists,” Echakowitz said. In an informal poll of its members, prompted by the Nazi revelations, the ASO found that 86 preferred to say they have Asperger’s syndrome, while 19 preferred to say they are autistic.
There are other reasons to be cautious about ditching the name, such as the focus the ASO has on this one specific kind of autism, unlike some larger autism organizations that deal with all its varied manifestations. Also, changing the name in response to bad press can undo a lot of hard work in the world of medical nonprofit advocacy.
On the other hand, now there are Nazis involved. From a public relations standpoint, this means all bets are off.
It is a dilemma on par with the town of Swastika, Ont., or the residents of Swastika Trail near Cambridge, Ont., both of which have been the target of renaming campaigns.
Simon Baron-cohen, who edits the journal where the research first appeared, writes in a new essay that he no longer feels personally comfortable naming the diagnosis after Asperger, but thinks future use of the term “is a discussion that must incorporate the views of autistic people.”
A DISCUSSION ... MUST INCORPORATE THE VIEWS OF AUTISTIC PEOPLE.