IS IT TIME TO RENAME ASPERGER SYNDROME?

Name associated with “higher-functioning” individuals more an identity than disorder

The world of autism was recently thrown into turmoil by the revelation that Hans Asperger, the Vienna pediatrician whose name has come to be associated with “higher-functioning” individuals on the autistic spectrum, was involved in the child euthanasia program during the Nazi occupation.

A rigorous study based on contemporaneous documents by Herwig Czech revealed that Asperger was directly involved in the assessments of children with disabilities, many of whom were transferred to the Spiegelgrund clinic, where nearly 800 were killed.

In her new book, Asperger’s Children, U.S. historian Edith Sheffer shows how Asperger’s career benefited from the antiSemitic purge of the medical profession, and how his concept of autism emerged from the prevailing eugenic consensus (shared as much by Western medicine as the Nazis).

A former patient once asked me to refer him for a diagnostic assessment after he had completed an online questionnaire that suggested he had Asperger syndrome.

He later told me that the psychiatrist had advised him that he met some of the criteria, but that it was up to him whether or not he should be given the “Asperger” label.

This sort of discussion over diagnosis — which never happens in relation to other conditions, such as schizophrenia — reflects the way in which the expansion of the autism spectrum has led some to embrace Asperger syndrome as an identity rather than a disorder.

The dramatic rise in the recognition of the syndrome, among adults as well as children, owes much to the work of the late Lorna Wing, who first introduced Asperger’s work to the English-speaking world in the 1980s.

For Wing, a founding member of the National Autistic Society and the mother of an autistic daughter, as well as a clinical and academic authority, the Asperger label was, above all, a means of overcoming the stigma that attached to the diagnosis of autism. As she wrote, Asperger syndrome appeared to be “much more acceptable to parents.”

Documentary filmmaker Saskia Baron, whose brother is autistic, has suggested that perhaps “Wing syndrome” would be a more appropriate label.

MEDICAL UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA Research into Dr. Hans Asperger was conducted by Herwig Czech at Vienna’s Medical University. It revealed that Asperger was involved in the assessments of children with disabilities.