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What? Psychologists have acknowledged what I said -- I didn't make it up. Psychologists now see that the Asperger's diagnosis epidemic had no basis in reality -- that's why Asperger's is being abandoned.

Further reading: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/health/03asperger.html?pag...



It's effectively being reclassified as a form of autism, which is what neurologists have been calling it for years now.

You're being incoherent--why on earth would psychologists "abandon" a diagnosis that they "love" because it's "bread on their table"?

On second thought, don't bother answering--I already waste too much time jousting with conspiracy theorists on HN.


> It's effectively being reclassified as a form of autism

That's like saying astrology is being reclassified as a form of astronomy. Something like that happened, but we all know the outcome of that battle.

> why on earth would psychologists "abandon" a diagnosis that they "love" because it's "bread on their table"?

Because of public exposure. Because of articles like this one:

http://arachnoid.com/trouble_with_psychology

Psychologists realized their behavior was obviously and solely self-serving, even to non-specialists. So, just as with Recovered Memory Therapy, they called a halt to something that could only do them more harm.

> I already waste too much time jousting with conspiracy theorists on HN.

That only makes sense if psychologists are the conspiracy theorists, because it is psychologists who are demanding this change. Case in point -- Theodore Insel, sitting director of the NIMH, calls for the same change that I do:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circ...

Quote: "In most areas of medicine, doctors have historically tried to glean something about the underlying cause of a patient’s illness before figuring out a treatment that addresses the source of the problem. When it came to mental or behavioral disorders in the past, however, no physical cause was detectable so the problem was long assumed by doctors to be solely “mental,” and psychological therapies followed suit.

Today scientific approaches based on modern biology, neuroscience and genomics are replacing nearly a century of purely psychological theories, yielding new approaches to the treatment of mental illnesses."

Sound familiar?


I think you have a point buried in there somewhere, but you're overstating it with so much hyperbole that you come across as a crank. Sort of like the LaRoucheites who used to accost people, panicked that Dick Cheney was going to nuke Iran.


> you're overstating it with so much hyperbole that you come across as a crank.

Tell that to Dr. Insel, sitting director of the NIMH, who I quoted to make my point.


Dr. Insel's quote wasn't the part that sounded crank-ish.




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