Who Benefited When Asperger’s Syndrome Disappeared?
More than a decade after Asperger’s syndrome was folded into Autism Spectrum Disorder, autistic adults, families and clinicians remain divided over what was gained — and what may have been lost.
More than a decade after Asperger’s syndrome officially disappeared from the American diagnostic manual, debate over the change has never fully gone away. For some autistic adults and families, the removal represented overdue progress toward a broader understanding of autism as a spectrum. For others, it felt like the loss of an identity, a language and a diagnosis that once helped explain a very specific lived experience.
In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association released the DSM-5, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders used by clinicians across the United States. One of the most consequential changes involved autism diagnoses. Asperger’s syndrome, autistic disorder and pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified, or PDD-NOS, …
