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Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

>Why do people constantly invent labels to comfort themselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemism_treadmill

Neurodiverse is a wider collection than autism. It's useful to describe a variety of circumstances without needing to enumerate through them.

If you say you have Aspergers on certain forums nowadays people will flame you, call you a Nazi, and mods will ban you. In these same communities, without exception, neurodiverse is totally safe and won't raise an eyebrow.

People go with what's practical.

Also "Neurodiverse" is just a group label for the "mentally disabled" as a whole, and also non-disabled people with disabled characteristics, and for disabled people who hate the word disabled because of the stigma attached to it.

> If you say you have Aspergers on certain forums nowadays people will flame you, call you a Nazi

...what? how? That's insane.

Hans Aspergers worked in a Nazi hospital, cooperated with the Nazis, was a Fascist, was a Nationalist, and had various non-woke views typical of an Austrian doctor in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. I've repeatedly seen heated arguments over if Hans Asperger was actually a Nazi or not. It is almost certainly the case that he referred autistic children to a hospital where they were euthanised, and I've heard some back and forth as to if he knew/was complicit, but it's certainly a bad look for that to even be a question.

Aspergers also has another issue which is that it has frequently been portrayed in popular culture as "mild autism", and arguably that's how the diagnostic criteria read, and there has been a lot of historical emphasis on the employability of people with Aspergers specifically. This has been very controversial, as if you remember how I was talking about the killing of autistics, the Nazi's weren't killing all autistics, just the ones they felt were least useful to them. So really in a lot of ways Hans Aspergers is symbolic of the inequality in treatment amongst different autistic people. A group of people who participate in communities where users have VAST differences in their quality of life for arbitrary reasons.

In any case, there's many reasons the word "Aspergers" has become controversial, that and the fact the idea of Autism and Aspergers being discrete things fell out of scientific favor more than a decade ago. I literally have a diagnosis of Aspergers disorder, I know other people with the same diagnosis, we all avoid using the word because it's become an antiquated landmine.

I have a diagnosis too, and I've never heard about any of this, nor do I think it has much if any bearing upon the meaning of the word. People have a general understanding of it, even if specific conditions vary, which is why the word is useful to me when talking about my psyche. I think it's quite a stretch to go from this to calling someone a Nazi.

Thanks for explaining, though.

Same reason you use whatever labels you prefer; to express themselves both as an individual and as part of a group.

Because Asperger's was removed from the DSM for being invented by a Nazi.

https://time.com/5255779/asperger-syndrome-nazi-germany-hist...

To be clear, he was the only doctor who was not a Nazi Party member in a hospital full of Nazi Party members. There has also been some counter-narrative about Hans Aspergers being a better man than he has been recently portrayed.

All the same, Hans Aspergers had many of the views common of doctors working in 1930's Austria and Germany, and many of those views are now considered socially unacceptable. Such as his love of Fascism, or his belief that child rape victims were asking for it. So generally, many people find it most uncool to be associated with such a person.

Aspergers has been on the decline for around a decade anyways because diagnostic manuals no longer consider it distinct from autism, the fascist revelations are just fuel on the fire.

Right and that’s why it’s Autism Spectrum Disorder. It’s a rather broad definition that includes a large cluster of different traits that manifest themselves in various ways within each individual. The traits of Autism and Asperger’s had a lot of overlap so it made sense to encompass it as one umbrella. Asperger’s reputation was malevolent and it colored the science in significant ways, but that wasn’t the primary driver for the change.

It’s a common misconception that the ASD spectrum is assumed to be scalar of magnitude, from “high functioning” to “severe”. In fact it refers to a spectrum, ie: > a mapping of a range of magnitudes to a range of qualities

Here is a good article that explains the distinction well: https://neuroclastic.com/its-a-spectrum-doesnt-mean-what-you...

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