> I'm sure there's an Autism spectrum upon which Asperger's syndrome lies ...
If voting can create or destroy a mental illness, then everything lies on the autism spectrum -- it's just a matter of talking psychologists into it. Asperger's was voted into existence, and voted out of existence. There was and is no objective scientific evidence for its existence.
> I'm sure that psychology (as distinct from psychiatry) is a scientific discipline ...
If psychology were a scientific discipline, then psychologists would be able to use their research results to dictate what psychiatrists and clinical psychologists can and cannot do in a clinical setting, in the same way that medical research dictates what can and cannot be done in a medical clinic.
But that is not so, and the reason is that psychology isn't a science -- it has no central defining theories, no tests of those theories, and no basis for falsification of those nonexistent theories, all required properties of science.
> so logic dictates that the weak link is your statement that "it was voted out of existence".
That's an uncontroversial fact -- Asperger's was voted into existence, then it was voted out of existence, and science played no part.
It is for these and other reasons that the NIMH recently ruled that the DSM, psychology's "Bible", can no longer be used as the basis for scientific research proposals, for the simple reason that it has no scientific content:
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...
Quote: "The goal of this new manual, as with all previous editions, is to provide a common language for describing psychopathology. While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity.
Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment. Patients with mental disorders deserve better."
The tl;dr: not science.