It's not Aspergers
On why you shouldn’t use that term
Word count: 245 words
There still are people that use the term Aspergers and aren't aware where it comes from. Especially for those individuals, I want to explain what the origin is.
But first, what is "Asperger's"? Aspergers is now part of the Autism spectrum. Generally, it was considered some sort of "mild autism". Basically "you are sorta autistic but you can function in our opinion so it's 'just' Aspergers". Where that division stems from and why it's highly problematic is something I'll mention later in this entry.
The name origin stems fron Hans Asperger, who was a Nazi doctor that did horrible experiments on and with autistic children. So we're off to a bad start.
The division into autism and asperger's stems from that time as well.
Essentially, it seperates into those that are still useful for the Nazis (those get labelled with "asperger's"), and those that are "truly disabled" and are to be killed (those labelled with Autism).
But even medically it isn't really accurate. The autism spectrum isn't a line and people are "more autistic" or "less autistic". It's more a chart of indicidual difficultis with different things. People got diagnosed with asperger's when someone from outside deemed them not needing of support.
So the overview looks like this:
- medically inaccurate
- named after a Nazi
- division to decide who gets killed during the holocaust
I hope this was impressive enough. Thank you guys (gn) for reading
