Autism today is better known as autism spectrum disorder or ASD. It’s a medical condition that, unfortunately, currently has no known cure, although there are a variety of different treatments available to help manage the many different symptoms that ASD diagnosed patients may display. The one thing that is largely in agreement is that ASD exhibits behavioral symptoms primarily, and so can have an effect on how easy or challenging it is for those diagnosed with the condition to interact comfortably with others.
As the name indicates, ASD has a broad “spectrum” of different behavioral symptoms, and these symptoms can occur at various intensities. This has, in the past, made correctly diagnosing ASD so complex that it wasn’t until the 1980s that ASD was even recognized as its own distinct medical condition. Before this change, ASD was diagnosed as some specific illnesses and even mistaken as a form of schizophrenia, since some types of ASD responded to the use of antipsychotic medication.
Working With Groups
Today, ASD is now recognized as a series of symptoms, and people are diagnosed and treated according to their individual symptoms, but before this modern interpretation, ASD was originally, in the 1980s, broken up into four subtypes of autism.
Adults today are likely to recognize some of these terms as they were used extensively in both the news and in fiction, such as film. It was only 2013 that the current interpretation of a single disorder with multiple symptoms was adopted. Most people will be at least passingly familiar with some of the terms previously in use.
Asperger’s Syndrome
Thanks to fiction and the media, Asperger’s is one of the most well-known classifications of ASD and, to this day, is still in informal use, even if the actual medical designation has been abandoned. Greta Thunberg, the famous 16-year-old environmentalist, is one of the most famous people in the world right now who still invokes the term “Asperger’s Syndrome” to describe herself.
In one sense, Asperger’s is often regarded as the “desirable” or even “fashionable” form of ASD that people want to have, and some people still make unfounded claims about having it. Asperger’s was, during its time, considered a “high functioning” form of ASD, and was often associated with people who had “eccentric” or “quirky” personalities, but were also often considered brilliant due to the hyper-focus and increased powers of concentration Asperger’s could potentially leave as a side-effect of the condition. People legitimately diagnosed with Asperger’s would sometimes go decades without a professional medical diagnosis, because the symptoms could be so mild that some people thought of themselves as just “introverted,” or draining to interact with people, rather than having a medical condition.
Pervasive Developmental Disorder—Not Otherwise Specified
The previous ASD classification system diagnosed people into four groups based on the severity of the symptoms they had, but it was the second, more serious classification that started to show some of the cracks in the original diagnostic methodology. Known as Pervasive Developmental Disorder—Not Otherwise Specified, or PDD-NOS, this was considered more serious than Asperger’s and could leave people with real difficulties interacting with others.
However, as the name implies, “not otherwise specified” made PDD-NOS a “miscellaneous” category that just about anything that didn’t fit the other three categories would fall into. While Aspergers and “classic autistic disorder” had a small range of very simple, easy to categorize symptoms, many other diagnoses only partially fulfilled these other categories, and so, due to not completely fulfilling them, would fall into the PDD-NOS category, thus causing many diagnostic headaches. While poor adaptive behavior, difficulty responding to changes in routine, and language developmental issues were part of PDD-NOS, many other symptoms also fell into this category.
Autistic Disorder
Autistic disorder was also commonly referred to as “classic autism,” and this more extreme variant was often the subject of media portrayal thanks to its many unique symptoms. The movie Rain Man, for example, is one of the most famous film renditions of classic autism, with the extreme degeneration of normal interactions, the emphasis on repetitive behaviors, and the subsequent “side-effect” of an ability to focus or perform complex mental operations.
Autistic disorder is the third category in severity, also required much more intensive treatment. Focused therapy and sometimes even the use of medication were advocated for people in this range.
Childhood Disintegrative Disorder
The most severe form of ASD under the older diagnostic system was often, for parents, also the most frightening. A chief component of Childhood Disintegrative Disorder is a regression. That is, the child would appear to be developing normally, learning speech, advancing hand-eye coordination, then stop, and reverse the process, becoming unable to talk or perform activities that used to be easy. CDD could occur between the ages of 2-4 years.
This condition was so severe that sometimes the use of antipsychotics or anticonvulsants were advised. Basic tasks like being able to eat, or put on shoes would be beyond children diagnosed with this condition.
