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Asperger Syndrome: Traits And Outcomes

Asperger Syndrome, commonly abbreviated AS, is a somewhat controversial and not entirely well understood pervasive developmental disorder. This is perhaps largely because of its relatively recent discovery. Hans Asperger, for whom it is named, published his research in 1944, where he called it autistic psychopathy, though this name fell out of favor due to association of the term psychopathy with the unrelated antisocial personality disorder. (Wing, 1981) It is considered to be related to, or a high-functioning form of, autism.(Bellini & Hopf, 2007) The current name was coined in 1981 (Wing, 1981) and it only gained official recognition as of the DSM-IV in 1994, meaning most diagnosed individuals are older than the diagnosis. It is also quite rare, affecting only about .03% of the population (Fombonne, 2005), though this number is somewhat disputable due to a lack of comprehensive study and the vagueness of some of the diagnostic criteria (Brasic, 2006). In contrast, depression has been known for thousands of years and schizophrenia for well over one hundred (Oltmanns & Emery) and affect a larger percentage of the population, so there is much more research to draw on.
The diagnosis is controversial largely because of disagreement on whether it is a pathology at all. Hans Asperger considered the children he worked with to be quite intelligent and according to Treffert (2004), approximately 80% of people diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome have normal or higher intelligence. Many have led successful lives. In this paper I will examine the causes, the experience of an affected individual and his likely outcomes. I use the male pronoun to refer to both for convenience and due to the fact that males are diagnosed four (Brasic, 2006) to six (Treffert, 2004) times as often as females.
According to the DSM-IV, AS is characterized by six features: Impairment of social interaction, narrow, stereotyped and repetitive interests and behaviors, significant impairment...