Follow Dr. Coplan on Facebook
Follow Dr. Coplan on Facebook


Follow Dr. Coplan on Twitter
Follow Dr. Coplan on Twitter


Follow Dr. Coplan on YouTube
Follow Dr. Coplan on YouTube

Beyond Kanner and Asperger – Part 2.

October 25th, 2015 by drcoplan

ppost

Copernicus’ heliocentric model of the solar system. The sun is at the center; the earth and other planets orbit around the sun.

Beyond Kanner and Asperger – Part 2. Dr. Coplan continues his discussion of a paradigm shift in the way we frame ASD

Ever since Kanner’s 1943 paper, clinicians have been arguing about how atypical is “atypical enough” to qualify for an autism diagnosis. Diagnosing ASD in a child with moderate to severe atypicality generally is not a problem. Problems arise, however, when considering adults, and/or persons with mild atypicality. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, Leo Kanner’s ghost – with its insistence that autism is both rare and severe – continues to roam the halls of the American Psychiatric Association. Thus, DSM5 clings to a fictitious boundary between “Normal” and “Abnormal,” and emphatically rejects the concepts of “compensated” or “subclinical” ASD. In the view of DSM5, treatments merely “mask” symptoms, and in order to qualify for an autism diagnosis an individual must remain “significantly impaired.” At a deeper level, however, there is another problem: ironically, autism experts have a tendency to over-focus on atypicality in isolation, and miss the forest for the trees. Paradoxically, taking autism out of the middle of the picture will actually let us think more clearly about ASD – just as taking earth out of the center of the solar system enables us to think more clearly about astronomy.

As we discussed last time, Copernicus revolutionized astronomy by advancing a “heliocentric” model of the solar system. At one stroke, this paradigm shift solved a lot of problems in celestial mechanics. Before explaining his model in detail, Copernicus laid out a foundation of seven basic principles, such as:

  • All the spheres revolve about the sun as their midpoint, and therefore the sun is the center of the universe.

  • What appear to us as motions of the sun arise not from motion of the sun, but from the motion of the earth…which revolve(s) about the sun like any other planet.

These and a few additional basic principles formed the foundation for all that followed. Read the rest of this entry »

Share

Beyond Kanner and Asperger – part 1

October 19th, 2015 by drcoplan

coplan post

Figure 1. Until the Middle Ages, most people believed that the earth was at the center of the universe (the geocentric model).

Dr. Coplan proposes a paradigm shift in the way we frame our thinking about ASD.

For the past several posts (beginning here), we have been reviewing Steve Silberman’s book, NeuroTribes. As Silberman points out, persons with High Functioning Autism and Asperger Syndrome are far more common than heretofore recognized. Furthermore, there is no “bright line” dividing “atypical” from “Neurotypical” (NT). Rather, “mild atypicality” shades over, imperceptibly, into “normal.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Share





Topics

Blog Archives