Social Constructions
March 12, 2008
I am not saying that the experiences of aspies are a social construct. There are experiential, or phenomenal, differences between people. However, how those differences are categorized is a social construction.
My neurodiversity, in the 1960s, was called childhood schizophrenia. It was not a misdiagnosis. I was, given the DSM-I, diagnosed correctly. Now, since autism has been removed from the child schizophrenia construct and placed into new categories, I have been rediagnosed with Asperger’s.
The experiences of aspies are genuine. However, Asperger’s itself is only a social construction – a human category. It may be changed in the DSM-V, and then again in future versions of the DSM.
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