'Agricultural specialisterne': rural employment revolution for those with Autism

[Visionary7903]

I mentioned in an earlier post that DSM V proposes to create one category of Autism Spectrum Disorder, thereby removing Asperger’s Syndrome and Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS) from the DSM.
*DSM V is the planned fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, due to be published in May 2013.

Dr. Darold A. Treffert, an internationally recognised expert on Savant Syndrome and the epidemiology of Autism Spectrum Disorders, believes that this may not be such a good thing…

…SCOTT: What do you think of the proposed DSM-V changes in regards to autism?

DAROLD: Well, there’s concern that Asperger’s will disappear and it’ll be inculcated into autism. I’m concerned that the DSM in general tends to lose its specificity for conditions, and they become more spectrum disorders, or disease-like disorders. We have medicalized a lot of things that I think are not really medical conditions.

For example, there is such a thing as adolescent shyness-- adolescents who are shy-- and they don’t all have social avoidance disorder. We continually are diluting what are conditions that we need to maintain the specificity along the lines in regards to autism. As we dilute it more, that may be useful for public education and early intervention, but from a research point of view, we’re losing the specificity that ought to remain.

…DAROLD: Yeah. We have to be careful that we don’t keep multiplying disorders and diluting them. I think there is a difference. People talk about Asperger’s as high-functioning autism, which I think it is. But it does have some of its own characteristics, like the preservation of language, particularly, which may be right brain dysfunction instead of left brain dysfunction, and we lose something in that, as things lose their specificity, and we keep diluting things. I’m not sure that’s helpful…

(source: Conversations on Creativity with Darold Treffert, Part I: Defining Autism, Savantism, and Genius | Psychology Today)