Elon Musk and what few know about Asperger
In these days the “Asperger syndrome” is on everyone’s mouth, after Elon Musk has been accused of having performed the Roman greeting. He denied, while his Italian collaborator, Andrea Stroppa, first confirmed and then attributed this gesture to the fact that Musk is “autistic”, and consequently would not be fully aware of his body language.
Musk and his autism
The richest man in the world in fact, in 2021, during an episode of the Saturday Night Livehe said he was suffering from the “Asperger syndrome”, a neurosviluppu disorder also known as “high -function autism”, since those who suffer from it does not have cognitive deficits, on the contrary, are tendentially surpassed, that is, it has a significant qi higher than average (generally above 130), but at the same time it has difficulties from the point of view of emotional and relational skills, with consequent difficulties in social integration.
The forms of “autism with high functioning” are generally underdiagnosed with respect to the forms of “low -functioning autism” (ie those that have cognitive deficits) precisely because often the person who suffers from them manages to mask their difficulties in adaptation, a However, cost of an extra cognitive effort and deep social suffering. Often people with the “Asperger syndrome” in fact also come to isolate themselves. Greta Thunberg herself seems to have been diagnosed in this sense and she also experienced a period of deep detachment from the society before finding her life motivation.
Yet it is necessary to make an important clarification: Asperger’s syndrome no longer exists at a diagnostic level, at least not officially. In fact, it was decided to remove it from the latest version of the DSM (the diagnostic manual of mental disorders) and to bring it back generically among the “autistic spectrum disorders”. How come?
The “DEPATOLOGIZATION” of autism
The reasons are different. First of all, because you are going towards a “depatologization” of autism, which today is interpreted more and more as a neurodactance and not as a psychopathology. In this sense, the term “syndrome” was misleading. But above all the reason why we no longer talk about Asperger is because this name has proved to be very controversial in the time. Hans Asperger was in fact an Austrian pediatrician, a neurosviluppo expert, who after ANSCHUSSor the annexation of Austria to Nazi Germany, he found himself working on the Hitler regime. During this period Asperger is accused of having stained with very serious crimes, like that of having killed hundreds of children diagnosed as “asocial”. In the third Reich, in fact, asocity, or in general the difficulties of social integration, were seen as a threat since in contrast with the concept of “Aryan race”. In a eugenic perspective, therefore, the children who today would define as “Asperger” in those days were suppressed.
However, there are those who claim that Asperger actually did everything to protect them, also risking their life, and who instead believes that he himself was the main architect of this carnage. Whatever the truth, on a psychosanitary level, Asperger’s syndrome no longer exists and it would be correct that, even in colloquial language, there is a reason.