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Originally Posted by yagr
I simply can't find this in the thread and there's no way for me to tell whose post you were directing this to. Can you help?
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The OP thinks Aspergers should be treated the same as any other mental disorder.
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This is a way to look at it, but I have to stretch to see it. Da Vinci had an extraordinarily large corpus callosum, but since we didn't recognize the corpus callosum at the time he was alive...then he didn't? Is that the same thing?
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How? People have the brains they have. They have the neurology they have. They have the personality they have. There is no dispute there. But think about how many degrees of freedom there are in the human brain. Take all neurons and all possible connections. No brain is exactly the same. As a very small difference in brain structure can have big effects in what kind of mind the brain produces.
So in that sense, a brain isn't the same as a muscle or a bone. Yes, muscles or bones or the heart, they are also not all completely identical. But small differences in general do not matter. We have absolutely no good idea about how the brain works. So a mental health diagnosis says nothing about what is happening in the brain. Only what kind of behavior a person exhibits. The way we define mental disorders is completely arbitrary You can take all symptoms in the DSM-5, shuffle them around randomly, and you can start diagnosing people that way. And for sure, there will be positive diagnosis. Yes, maybe there will be less diagnosis, as the symptoms we link together are indeed correlated and occur more commonly.
Professionals try the best they can. So that is why they have diagnosis. But we have no idea if something like BPD actually exists, is completely made up, or somewhere in between.
Until a genetic or neurological aspects enters a diagnosis, it is completely a human invention. What is needed for an actual disease is to be able to scan someone's brain. And people with Aspergers should have some brain structure that is with few exceptions only found in people with Aspergers. And likely the same will be true for a genetic component.
Now, we are moving towards this now. But we aren't quite there yet.
All this by the way doesn't mean the problems people experience aren't real. They are very real. But the question is if there is a neurological pathology. And if this is something shared by many people.
I suspect that the pathology of mental illnesses can be so diverse and complex, you there is no point in giving the same person the same diagnosis.