Yes, I agree. I was commenting on the mental health field's having made the connection, on no serious evidence. It's important to realize that mental health di

Yes, I agree. I was commenting on the mental health field's having made the connection, on no serious evidence. It's important to realize that mental health diagnoses follow popular taste, not scientific evidence. Homosexuality was a mental illness as long as the public held homosexuality to be unacceptable. In the pre-Civil War era, psychologists labeled a slave's tendency to run away from his master as a mental illness, simply because that was a popularly accepted idea, with support among those who paid the psychologists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania In the same way, Asperger Syndrome seemed to be a way to attract paying clients -- but I don't mean those who received the diagnosis, but the parents who paid the bills, who perhaps wanted Johnny to "fit in" better at school, be more "normal". In each of the quoted cases, public taste changed over time, and psychologists responded by abandoning a failed mental illness. It's not science, it's a popularity contest. If only real doctors could retire their diagnoses in the same way -- that would instantly solve the cancer and heart disease problems. But this is silly -- medicine isn't psychology. Medicine is based on science.