“But when I asked him if, in theory, someone could fake Asperger’s, he replied that the diagnosis ultimately relied on clinical judgment. “There is no biological test of autism,†he wrote. “This means, as with any psychiatric diagnosis, that in principle someone could fake it by providing false information in answer to a clinician’s interview questions, but even then clinical judgment and experience (is the person lying?) comes into play.†Or perhaps it was an unavoidable consequence of the squishiness of the diagnosis process itself. In his report to the court, Baron-Cohen buttressed his diagnosis by citing Edwin’s “scores†on the Adult Asperger’s Assessment, but there was ample reason to doubt the validity of answers to questions like “I find it easy to work out what someone is thinking or feeling just by looking at their face.†In a 2011 Nature article, Francesca Happé, a cognitive neuroscientist at King’s College London, voiced her skepticism of Baron-Cohen’s diagnostic tool: “Whether those self-perceptions, as with any of our self-perceptions, are accurate is questionable.†Baron-Cohen’s adviser, Uta Frith, echoed Happé: “Rigorous studies are still missing. . . . At the moment, he has people saying ‘yes, I’m a person interested in details,’ as opposed to actually observing them on tasks.†Two years after the diagnosis spared Edwin from prison, the American Psychiatric Association expunged the disorder from the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The controversial shift—dropping Asperger’s as a stand-alone disorder only nineteen years after it was included in the previous edition—happened “in large part because studies revealed little consistency in how the diagnosis was being applied,†according to The Atlantic’s Hanna Rosin. After extensive review, the authors of an Archives of General Psychiatry report found that children with similar test scores were given different diagnoses: “Whether a child was labeled as having Asperger’s or diagnosed instead with autism, or some other developmental disorder, depended mostly on the clinician’s somewhat arbitrary interpretation.†In an op-ed about the decision to drop Asperger’s from the DSM-V, Baron-Cohen wrote, “Psychiatric diagnoses are not set in stone. They are ‘manmade,’ and different generations of doctors sit around the committee table and change how we think about ‘mental disorders.’†Johnson, Kirk Wallace. The Feather Thief (p. 232). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Johnson, Kirk Wallace. The Feather Thief (pp. 231-232). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Johnson, Kirk Wallace. The Feather Thief (p. 231). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Johnson, Kirk Wallace. The Feather Thief (p. 231). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. ”
