where was the late Dr Wing for 20 years?

This Daily Telegraph obituary to the recently deceased inventor of the term Asperger Syndrome, Lorna Wing is staggering and baffling, quite angering. It quotes her claiming that her first use of the term in a scientific paper in 1981 opened a Pandora's Box. Over the next 20 years there were 900 published papers on it, including the first diagnostic criteria proposed in 1989 by Stephen Gillberg.

If Wing an academic voice with such effective impact as this, why couldn't she stop it taking 20 years for the condition to become widely known of? It is a too shattering thought to cope with. In the meantime, we were still living out lives not knowing of it, without the back-up and fellowship of an aspie scene, missing out utterly and tragically if we died during that time, and getting into avoidable life troubles including getting into poverty in the right wing neocon economy. Adolescent psychiatry was missing AS and still wrecking lives applying oppressive conformist agendas of personal change that AS proves wrong, and by it leading to neocon economy troubles too. The Enyclopaedia Britannica was still describing autism as Kanner autism with 80% of subjects learning disabled, I remember that from the period when I was beginning to notice the was attention on autism linked to childhood problems, in the years before I discovered modern aspie awareness in 2002.

Where were you left in the neocon world of 1989 if you heard nothing of what Gillberg was doing, and you would never cross the path of a fortuitously well informed and open minded psychiatrist after an adolescent service had already in 1983 acted totally obliviously to autism towards your school crisis?

Wing's experience in the world of academic papers does not match at all the experience of real society and real aspies outside it. She must rationally have realised there were many unreached all through those unbearable lost 20 years, when she made that comment. Why never give us the support of being more angry about that? An urgent social change should just progress with ever so slow effete composure through doctors and the cases that chance across their paths?

Maurice Frank