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

seen a light?

Comedy billed as not for the easily offended usually fairly certainly means not for me. I'm ever so'seeeeeerious, ya see, with a sick world of injustice always at the forefront of thought, and seriously down on all the ethicality of everyone who has an emotionally cruel sense of humour, which is indistinguishable from being an emotionally destructive person seriously. 1980s alternative comedy was just a fashion statement for blatant bullying and violence, for delight in destroying everything anyone cares about.

But there is a very real practical question around how referring to injustices in comedy sometimes helps the serious impact against them. Like the old Berlin Wall graffiti "Jump over and join the party". Like Life of Brian. When is comedy that refers to injustices ever constructive? Ever not just a further kicking in suffering's face?

When it is open to thinking about. When it is not an act of bullying aggro with a socially intimidating effect. The way all that distressingly aggressive 1980s alternative comedy fired up all that is ugliest in peer groups, is why it failed to get across the serious political messages it sometimes hoped to.

Fringe stand-up performer Abigoliah Schamaun makes you think, because every time she crashes through an offence barrier she actually pauses and reflects on it, checks out how the audience feels with it. It gives the whole question of offence a significantly different feel. It is more survivable for the audience, and each time you wonder whether it is more justified for the performer, because you are not just getting hammered by it, passively. For usually that aspie unfriendly helpless position, take whatever I throw at you and like it, is the relationship an audience who feel ever so super-cool really have towards a comic who wants to make them sick. An audience who have the fairness of their own feelings acknowledged are in a stronger feeling, better feeling, less pushed around, position.

Seriously don't want that light bulb she eats to be real, or she won't be performing for long. No audience can pass on the reason for doing it, because there isn't one.

Maurice Frank