Marketing Mental Disorder for Fun and Profit
Just my jaundiced reading of the NYTimes article Answer, but No Cure, for a Social Disorder That Isolates Many:
Because Asperger's was not widely identified until recently, thousands of adults like Mr. [Steven Miller, a university librarian] — people who have never fit in socially — are only now stumbling across a neurological explanation for their lifelong struggles with ordinary human contact.As Mr. Miller learned from the article, autism is now believed to encompass a wide spectrum of impairment and intelligence, from the classically unreachable child to people with Asperger's and a similar condition called high-functioning autism, who have normal intelligence and often superior skills in a given area. But they all share a defining trait: They are what autism researchers call "mind blind." Lacking the ability to read cues like body language to intuit what other people are thinking, they have profound difficulty navigating basic social interactions. The diagnosis is reordering their lives. Some have become newly determined to learn how to compensate.
They are filling up scarce classes that teach skills like how close to stand next to someone at a party, or how to tell when people are angry even when they are smiling. Others, like Mr. Miller, have decided to disclose their diagnosis, hoping to deflect the often-hostile responses their odd manners and miscues provoke. In some cases, it has helped. In others, it seemed only to elicit one more rejection.
It's the last paragraph that jumped out at me. Puts me in mind of how no one really heard of lactose intolerance until lactaid came out and did a publicity blitz.
Of course, this could just be the Asperger's talkin-- no, that's just in poor taste. . .
Mentioned this a while back, after reading Clare Sainsbury's Martian in the Playground : Understanding the Schoolchild with Asperger's Syndrome. Link to Amazon.co.uk; don't see any evidence of a US print of the book, but may not be looking hard enough.
Article seen at Metafilter, which also had a link/discussion to/about The Obesity Myth over at Big Fat Blog.
Suppose I could explicitly tie these two apparently disparate topics together by mentioning the diet industry, but I just did, so why bother?