Lay abstract: Many people with a diagnosis of ‘Asperger Syndrome’ have concerns over the replacement of this label with ‘autism spectrum disorder (ASD)’ within the new diagnostic manual that was published in 2013 (DSM-5). Negative associations with labels can have implications for the development of the stigmatization of clinical disorders. Stigma associated with schizophrenia has been widely s...

Asperger syndrome was first described by an Austrian physician, Hans Asperger (1944), as "autistic psychopathy." It is an uncommon disorder whose exact prevalence in the general population is not known. Gillberg and Gillberg (1989) estimated that among Swedish children with normal inteUigence, the rates are 10 to 26 per 10,000 while among those with mild mental retardation the rate is about 0.4...