"Inte som alla andra" : En kvalitativ studie om en grupp vuxna med Asperger syndrom

Sammanfattning: Normal children acquire the necessary social habits without being consciously aware of this, they learn instinctively. (Author’s translation from Swedish to English) (Asperger & Frith, 1998, s. 21)   This essay is about people who do not learn to socialize, the social habits, instinctively but through conscious learning. We have interviewed three adults with the diagnosis of Asperger syndrome with the aim to let them tell us about what it means to have a neuropsychiatric disability. We will briefly describe how the Asperger syndrome is described in the literature and what facilities are offered within the Swedish health care system. A diagnosis refer to a deviation from what is assumed to be the normal, therefore we will put forward theories concerning the norm of normality and normativity. We have tried through a theoretical discussion to deepen our understanding of identity formation and found the following arguments are reliable individual identity is shaped by three sub-aspects of identity; the identity of biological, psychological identity and social identity. Based on these theoretical arguments, a reasoning regarding how this affects what people with Asperger syndrome will and can tell us about when they talk about how they perceive their life before and after they have been diagnosed. Our intention is to critically discuss how identity formation is affected and how normality are handled and experienced by a group people with this diagnosis.