“We Aspies has found our identity in our diagnosis and now it’s taken away” one could read in a Swedish newspaper in 2011. This was a response to the decision to eliminate Asperger Syndrome (AS) from the leading diagnostic classifications of mental illnesses and let the condition be included in the category of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). For people with AS this alteration in diagnostic classification had a strong impact on their everyday life, as subjectivities, solidarities within the aspies-community and relations to various agencies and collectives are now subjects for renegotiating.

Grounded in an on-going study, involving interviews with 20 people with AS and analysis of an online community, the paper will focus on three questions: What symptoms, problems and sufferings are AS used to decipher in everyday life and how can these experiences be analysed from a sociological point of view? How does AS as a cultural category, embedded in psychiatric discourse, structure the feelings and explanations of mental suffering and what happens with this interpretative practice when the diagnosis is incorporated in ASD? In what ways does this change transform the conditions for AS as a resource for subjectivity, collectivisation of suffering, and management of feelings of social deviance?

A goal with the research is also to contribute to the field of “sociology of diagnosis” in relation to an understanding of how psychiatry increasingly makes social interaction a subject for medicalization of human behaviour.

© European Sociological Association, 2017