Why do people think that ASD's are overdiagnosed?

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My understanding is that "autism" is actually an umbrella term for a bunch of conditions with similar symptoms.

Ahogaday has a list of some good links detailing how the hunt for a singular "cause" of "autism" has so far revealed a variety of underlying brain abnormalities that appear to be generating the same behaviors.

There has yet to be found a unifying "cause" of all autism.

In the UK, before being referred for Autism testing (and other related disorders) they do check things like hearing and sight. With me, I already had a diagnosis of a few sight problems; so it being sight related was ruled out. (there seems to be a lot of people with one of the sight difficulties I have, who are diagnosed with ASD)

Going back to the original question:

I know someone who claims ASD is overdiagnosed and in "my day" (we're going back to the 50s and 60s here) there was no such thing as Autism. My parents once told me that during the 60s, we would have been put into institutions and ignored.

Well, okay that's highly possible.

I thought you meant they got all just missdiagnosed.

I think that there's probably truth to that statement. I personally feel like unless I've done a lot of research on a topic, my opinion cannot possibly be valid. Of course, this is an issue because I'm very reluctant to contribute to most conversations, whereas it seems to me like most people can casually chat about anything under the sun (at least it feels that way in comparison).

A better wording of my point as well, Raziel.

In their minds, people have an idear of an autistic child as a child not interacting, not playing, not doing anything that seems meaningful, maybe like someone with severe brain damage, like someone with phenylketonuria that was undetected and untreated in infancy. When the autistic children in the videos don't act like that, then the ignoramuses comment that they are not autistic.

I tend to believe that the majority of self-diagnosed Aspies are actually Aspies. At the very least, they're not the equivalent of the average NT, so I fail to see how it really makes a difference either way in this case.

Attwood sayed that 80% of the people who come to him and think that they are aspies, are actually in fact aspies.

Yea because only people with money count and everyone else should be ignored. Are we really gonna bring this up again? I mean I'm sure that there are people that are wrong and there are people that just think it's trendy but it seems like they are the few. Why so much hate for people that are just trying to make sense of their lives. I don't know what's worse. Feeling like an outsider to the world or feeling like an outsider to the people that should have a little sympathy.

Yeah, I think this is basically the case. I guess it's just a little hard to wrap my mind around all of ignorance that's floating around out there.

As for overdiagnosis, I have no idear if autism is over or underdiagnosed in children. The idear of autism has broadened, and diagnostic substitutions of autism for other conditions has occurred, but I don't know if this trend has gone too far to label non-autistic children as autistic. I read of one autism researcher referring to autism as a fallback diagnosis that is made too much. Children who would have been diagnosed with language disorder or mental retardation in the past are now being diagnosed with autism, because they meet the behavioral criteria for autism. However, in some cases, these autistic behaviors may be a secondary effect of language disorder or mental retardation. On the high-functioning end of the socially responsive/communicative child, children with milder autistic traits are being diagnosed with autism, and some of these children have a lot of neurotypical traits as well, so it is hard to decide where to draw the line for the diagnosis.

The thing is that ASD's basically just got recognized and begin to get researched and paid attention to and diagnosed at all (for the cases of higher functioning or atypical anyway). When disorders get recognized and people begin to get diagnosed with them they become kind of like medical fads. Still it isn't necessarily over-diagnosed -part of it is just people coming out of the woodwork who have the syndrome and were msidaignosed or diagnosed with other things- another is that since knowledge of the disorder is in it's infancy perhaps people have something similar that is genetically related but not exactly the same or maybe just similar un-conceptualized disorders -or maybe the category just needs to be broadened to include more people-or maybe narrowed-the problem is the category is new so the medical community DOES NOT KNOW YET. For example Schizophrenia which was first conceptualized in the 1930's........and the rate of diagnosis in the USA was extremely high-way higher than it is now. Still a lot of the people who were once diagnosed with it now have diagnoses like Schizophreniform or Schizo affective disorder or Schizotypal Personality Disorder -which are all thought to be genetically related to Schizophrenia anyway. So even though the criteria for Schizophrenia was narrowed and the criteria made more strict the people who were "misdiagnosed" with it had very similar genetically related disorders. Other people who were misdiagnosed with it actually had Bipolar Disorder 1 which might also be genetically related - but is more distinct. The point is people panic beacuse a newly conceptualized and recognized disorder is over diagnosed or misdiagnosed and then some doctors go as far as to say the disorder doesn't exist or is misdiagnosed in most cases and then do a disservice to people who actually have this serious problem that was just recently discovered and is starting to be explored by the medical community. There were people who decided Schizophrenia just didn't exist when it was becoming a fad and obviously people with schizophrenia diagnoses did have some kind of serious problems so this was very unhelpful. One of my Psychology prof's believed ADHD didn't exist because of the high co-morbidity and rate of "mis-diagnosis" but as Vernandi mentioned studies don't even support that it ever was over diagnosed.

Also of course any disorder can be confused with other disorders that look similar in terms of brain imaging patters, symptoms , behaviours etc, This is because (at least at the point we're at now in terms of knowledge of neuropsychiatry) all diagnoses of psychological, psychiatric , developmental disorders (anything that is DSM or ICD territory) are at least partly subjective , they are based on behavioural symptoms which are by their nature subjective.

Sorry for the rantiness.

Last edited by daydreamer84 on 30 Sep 2012, 12:30 am, edited 1 time in total.

Well I posted above about what I think about the over-diagnosis but no the symptoms of ASD aren't that unique. Here are a list of symptoms and associated traits that seem somewhat unique and other disorders that have the same problems documented:

Stimming (unusual stereotypical behaviours)can be found in:
intellectual disability and developmental delay
psychotic disorders like schizophrenia
stereotypical movement disorder

Need for Routine/Sameness:
OCD/anxiety disorders
OCPD

Intense fixated Interests: high intelligence
avoidant personality disorder
schizoid personality disorder

Social interaction Problems
ADHD
anxiety disorders especially social anxiety disorder and social phobia
affects of abuse/neglect
psychotic disorders
avoidant personality disorder
learning disabilities
developmental delays
Schizoid Personality Disorder

Theory of Mind Problems:
NVLD
Schizophrenia

Nov-verbal communication problems (including interpretation and expression):
NVLD
Hyperlexia
Semantic/Pragmatic Language Disorder

This list is not too extensive....these are just the ones that I know of/ can think of. I think it's the combination of the different traits that's telling.

Last edited by daydreamer84 on 29 Sep 2012, 8:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I am curious as to how you were introverted as a baby, my mother has told me that as an infant I hated to be held and the only way that she could nurse me was to place me on a pillow so as to not touch her in any way. She has even said that before I was born that it felt like I was stretching out inside of here like I wanted some space, which I can only imagine how much that sucked for me if I was claustrophobic. But I thought that your comment was interesting.

If they don't see us drooling and banging our heads, they don't believe that we're on the spectrum, because our traits and symptoms don't show.

I should've been more specific, but that is where I was going with the list, the combo of these traits above everything. Thank you for posting that info, I had no idea schizophrenics stimmed, I always believed stimming to be unique to autists and pregant women - although I'm not sure if the latter's stimming is the same as the former's.