Aniihya wrote:
Adamantium wrote:
Who_Am_I wrote:
I'm sure someone's already posted this, but turn it around and you've got "72% of murderers thought to have not suffered from ASD.".
But even that is too low.
The data doesn't support or even "hint at" the conclusions drawn.
A scientist is not going to advocate doing a study to categorize theropod populations currently living in the Australian outback or a study to categorize the hull designs of UFOs observed over Siberia compared to those observed over Brazil, because there is no reason to think such studies would be possible to complete or yield useful or interesting results.
In the meantime, people should refrain from proclaiming a connection that simply has not been shown. Are some autistic people violent criminals? Yes, such evidence as actually exists seems to show that the rate of such behavior among autistics is LOWER than in neurotypical populations, not higher.
If evidence emerges that shows some connection, then that is something worth exploring carefully, but in the meantime it is damaging and foolish to smear a very heterogenous population of autistic people, who exhibit extreme variations in cognitive and behavioral styles with charges that they all have some increased propensity for extreme violence, or spree killing, or serial killing or any such thing.
Please present mentioned evidence.
Funny you should ask for that, as you never provided evidence to the contrary in a previous debate on this subject in the News and Current Events forum:
viewtopic.php?f=21&t=200813&start=45But I don't mind providing evidence:
Dr Mohammad Ghaziuddin studied this and found no evidence of higher rates of crime (and some evidence of lower rates of criminal conviction) in autistic populations. Specifically cited in his article in Current Psychiatry (
http://www.currentpsychiatry.com/home/a ... 2abe2.html) is the paper "Haskins BG, Silva JA. Asperger’s disorder and criminal behavior: Forensic-psychiatric considerations. J Am Acad Psychiatry Law. 2006;34(3):374-384." which provided this information: "In a clinical sample of 313 Danish adults with ASD (age 25 to 59) drawn from the Danish Register of Criminality, Mouridsen and colleagues found that persons with ASD had a lower rate of criminal conviction than matched controls (9%, compared with 18%)."
So there you go, a shred of evidence to support my claim. I have yet to see a similar shred of evidence to support the accusation that autistic people murder or commit acts of violence at higher rates than other people.
I am convinced by the reasoning presented by Emily Willingham in Forbes on this topic:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywillin ... -autistic/Some brief excerpts:
Quote:
In their paper, which is making a splash, of course, Clare Allely and co-authors claim that 67 of the 239 “eligible killers” they evaluated in their review had “definite, highly probable, or possible” autism spectrum disorder. But a closer look at their numbers shows that of these, only six were in the “definite” category [ETA: details on those six summarized here]. That’s 2.5% of the total of 239 they examined. It’s a percentage that happens to be just slightly less than the 2.6% identified in the most thorough study of autism prevalence in the general population to date, in South Korea.
...
The authors of this egregious paper helpfully provide some silly Venn diagrams that allegedly show the overlap of autism, brain injury, and emotional distress. But as I’ve written before, the real unifying feature of most mass murderers isn’t any of these. It’s the anger and the rage, often blasted outward at innocent targets by way of easily accessible firearms. No autism required … or, in the vast majority of cases even identified in this paper … diagnosed.
It's a well considered, well written piece. I recommend it to anyone interested in this topic.