1 in 68 changes possibly to 1 in 46.

Post Reply New Topic

do you believe autism is growing?

No, I believe it is being diagnosed more.

Yes and no. I think we have learned more about it and different degrees but I also think they stretched the spectrum and now more people are on it and fit it and the "no" part is I think it gets over diagnosed. I think if you are having social issues in school, doing nervous habits or preferring to play alone, they think you have it than looking at the big picture like what does the kid prefer to be alone, why is he doing (insert nervous habit here), why is he having social issues. Some kids are just shy, some just have outside interests than their peers so they don't have things in common, some kids are just mean and there is a saying that "before you decide you have social issues, make sure you are not surrounded by as*holes," and some are just introverted and I think with autism being on the aware, people will look for "signs" and find "proof." Look at my blog for example about what I wrote about my son and you will see why they put him under the ASD label for school (it's not a diagnoses).

Yes but they are covering it up by doing things like removing aspergers from the DSM. I think the real statistics are worse but I think its a conspiracy to hide the fact that vaccines might have caused autism. Hear me out here, yes the research into that is dodgy but consider the fact that all those against vaccines in anyway way shape and form keep getting murdered, its a little weird. Don't believe me, Google it.

Also consider that there was a case in which a family sued the pharmaceuticals companies over their child being autistic. They won the case but the weird thing here is the courts sealed the evidence in the case so yeah go luck suing the pharmaceuticals companies for your autism, your never win now. Google that too, I am too lazy to find a link but I have seen all this on the internet somewhere and I find the whole thing odd. Do I believe autism is caused by vaccines, I don't know. However the pharmaceuticals companies are trying too damn hard to protect their ass and its a little suspicious.

If it was caused by vaccines, we would have had an epidemic of autism in the 1950s and 1960s.

They didn't. They removed the TERM "Asperger's Syndrome", not the symptoms. Someone who formerly was described as having Asperger's is now simply described as being a "high functioning autistic".

My response: nope.

A) they expand the definition of the Autistic spectrum. The umbrella gets bigger. So more folks are under it.

B) They get better at finding and diagnosing folks on the autistic spectrum ( like in poor or minority communities) than before.

The same proportion of folks have it as always. They just get better at finding those folks than before.

One could propose that there was an "epidemic" of autism in the 50's and 60's - before then, the clinical data would show that there were zero autistic people!

No, i believe its being over-diagnosed, like ADHD.

I think there are some people and children who just aren't the social type and then get labelled with it, even though none of their 'symptoms' are problematic.

Im not saying ALL people diagnosed are faulsy diagnosed, there are OBVIOUSLY people who need the diagnoses because their autism actually disables them to a degree (hmm imagine that, a Disability actually disabling people) and i know of the people who did not get diagnosed in the 40s-90s are getting diagnosed now, EVEN if they have adapted but my point still remains valid

people who just sort of behave like autistic people are being diagnosed, even if their behaviour does not impair them and i think a majority of these diagnoses are children of scared parents who think little timmy has no friends because hes autistic.

I have to be honest, I just don't get where the over-diagnosis idea comes from, and I think it is a myth. "Labelling" by people not qualified to diagnose may well be more common, but not formal diagnosis of the kind that I would hope the statistics are measuring.

The experience of most people I have spoken to, whether autistic adult or parent, is that it is often difficult for many to even to obtain an evaluation (which would lead to under-diagnosis). By definition, a patient's traits have to be "problematic" for a diagnosis to be considered, and the diagnostic manuals have always been very clear on this point. "Sort of behaving like" is not going to get anyone a formal DX in all but a tiny minority of cases where the doctor is straight up crooked.

In terms of parents, my experience is that most of them are scared to death that their child might be diagnosed as autistic, and I have yet to come across even one parent who is desperate for a diagnosis in order to explain some normal childhood expression of personality. Again, I think this is a myth stemming from the media selectively choosing their anecdotes to suit their narrative.

I really fail to see why people think there is any mystery to be solved (other than belief in the bovine excrement spouted by the mass media). The criteria for diagnosis have been widened, a couple of generations of older people are being diagnosed because they never had the opportunity before, and many nations have expanded access to diagnostic evaluations. I don't see that there is any need of paranoid explanations, as there is absolutely nothing out of the ordinary that needs explaining.

Over diagnosis is the simplist most "common sense" explination. A variation on people believing correlation equaling causation.

People believing vaccines cause autism is a product of our times. There has been so many actual conspiracies by goverment and industry the first reaction nowadays to any situation is often to think conspiracy and coverup.

Then why was the term "autism" coined in the Forties, and why was aspergers coined in the Thirties, and why were the symptoms of both autism, and aspergers, observed in children by a Soviet shrink back in the 20's?

It would be interesting to see where these numbers are coming from. Are they talking about children only or all ages? Does this include the self diagnoses, does this include people with traits, does it include kids who are under the ASD label in school without a DX? Or is this based on people who are DX'd by a ASD specialist than by a school psychologist or clinical psychologist, etc.

Apologies if my sarcasm was a little obtuse. I wasn't implying that autism didn't exist, or intend the example as in any way precise. As what appears to be a poly-genetic condition I believe it likely that autism has existed at similar levels for most or all of human history and pre-history. What I was getting at, is that you can only see what you are looking for - and until criteria for diagnosis are widely accepted, people with any condition are effectively "invisible" in epidemiological statistics.

Autism as an entity has existed since 1943, when Kanner published his paper. I've seen case studies from the 1940s which mention autism in the Kannerian sense. Classic autism was known as "infantile autism" even under the DSM-III, which was opened to the public in 1980.

Asperger published his findings in 1943 as well--but it seems as if Lorna Wing was a pioneer in disseminating knowledge about Asperger's works, starting around 1980.

There was a vague sense that there was a "high-functioning" form of autism in the 1980s.