the washington post really should know better.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/ ... IQAEqvNWO_

here is the link to an article which says that antidepressants such as prozac help autism. it goes on to say that they lessen repetitive behaviors. it was a "small study"... in other words handpicked. they publish this for the world to see. reducing repetitive behaviors does nothing to help autism. parents of autistic people are going to try to put their kids on prozac because of this. it just sounds like a sales pitch for the company who makes prozac.

Link's no good.

But on the topic. I hate to be the first one to reply and not agree with you. Doing do seems to have a tendency to start threads off on the wrong foot, but....

Lemme explain first.

I've been on Prozac, but it was before my Autism DX, and was for some compulsive behaviors. It worked. It not only worked, but I became more focused, accomplished a lot more, and became better organized and better able to maintain productive routines. I do have ADD to though, that we also did not know about at the time. Did it do anything for my Autism? Not a clue, because I didn't have any idea what to look for at the time.

I stopped taking it for one reason only. I couldn't tell it was doing any good at all until after the fact. What I mean is, I didn't feel any different. I didn't notice any differences in the moment. But I did start noticing things like, "Hey! My desk is totally organized. I know where everything is, and can find what I need in a split second." The problem for me was that if felt as though someone else had been doing it all for me.

That was very disconcerting so I stopped taking it. Now my life is a crap-pile mess again, but Prozac did help me get rid of the compulsions.

It does have a lot of positive affects. Some that I can see would help with some Autism problems. Reducing repetitive behaviors certainly would help me if I had any, but I don't anymore so...

Repetitive behavior can in some cases interfere with learning in an academic setting or in adapting to daily life. Not doing anything (that's available) to address this can be detrimental to them by the time they become an adult.

i dont know about prozac,but adivan helps me a lot

my point was just that it was a small study and it just wasn't very scientific, so it was irresponsible for them to publish it because people might make quick decisions based on the information they gave.

Well it's kind of hard to comment on that when the link doesn't work and we can't read it for ourselves. We don't know what that article actually says. For the most part, newspapers just report what they find out there, but don't tell anyone what to do with it.

EDIT: Found it here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/ ... story.html



A small number, yes, but that's actually a very scientific, and statistically sound way to begin research on something like this. It's a study designed to see whether further studies should be done. They always start with small numbers first, because it costs a lot of money to study large populations. It's a "test," in effect, of a theory, to see whether it may be worth doing a larger and more expensive study.



That's pretty significant.



There's the responsibility factor for the paper. They're specifically including this information so that readers will NOT draw broad sweeping conclusions.

They even included a link so we can go find and read the study for ourselves.

I don't seen how this amounts to being irresponsible TBH.

i have had in the past genuine difficulty posting direct links to articles and such even on a good computer.just because a link seems dead doesnt mean its iligitimate.you can usualy google it and it will come as well

I wasn't suggesting that at all. Just that it's hard to comment on something you can't read. Anyway, I found it. Problem solved.

well the link worked on my computer so there must be a site glitch. at any rate it still seems like the article is too general to me, and it could mislead people.

I prefer to think of it as "people may be mislead." I agree, they might, but we've got to take some responsibility for properly interpreting what we read.

Does the link you posted still work for you? I was wondering if they may have moved the article. It wasn't hard to find just using their own search field anyway.

i posted the day the article came out because i read it in the paper so they may have archived it or something, but the link still works for me yeah. i'm thinking it is a site problem or maybe i have a cookie that you don't idk.

Eh. WaPo is a newspaper, not a medical journal.

It has a responsibility to report news accurately and it seems that that's what it has done. It's not in a position to analyse the study, after all.