Autism CARES Act signed into law

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Mountain Desert Islander

Woo hoo! A one-paragraph news story. I don't quite understand what they mean by "research."

Early identification, prevention, treatment, cure

Although it’s the early identification that confuses me if there is no treatment or cure at present why the emphasis on early identification.

There’s ABA skills training but thats hardly going to change much for the individual

It’s like they are locked into their own groupthink narrative they keep talking about something but end up forgetting the false logic of what they are saying.

Maybe Mr Musk will be in charge of all the Research..and absolutely nothing will get done . Except maybe like some of the earlier facilities written of on Wrong Planet . Perhaps they will continue to see how much pain it takes to get
lower level Aspies to be kept under control...in a commercial medical environment? Sorry but some of the places I read about on here before did not sound very nice. .
Hope this is NOT that kind of research..!

The emphasis on early identification is because nothing much of significance can really be done to address things if all the folks that should have been identified are. There isn't really that much that can be done about adults at the present that isn't already legally required. But, ensuring that everybody that should be identifed early on is, should help a lot in terms of the quality of the research into what to do about it.

This is hardly just something that's useful for the purposes of eugenics.

The push for early identification is based on the fact that brain wiring that decides who you are most intensely forms in the earliest years. The “hope” is that if a person can be identified as autistic in infancy ABA therapies can stop or deflect the brain wiring from making one autistic or at least mitigate it.

Brain Plasticity & Early Intervention

How Early Intervention ABA Therapy Can Benefit Your Child

Maybe the money will produce some benefits but any legislation that promotes curing ASD just has a chilling effect.

My reply about brain plasticity is in response to questions about the push for early intervention, not the legislation per se.

The legislation "requires the Government Accountability Office to issue a study and report on how to increase the number of developmental behavioral pediatricians". Pediatricians treat people until the ages of 18 to 21. Being pro-ABA is bad enough, saying the legislation is pro-cure is a stretch.

Just watch Elon "increase its efficiency" and bugger it up.

Yep, I do think there is a legitimate reason to want to intervene early, I just get uncomfortable when it comes to the tendency to focus on things that come at the expense of the folks that are allegedly supposed to benefit. And if it is focused on early diagnosis that both leads to a future risk of eugenics-lite and further missed diagnoses for folks that aren't showing the sort of early signs that they like to see.

I believe there`s a lot of official dishonesty about Autism, the way the ASD diagnosis is structured and official policy that is full of contradictions, just like the ND movement itself.

Nothing really makes sense and there is no real intelligent logic to anything, its just a mess.

Definitely. Smooshing a bunch of diagnoses together without doing the necessary research to establish if it made any sense just made it worse. I think that it wouldn't have been as much of a problem had the diagnoses been around a bit longer, but most of the diagnoses were less than 20 years old when they were yanked and they didn't even start researching masking until about 5 years in.

As far as the ND movement itself goes, we only have the diagnoses that are available and ones that were available to work with. And, a lot of the stuff that people point out as being essential to autism when people are pushing for cures aren't things that everybody has to deal with, not even if you restrict it to people that were diagnosed.

I still think that it's foolish to blame autism for things when there are other diagnosable conditions at play that are less inconsistent in how they impact affected people.

A couple of examples:

Pathology claiming autism is a 100% genetic condition but at the same time claiming early intervention can somehow prevent or reduce autism.

That doesn’t make any logical sense

Gov claiming early intervention for early help and dedicating large resources into this. There is no help appart from welfare and access to special school that wouldn’t start until 5 years old anyway.

Talking like autism is one condition when it clearly isn’t

All the various euphemisms associated with describing autism that are not honestly held beliefs by those who say them

That's an out of date view. How genes respond varies based on environmental factors. A good example is that the environment that a person grows up in influences the amount of sweat glands. I don't know if anybody knows how much of the autism related issues are genetic and not epigenetic. There's a lot that goes on at that age neurodevelopmentally. And early identification is essential to working that out.

To an extent I agree here, but I don't know how that improves without better numbers, and programs can be added to intervene sooner. Head start does that in for a more general population. There's no inherent reason that programs couldn't be started with more specific help.

Well i don't know where you live but in the UK, as far as I'm aware there is no early intervention whatsoever for a child diagnosed, despite news media claiming the importance of it.

It just opens the door to welfare, special schools and maybe ADHD meds if needed that's about it.

In the US there`s ABA (skill training) or floor time ( mostly social training) i think? (leaving aside new experimental) things recently.

None of these as far as I'm aware are proven to dramatically change autism.

In any case if autism was a such a gift, natural difference or wasn't a disorder it wouldn't need reducing by early intervention in any way, another dishonesty spread by many.

I'm in the US, I doubt that it's appreciably different here.

However, by law in the US, gifted students have a legal right to special education just like those that are disabled to. So, I'm not really sure how you can draw a line between autism versus giftedness versus other learning disorders or intellectual disorders on the basis that there's a need for special education. As, all of those groups are entitled to a special education on the basis of any or all of that.