Mountain Goat wrote:
There was a study where a top professor in psychology specializing in autism went around the world from country to country from people group to people group to assess people, and he did it in a very different way to how people are normally assessed, as normally people either find out on their own and ask for an assessment, or they will be sent there by someone in the health service. What he did was to assess large groups of random people without telling them what they were being assessed for. They were told that if they knew, to come and see them directly and not tell anyone else. (That way they could both save time and ensure the others were not aware). He also used local psychologists to do the assessments as it is important that traits associated within the local populations are not mistaken for autism traits).
Now the results surprised everyone. Now remember these were random volunteers, many of whom did not even know what autism was (I didn't understand what autism was until I prayed in desperation, and after a series of unexpected results that lead me down the path of discovering what autism is).
He found out that the results almost always averaged at 6% of the population. He said sometimes they would show 5.9% or 6.1% but they didn't fluctuate beyond that.
He also turned to each countries Healthcare systems and said that the countries with the best mental Healthcare systems tend to diagnose at most 3.5%, and those with the poorest Healthcare systems diagnosed as low as 1.5%. He said the reason why the figures were lower than the 6% average was that they were only assessing those that came to them.
What your referring to I believe is known as the nocebo effect or placebo’s evil twin - that anxiety people get if they have a symptom and read a medical book suddenly they have all those symptoms for some horrible deadly condition.
The same is true in mental health and probably is why the self diagnosed should be viewed differently to the diagnosed.
However I am assuming the figures presented are those who have been professionally diagnosed and gone through a proper assessment usually by multiple experts.
Also it’s logical to assume since the cdc figures of 1 in 36 at 8 years old probably excludes most hf aspies that don’t get diagnosed until teenagers. Leaving a 9 year gap 9-17 the 1 in 20 is not that far fetched and there is reason to believe that is the true figure.
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"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends upon the unreasonable man."
- George Bernie Shaw
02 Jan 2025, 4:15 pm
