Reply to Autism and Overdiagnosis: Rampant, in psychologist's opinion

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]ASD is not a disease like cancer.[/quote]

So you are arguing for less specificity with ASD? Just lump 'em into one big group?

Good science demands specificity. I've never heard anyone argue otherwise. The truth is, today we are calling a multitude of things autism. [/quote]

Yeah. At the dev ped the other day for my kid that clearly has issues - many - but clearly not asd, no less problematic probably, and probably no less dehabilitating, I saw several classically autistic kids. [b]They look a certain way have a certain posture and a certain voice and a certain way.[/b] It's clearly genetic. [b]I think we are calling degrees of intellectual disability all autism. Not popular. But it's true.[/b] My kid is cognitively low functioning, there's no autism. But we've been forced that way like ten times. It's fruatrating because: expertise, prognosis, specialities. Why does this need to be explained? There's no "it's just cancer." Come on.[/quote]

No, they don't.  This is the worst kind of stereotyping. There's a saying "If you have seen one kid with autism, you've seen one kid."  There is a LOT of variation, even among sibs.

Autism is partly genetic and partly environmental. When you look at genetics for sibs with autism, they have mutations at different locations. It's not even the same genetic problem in the same family.  [/quote]

And also there's no sensible way to describe autism, at least as presently defined, as "degrees of intellectual disability."  Get to know a really smart Aspie and it's quickly apparent that what's wrong is not necessarily an intellectual disability.  DS is sharp as a razor cognitively--conspicuously a more precise and complex thinker than his NT age peers.  His (real) problems are social, emotional, and sensory.  The autism diagnosis encompasses a ton of people who do share some compelling common characteristics and may benefit from some similar interventions, but who cannot be stereotyped as having a certain posture, or voice, or level of intellectual functioning.  If you think that you know what "real" autism looks like, and that the kids who are not "classically" autistic don't "really" have it, then you're just saying you know better than the people who put together the DSM-V about what these words should mean.  But they're just words.  Maybe someday we'll have some real scientific way of identifying different underlying etiologies.  But for now nothing useful comes of this endless debate about whether the HFA crowd is really autistic or not.

And one thing I've noticed--parents beat this debate to death, but the actual autistic bloggers I read do not.  They seem to feel a lot of solidarity and commonality, from one end of the spectrum to the other.[/quote]

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