Should the Autism Spectrum Be Split Apart? (hawaiitribune-herald.com) 162
XXongo writes: A New York times article suggests that merging the diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome into the Autism diagnosis in 2013, thus creating the "autism spectrum disorder," was not helpful (paywalled; alternative source). That broadening of the diagnosis, along with the increasing awareness of the disorder, is largely responsible for the steep rise in autism cases that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called "an epidemic" and has attributed to theories of causality that mainstream scientists reject, like vaccines and, more recently, Tylenol. But the same diagnosis now applies to both people who are non-verbal, frequently engage in self-destructive behavior such as pounding their heads against the floor, and may require full-time care, but also to people who are merely somewhat socially awkward, possibly engage in repetitive behaviors, and have a narrow range of interests. "Everything changed when we included Asperger's [in the diagnosis of autism]," said Dr. Eric Fombonne, a psychiatrist and researcher at Oregon Health & Science University. He noted that in the earliest studies of autism rates, 75% of people with the diagnosis had intellectual disabilities. Now, only about a third do.
Question is (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Question is (Score:5, Interesting)
The diagnoses were merged because the evidence had begun to suggest that they were different severities of the same ailment. If the evidence has begun to suggest that we're dealing with fundamentally different ailments then the diagnoses should be split accordingly. If not then you're shuffling names for the sake of politics and it's not a good day in science when that happens.
Re:Question is (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Question is (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm married to a psychologist, and I can assure you that the DSM 5 (the guidebook for diagnostics) was created by a committee that was heavily influenced by politics, and there was a significant pushback within the psychology community about it.
This is the side effect of the fundamental problem that we really don't understand minds. Just as our AI people are basically alchemists prior to the acceptance of atomic theory, these guys are the same thing, just with the fact that some of them understand and admit that. These guys are right in the middle of our current culture wars without a solid basic scientific basis for what they do. We observe that chemicals affect or change neurotransmitters. We see some clear changes in the brain. Sometimes we see people's minds changed by destruction of bits of the brain, but we also see those minds recover and completely work around loss of what we used to think of as fundamental parts of the infrastructure.
That's before you start getting to diseases of the mind. We used to have "gender dysphoria". Then people observed that some brains inside males really seem to behave in female ways and started believing that their identity was fundamental. Then others showed that the brain and certainly mind are much more plastic that people thought before. In some cases your treatment and surroundings can visibly change the sex that your brain would be identified with in scans.
To really work out what's going on in even that small area, you should do randomized trials and double blind experiments. Needless to say, randomly changing the way someone's parents bring them up gets into ethics problems and isn't done. The science is really difficult and is often done badly. When governments have attempted to get a rational scientific summary of the current state [nationalarchives.gov.uk], that ended up with scientific criticism [biomedcentral.com] on both sides [beds.ac.uk] and ended up as a political shitshow [bbc.com]
DSM-N is where psychologists actually take that stuff on board and have to make recommendations for doctors. Their job is really really difficult. If the whole research field is totally politicized and if what was illegal under one US government becomes illegal to avoid under another then that becomes an inherently political job.
Since "gender" is by definition of the word a product of the mind (what I believe I am - whether through self examination, self determination, realism or madnes) and we don't have a proper theory of that mind, et alone a clear way to link the mind to the "sex" of the brain or even 100% clarity about what that even means, you can't even clearly define most of the terms and ideas needed to debate the issue scientifically.
Now, I've tried to be careful and, reasonably neutral and point to how the politics interferes with the scientific debate about one particular determination that has to be made for DSM. There's a 90% chance that if the critics don't read this last sentence we're going to get a massive flame war (and a 70% chance even if they do) from people who are more invested in this and probably know more specific facts about recent literature than me. Remember, these people are, in the end, Alchemists debating whether iron will soon be transmuted into gold or not.
How would you do DSM avoiding that?
Re:Question is (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sorry... I've been broken on the internet for a while now and started to use joke \j and sarcasm tags \s because so often there's just no way to tell and what looks like it has to be a joke is actually deadly serious. ;-)
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I'm pretty sure you just mistook satire for sincerity.
To be fair, I did too, on first reading. But that was less of a reply than a meta-reply, describing the format of expected replies.
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the DSM 5 (the guidebook for diagnostics) was created by a committee that was heavily influenced by politics, and there was a significant pushback within the psychology community about it.
This is the side effect of the fundamental problem that we really don't understand minds.
No. The DSM is guided by politics as stated, and that is not a side effect of our not understanding minds. Both things affect the DSM, but you're willfully pretending the situation isn't what it is to suit your argument.
Now, I've tried to be careful and, reasonably neutral
Reality is not neutral. Stop it.
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This is the side effect of the fundamental problem that we really don't understand minds.
No. The DSM is guided by politics as stated, and that is not a side effect of our not understanding minds. Both things affect the DSM, but you're willfully pretending the situation isn't what it is to suit your argument.
If there was settled science about this, the space that the politics would cover would be much smaller. With legs, we can identify clearly if one is missing. However, also, if someone complains that their leg feels weak and unstable, we can look and see with ultrasound if there are missing / damaged ligaments. If that is true of someone, then basically everyone accepts that the person will be disabled. If we come to something that's less well understood and more difficult to diagnose, like post-viral-syndro
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Fantastic post. Thank you. Whether it is the DSM Qor something else, we have to construct it from our observations and experience. There is no single unique way to do that. These things always involve disputes, compromise, and politics. We make this effort even when we know the outcome will be imperfect. We need things like the DSM so that we can communicate with each other. There will never be a final, complete, unchanging DSM. We change, the world changes, and our conclusions change.
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Really good response, thank you!
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I'm married to a psychologist, and I can assure you that the DSM 5 (the guidebook for diagnostics) was created by a committee that was heavily influenced by politics, and there was a significant pushback within the psychology community about it, and it was pushed through anyways for political reasons.
Thanks for sharing that. I had never looked at diagnosing mental disorders through the lens of bias. I feel kind of silly about that now. My youngest is autistic. When talking with his various SPED teachers over the years, it's become clear that they are in a constant "monitor/diagnose" (the SPED teachers aren't supposed to diagnose anything, but human nature seems to push most of them towards doing it anyway) frame of mind. Maybe it has something to do with the quality of teacher a public school SPED posit
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One person's wife saying something doesn't mean anything. Notice they don't give any details like what said politics were.
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One person's wife saying something doesn't mean anything. Notice they don't give any details like what said politics were.
Every data point is welcome. It gives you information to look into. If you take their word for it without verification, that's on you.
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Well considering when asked elsewhere about it they started going on about gender dysphoria I would take this data point with a grain of salt.
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Of course it does. If they can't enunciate the details on what they are talking about then they are likely making their claim up.
Just because a person says something doesn't make it true.
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What were the political reasons? (Score:2)
What were the political reasons? I don't remember any politicians claiming the need to unify a butch of stuff under the term autism the way I hear about Tylenol and vaccines giving it to people.
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Good lord, use paragraphs and stay on topic. 2/3rds of your post isn't even about autism and I don't feel I'm any closer to understanding what you were getting at in your first post.
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His post is more broad then just talking about autism. The point he's trying to convey is that how we classify stuff (via DSM) takes politics into account instead of sticking to what the professionals are saying.
Gender dysphoria is an example of how the guidance of DSM can be affected by politics. Since we don't have the medicine to fix the mind, we're resorting to physically altering people that want to change their outward gender.
That doesn't mean that a trans-person doesn't still have a flaw in their bra
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This.
I was following the DSM back in the day and many thought; as did I, lumping them together created funding for Aspies that otherwise didn't exist. When science screws up, it gets back on track eventually as long as it's still science - if it does not, then it is no longer science. I've been tracking the topic for 20 years; before the fads or most psychologists even knew about Aspergers (or forgot about in school; back when rates were estimated to be 1 in 100k in the late 90s.)
With more information from
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You can add how they've recently reclassified transgenerism (ne gender dysphoria) to the reasons why people have lost trust in the mainstream medical/psychological profession, as well.
Psychology has always been prone to un-scientific activities, but it's become increasingly bad with the wanton politicization of diagnostic standards, on top of the un-scientific approach employed in making most individual diagnosis.
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I'm married to a psychologist, and I can assure you that the DSM 5 (the guidebook for diagnostics) was created by a committee that was heavily influenced by politics, and there was a significant pushback within the psychology community about it, and it was pushed through anyways for political reasons. I'm not sure if the psychology profession (and medical profession as well) truly understand how much they're contributing to the falling public trust in institutions by doing stuff like this, but it's plain as day to me.
A spectrum of psychologists. Hope I'm not stepping on toes here, and casting a wide net, when marriage counseling part of psychology has ben heavily influenced by womanist politics, and is pretty worthless. disclaimer - the standard format is the wife demands to go to therapy, wanting to fix her terrible husband. There is a powerful incentive to play to the "victim", so if the therapist dares to claim that the wife is at some level of fault, she'll stop going, so there is more money in badgering the husban
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I used to think it's trendy but now i think its better diagnosis.
It's getting to the point where pretty much everyone has something and you know? I believe it.
I've started playing an online game and nearly every young person claims to have something, some of them are faking but after interacting with a bunch of people. Yeah a ton of them show adhd or autism symptoms in line with their supposed diagnosis, they have stories from their childhood in line with those diagnoses, and they have current problems ty
Re:Question is (Score:4, Interesting)
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I think there are a couple issues here. One is parents. I have a relative who worked in education and there is an incredible amount of "shopping for a diagnosis" that happens when a child has issues with some aspect of their education. Many parents simply aren't able to deal with the fact that there are things that their child may not be good at, or that they're not conventionally brilliant, etc. They then shop around for a psychologist who will attest to the kid having some "disorder" so that they get
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Many parents simply aren't able to deal with the fact that there are things that their child may not be good at, or that they're not conventionally brilliant, etc.
Or that their child is a misbehaving brat because of bad parenting.
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I don't usually quote song lyrics on Slashdot, but these seemed relevant:
I know I'm not unique, we all got broken brains
Culture recently decided being crazy is okay
And now we all can talk about it on our social feeds
Having a rough day?
Hashtag mental health awareness week
I know that's progress
We don't have to hide no more
But it leaves me wondering why we ain't said this stuff before
Like were we always all crazy and we all just kept quiet?
Are we on the same page with what we're identifying?
And if crazy's the new normal then it's not that crazy, is it?
Cause the word by definition means it sits outside the system
And how can we tell difference between sick and tryna' fit in?
And if everybody's crazy, then who's supposed to fix it?
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mSf_i1U0TI)
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If everyone has it... (Score:2)
... then no one has it because that means its simply a section of the range of normal human behaviour and not a special condition or disorder at all.
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+1, Insightful
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Well, back when I was a kid, 'autistic' meant, 'screaming and flapping your arms when somebody turned on the light wrong.'
"Rain Man" was a movie about what was, at the time, considered a high-functioning autistic.
Most of what we would nowadays call 'ASD' was just 'quirky' or 'weird' or 'shy.'
Go find a copy of the 1980s nuclear war film Testament. Watch the scenes with the sons. One son, the youngest, has several scenes with things like 'running the TV, a radio, and a record player at the same time,' 'bein
Blame the parents (Score:2)
Everyone wants their kid to be special or have special treatment? Shy, a bit awkward? Must be something wrong with them, must get special attention at school!
No! They're just normal kids. There is no single normal human behaviour, there's a whole spectrum of it from the psychotically gregarious to the socially awkward types amongst who I include myself and probably a lot of people who have it ended up in IT have it because interacting with a machine can be simpler. That doesn't make us special or abnormal,
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It's been mangled by culture.
Once upon a time, it was unambiguously a pretty debilitating mental state. If you had that diagnosis, everyone could see issues and it wasn't at all something that anyone would aspire to.
Then Asperger's came along and thus began the 'diagnosis as an excuse for selfish behavior'. The general impression was "a smart person who has a tendency to be a jerk", which sounded totally awesome to a lot of people. They didn't need to try not to be a jerk, they had a pass in the diagnosis.
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All the above.
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Autism as used in the modern sense, is a relatively new diagnosis, coming into prominence only in the last 35 years or so. Previously a lot of people we now call mildly autistic would just be labeled as "weird" and singled out for extra discipline, bullied by their peers, and flagged for remedial education. Many of the "profoundly autistic"/low functioning kids would have been labeled "mentally retarded" and stuck in special education programs (that classroom near the boiler room with the window blacked o
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It is an evolution of "victim syndrome": "It's not my fault. I have autism. I'm on the spectrum."
For most people it is just an excuse. People using it as an excuse for their poor behavior are making things worse for those who are really suffering and in need of extra care.
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Having an invisible disability is a function of the newer generations, and an arms length relationship to "the economy", i.e. how pharmaceutical companies and psychologists turn very little into a huge feeding frenzy/industry. ($$$$)
Woke people pat each other on the hand and
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Not everyone has what it takes to get through law school, pass the bar, and then become a judge. Not everyone has the traits needed to take multiple companies public and become a millionaire many times over.
But the people who do have such skills do have a much better shot at finding workarounds for their challenges.
So if your message is that "they did find on their own, so everybody with autism / ADHD / etc should do find on their own" then I have to ask how big your yacht is. Because if your former boss ca
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BUT
Plenty of people did what I just said. They were coaxed into accepting limitations, then not challenging those assumptions.
You have it backwards. They didn't have any better shot at passing a bar exam or whatever you need to become a corporate financier. They clawed their way up without help, without intervention, zero fucks were given for their
because the autistic get laid more now! (Score:2)
Why does everyone seemingly have autism now? Is it better diagnosis, over diagnosis, re-definitio of autism or something else?
All 3. I have Asperger's. When I was a kid, I didn't get a diagnosis because we were poor, rural, and it was the 80s. I would definitely get one today and get social services to help me integrate better into school. I also would understand why my behavior was off putting to many instead of being constantly shamed and told I am fucked up and broken. Instead of being on my own and having to figure out via trial and error how to fit in, I would have been put into a social group today where a teacher would
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Not everyone who is a stereotypical nerd is an ass burger. And you are not qualified to diagnose others.
classy name calling there, bud! (Score:2)
Not everyone who is a stereotypical nerd is an ass burger.
You really put me in my place with that clever and witty insult. It's so profound, I will now question all of my life's decisions. You've set me straight!
Re: Question is (Score:2)
Nowadays, it's not so much a diagnosis (an assessment of an illness), as it is a psychological characteristic (a descriptive personality trait). It's become an identity. Like gender dysphoria, if you turn a disease into an identity, you will find the cohort size increase due to self diagnosis.
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There's been plenty of videos lately on it, but it boils down to:
1) better reporting
2) pollution, Autism has only been reported since industrialization
3) older parents, there is a bunch of "inherited mechanics" that we basically know because usually twins 90%+ of the time are both have autism if they are identical and less than 20% if they are fraternal.
4) drug interactions, yes the "tylenol" thing is a thing, but it's not "the" thing. It's a contributing factor because NSAIDS can't be used during pregnancy
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Human resources understand it better than calling in sick with ME.
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Why does everyone seemingly have autism now? Is it better diagnosis, over diagnosis, re-definitio of autism or something else?
Two things. Autism Speaks wants money, and an epidemic of Autism makes them look good
The other reason is that somehow over the fast few decades, having mental or physical problems has become a flex.
I've worked with some actual aspies, what they are is individuals that might be a bit socially awkward, might have a tendency to speak their minds without as many filters, might not be athletic, but damn - so many are really smart and focused.
But they have feelings, want to be loved, and once you get them
Re:Question is [projection]? (Score:2)
Going for the Funny that the rich-target story didn't get any of...
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Because your great-grandfather who hated loud noises, family gatherings, and was at his happiest tilling the fields in extremely straight rows day after day.
When he retired, he built ships in jars and organized all of his stamps in his spare time. Of course he was autistic.
We just didn't say that, we said, "ah yeah, Grandpa Joe was eccentric. Helluva farmer, though."
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I won't waste a mod point on you, AC, though it's likely rsilvergun did.
Reinforcing the stereotype.
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Meaning once the disease described individuals who were very likely going to need help for their entire lives.
Now those people are a minority of the folks receiving that diagnosis.
I imagine I would receive an ASD diagnosis if I grew up today. When I did grow up however, I was just an introverted nerd.
The question before us, is whether or not this is cons
As a diagnosed autist (Score:4, Interesting)
Dear Lord, someone finally sees reason! So much yes please!
Give me my Asperger's back! I don't give a damn if he was a Nazi or whatever, the term was exceedingly useful!
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ACs are never on holiday. They, like rsilvergun and others, are ubiquitous and everlasting bots, spawned in the days of lIce and the other malicious IRC bots. Some are wetware, apparently, an interesting evolution.
Nothing new here.
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When have I ever commented on his sexuality? I've commented on his age or intellect, sure... :D
Should the Autism Spectrum Be Split Apart? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes!
I'm fed up of being ASD. I have to explain where I am on the spectrum and I think it helps having a return to the time I was able to just say I am an Aspie and everyone gets it.
When a spectrum is big, we always divide it into subgroups. Why have Blue, Red and Yellow? Why not just call it all visible light and describe the colour to people in Kelvin? Most people would have no clue what a kelvin is.
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"Why have Blue, Red and Yellow? Why not just call it all visible light and describe the colour to people in Kelvin?"
Nanometers would be standard, but I get the point. "Look at all the 700 nm in the sunset sky." "Look at how 470 nm the ocean is today." It would certainly mess up the poet's rhyming though.
Names are important (Score:2)
Re: Names are important (Score:2)
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Don't forget cyclone and typhoon - both hurricanes, just different oceans.
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But then again, so are tornadoes.
Hurricanes and typhoons are what you're thinking of regarding the "different oceans", but even then it gets a bit weird- see the hurricane barreling into the west coast of Mexico right now.
The actual rules for which you call it are fucking complicated.
Re: Names are important (Score:2)
That's a bit more like localization. There is no real difference from a technical sense. The different words come from different regions with different linguistic groups. Typhoon (Chinese tai fung, used in Asian Pacific region). Hurricane (Mayan Huracan, used in North and Central America). Cyclone (Greek kuklos, used largely in the remaining southern regions).
This is sort of similar to sirocco (hot dry wind from North Africa moving towards Europe). It's just desert wind. From a technical perspective, that s
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Cyclone (Greek kuklos, used largely in the remaining southern regions).
They just don't really have a specific term, there.
Tropical Cyclones are what the storms are.
Hurricane and Typhoon are regionalized names for them, as you pointed out.
The word cyclone itself refers to any scale of cyclonic atmospheric disturbance (but usually mesoscale) and is the generally agreed upon scientific term.
Re: Names are important (Score:2)
Yeah, good call-out. Cyclone is closest to the technical term, I would say, while the other are regional colloquial terms.
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But the reason here is money. (Now who would've thunk!)
The more people are diagnosed with whatever, the more money there is to be made by producing remedies. Remember that if you exhibit symptoms of a disorder, doctors are obliged to treat that -- if they don't, you can sue them for negligence, even if they disagree with the diagnosis or with the whole approach.
Throw in the mix here the interests of the big pharma and medical insurance businesses, et voila, on a systemic level you have a recipe (pun not rea
I fully agree. (Score:2)
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people with Aspergers who don't generally need much help are using limited resources within the healthcare and social care system that they don't get any benefit from but someone with more severe autism would.
What resources? For an adult, there's nothing. For a kid, is it fair to deny them help they need because they're not "autistic enough"?
Harvard isn't mainstream? (Score:2)
theories of causality that mainstream scientists reject, like vaccines and, more recently, Tylenol.
The study's senior author is the Dean at Harvard's School of Public Health with the study led by Mt. Sinai. Seems pretty mainstream to me.
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The study did NOT say caused. It was a correlation thing. IO am sure you have heard the cliche "Correlation does not equal causation". It is a cliche because humans often make this mistake.
My favorite example was the comic book study. S
In the 1950s Dr. Fredric Wertham (a noted and powerful psychiatrist that was quoted in the famous legal case Brown vs Board of education) found that most adult readers of comics were in prison. He wrote a book called the Seduction of the Innocent that proposed that comi
what autism is, and is not (Score:2)
First they came for the trans (Score:2)
Because I was not trans,
Then they came for the autistic,
And I did not speak out,
Because I was not autistic,
Then they came for me,
And there was no one left,
To speak out for me
It's all in your mind. (Score:3)
I have a nut allergy. It's only irritating and unpleasant for me, there's no big reaction, anaphylaxis or EpiPens. If you need to split the nut allergy category you could go for mild, serious and profound perhaps.
Why is autism different? Why a separate category for milder forms of it? I also have autism, it runs in the family. My sister is quite debilitated by hers but I pass as neurotypical (masking!). We agree on how it affects out brain function, social interactions, sensory processing, etc. It's the same "symptoms", different severity.
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Why is autism different?
Nut allergies truly are on a spectrum, they are otherwise essentially the same thing. A mild nut allergy, for example, can morph into a more severe nut allergy, and sometimes, nut allergies can be reduced over time, perhaps with the help of allergy shots.
Autism is not actually a spectrum, despite the name. It rather seems to be a collection of distinct conditions that have some similar symptoms, that happen to vary and happen to appear to be on a spectrum. https://www.nbcnews.com/hea [nbcnews.com]
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Why a separate category for milder forms of it?
Just because someone may have some overlapping symptoms or behaviors doesn't mean its the same thing but less.
You have a highly social person who diagnose as autism because they get fixated on things, big woopie. That's completely different from those who are broken socially IMHO the base core of autism is they lack the ability to communicate mostly non verbal cues. Yet those social butterflies who excel at it, and always have as a normal person, get classified as autistic to the point where those who have
Just use the anime convention! (Score:3)
Autism (base), Super autism, Super autism 2, Super autism 3, Super autism 4 (not canon), Super autism 4 (canon), super autism god, Super autism god super autism, Super autism god super autism (with kaioken), Ultra Autism sign, Ultra autism mastered
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That's a good argument, however, being compared to saiyan forms is cooler (as opposed to frieza)
Subtypes and Features (Score:3)
The trouble now is that, more than ever, Autism is a wide umbrella heading. If two people, Alice and Bob, have Autism, then they don't necessarily have the same thing, and the degree of similarity between Alice's Autism and Bob's Autism may be great or little.
There are many common features of Autisms* such as non-verbal, stimming, and so on. Then there are less obvious features, such as those described in books like Pretending To Be Normal.
*(and I think it best to pluralise: Alice has an Autism, and Bob has an Autism, but Alice's Autism may not be the same as Bob's Autism).
Part of the problem is the way the medical people like to apply diagnostic labels, as they do with physical medicine, and then try to reason based on those diagnostic labels. For example one may want to try a randomised controlled trial of treatments for Autism (without even considering the possibility that such a trial may not be comparing like with like).
Mind and brain are complex, and complexity is a bitch.
Dad was an aspie I am low spectrum one (Score:4, Interesting)
Next recognize that people are different and shouldn't be expected to be the same.
In the 50s... (Score:2)
...only the most severely disabled got a diagnosis.
I was just the weird kid with no friends who everybody hated.
Many years later, I learned about Aspergers and realized that it explained some, but not all of my problems.
When I read about the other versions of autism, it seems that those people are nothing like me.
Combining a wide spectrum of mental illnesses into a single description may have a tiny bit of value, but It seems to cause more harm than good.
Neurodivergent People Have Always Been Here (Score:2)
I have learned some things. Neurotypical people and neurodivergent people don't mix th
ASD is too broad a spectrum (Score:3)
I know personally of 9 people who have Autistic Spectrum Disorder. Prior to the change with DSM-5 in 2013, these 9 people would be classified as follows: 1 with PDD-NOS, 2 with Aspergers or High Functioning Autism, and 6 with Autism. Today they are all classified as having a single "thing". I am one of those 9 people. I've never been clinically diagnosed, but after going through this with two of my sons (2 of the 9 people), who have what used to be called Autism, I know pretty well what I have. My sister has Aspergers.
All 9 of the persons mentioned are different from each other. I cannot look at all of them and say they have the same "disorder". Some of them are able to live on their own, others not so much. Some need 24/7 supervision that are 20+ years old. In a previous story I used the analogy of broken bone disorder, where you have to have a broken bone somewhere in your body to have "broken bone disorder". Could be any bone in the body, broken in any way. There isn't a single treatment for "broken bone disorder". Treatment depends on what bone is broken, how it was broken, what its used for, and so forth. You cannot apply the same treatment to everyone with "broken bone disorder", nor is everyone who has the disorder impaired in the same way. Some may be not impaired at all.
I've heard rumblings that ADHD was being considered to be put under the Autism Spectrum. Someone even mentioned putting Obsessive Compulsive Disorder under there as well. I kid you not. At that point we might as well change the name from Autism Spectrum Disorder to Some Kind Of Mental Health Disorder or something.
As someone else pointed out, DSM-5 was and is not universally liked among mental health professionals. There was a lot of push back on DSM-5. And yet here we are.
The type of people who like DSM-5 seem to be the media and politicians, not those who are in the trenches dealing with ASD such as myself.
Yes. (Score:2)
Hell, yes, it needs to be split. And some of it should be ripped out of the DSM and wrapped around the necks of the assholes who decided it was an "illness".
who cares? (Score:2)
This obsession about the ICD codes of common conditions is a side effect of our broken health care system.
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Who said anything about ICD codes? This isn't about coding, it's about whether the condition is really just varying severities of the same condition, or completely different conditions that just appear superficially to be related. https://www.nbcnews.com/health... [nbcnews.com] If the latter is true, then the treatments would also differ.
political science (Score:2)
These arguments are about politics, not science. The motivations are purely political.
As an autistic person, I have something to say (Score:2)
Problem (Score:2)
Here's the problem - the "increase" in cases led them to start blaming random stuff and throwing out all these bans.
If you change the definition now, you'll have a corresponding decrease that they'll say their actions caused and they'll take credit for.
If they don't have the critical thinking capacity the understand the increase in diagnoses, they also won't properly understand the decrease.
Split apart? You mean like between Republicans and (Score:2)
Already had that, then glued it together (Score:2)
"Autism lite" used to be called "Asperger's Syndrome", but then they grouped that into "autism" or "mild autism", and now they want to ungroup it again???
The namer has autism! ProveMeWrong!
Yes, and come up with a meaingful threshold (Score:2)
Asperger's, which I've been formally diagnosed with, is not the same thing, in most cases. In fact, Asperger's is misdiagnosed, usually without a doctor, in far too many ca
Re:Redefinitions by activists (Score:5, Insightful)
"It's pretty well understood that current "let's get everything under the same umbrella so activists can claim they have more support" has been modus operandi for far left activists for a while now. "
Bull, that was the right wingnuts what did that so they could claim anything they didn't like was a "Conspiracy".
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, because "right wing conspiracy" stands for "facts left wing doesn't like".
Have a gander at a list of other "facts left wing doesn't like" presented in another reply.
Re:Redefinitions by activists (Score:4, Informative)
That was doctors and neuroscientists, not activists.
Lots of conditions have a wide spectrum when it comes to severity and symptoms. They are grouped together due to things like common cause or common mechanism. Sometimes they grouping is historic, but we tend to undo that when it turns out to be inappropriate.
Re: (Score:2)
I really hit a bullseye on this, didn't I? Replies are everything from "this is a conspiracy theory" to "this is bipartisan (and vaccines because why not)" to "I will DARVO you for this!" to "doctors can't be activists, and certainly don't want to have their thing get more money, and there's absolutely no historic precedent otherwise (please ignore massive amounts of precedent to contrary!)"
This is indeed a "conspiracy theory" in that it's a fact that is unpalatable for activists. It is indeed bipartisan in
Re: (Score:2)
Wanting your kid to be diagnosed with autism is bipartisan. So is wanting to blame it on vaccines.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I basically had a mental breakdown, life became to much. I went to see a psychologist Dr (non-MD Phd) who specializes in diagnostic testing. After spending 3 hours questioning me, she wrote a report that cut me to the bone, it was "ME" to a T.
After my wife passed away, I was struggling with depression and my primary care Dr tried many different meds and they didn't help. After testing, I'm told, "you have bipolar depression" and with the right medication meant f