Slashdot Mirror
CDC Reports 1 In 88 Children Now Affected With Autism In the US
An anonymous reader writes "A new government health report indicated that about one in 88 children in the United State has autism or a related disorder, the highest estimate to date, which represented an overall increase of 25 percent since the last analysis in 2006. The Centers for Disease Control reported on Thursday that the rate increased by 78 percent compared to the reported rate in 2002. From the article: '"The CDC’s new estimate of autism prevalence demands that we recognize autism as a public health emergency warranting immediate attention," Autism Speaks Chief Science Officer Geri Dawson said in a new release.
"More than ever, these numbers compel us to redouble our investment in the research that can reveal causes, validate effective treatments and guide the effective delivery of services to all our communities," she added.'"
And all of them are lurking on 4chan.
Whereas on slashdot the ratio is the prevelance is the far more alarming 1 in 2.
Or are we changing how we mesure it? How we define "autism"? Maybe it's because autism is more acceptable, and doesn't require someone to be locked in a basement until a group of 1980s teens decide that they need to find a treasure in order to save their housing development.
All kidding aside, I'd be interested to know how much the autism scale has changed over the years. I realize that highly functioning people with autism still count as having autism, but was that always the case?
There's a reason there is no "Disagree" mod...
I Had Asperger Syndrome. Briefly.
By BENJAMIN NUGENT
New York Times
Published: January 31, 2012
"FOR a brief, heady period in the history of autism spectrum diagnosis, in the late ’90s, I had Asperger syndrome.
I exhibited a “qualified impairment in social interaction,” specifically “failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level” (I had few friends) and a “lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests, or achievements with other people” (I spent a lot of time by myself in my room reading novels and listening to music, and when I did hang out with other kids I often tried to speak like an E. M. Forster narrator, annoying them). I exhibited an “encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus” (I memorized poems and spent a lot of time playing the guitar and writing terrible poems and novels).
The biggest single problem with the diagnostic criteria applied to me is this: You can be highly perceptive with regard to social interaction, as a child or adolescent, and still be a spectacular social failure. This is particularly true if you’re bad at sports or nervous or weird-looking.
But my experience can’t be unique. Under the rules in place today, any nerd, any withdrawn, bookish kid, can have Asperger syndrome."
There's a pretty active debate over how to classify it, and how it relates to "normal" functioning, and some of the major theories do at least hint in the direction that the picture of "normality" is complex.
One model, which has a clearer division, is that there is a specific etiology, which would make "autism" a more conventional "disease" in a sense, in that some people have it and some don't, and there is a known cause.
However another major model views the "autism spectrum" as something like the tail of a normal Bell-curve distribution for some cluster of traits. In that case, the dividing line between "normal" and "not normal" becomes a more subjective one having to do with how far in the tails you decide to put a cutoff, which probably involves some judgment of ability to function in society (which in turn depends on the society).
Other models think that we're conflating several etiologies in this big basket, and that some may be discrete diseases while others are tail-of-a-Bell-curve traits.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
My son is autistic, and I can't stand it when people involve the words 'disease' or 'cure' when speaking of it. Autism Speaks goes so far as to use the word 'eradication', so I don't bother with them whatsoever. They want a cure for something, in my own opinion, isn't curable. It's the way you're made. There are no cures for Down's out there right now, are there?
And when it comes to the "OMG SO MANY AUTISTIC KIDS!" issue--I'm sure everyone here remembers the days back in grade-high school, where the special-needs kids were all dumped into one room. From Down's to ADHD, they resided in the basement where none of us "normal" kids ran the risk of running into them and giving us complexes. There were many, many children that were autistic, but they'd only get the colorful, cute euphemisms, like 'retards' or 'speds'. They were ALWAYS used with great care and kindness, of course. /sarcasm
Nowadays, more people are eager to look into each case specifically, instead of throwing a blanket over any kid that falls behind or shows some sign of disability. Therefore, we're all freaking out about how there are so many sudden cases of autism--to me, it's always been here. I myself am in the spectrum, but back when I was little, I was brought to 'retardation' tests to examine my issues (where they discovered that my IQ was actually strangely high). I consider myself an undiagnosed case until I learn otherwise. If you look around yourself, think back to all the kids you went to school with, the more you might realize that autism's always been there... we just haven't met it with the same speculation, sensitivity and care until now. Are there environmental factors? Perhaps. But I think that only delays our understanding of autism itself: we're looking for outside reasons, when it's inborn, 'just the way you are'.
My son is almost nine, doesn't use the toilet exclusively, speaks almost exclusively in echolalia (and in my exact tone and inflection, as I was his main caregiver growing up), has odd, brain-numbing routines (he'll sing the same three words of a song for an hour straight while hitting the floor over and over again in specific patterns)... but he is damned smart, scarily so. I work on meeting him halfway; he does, deep down, have great understanding, and as long as I accommodate the things he can't help, it works out. To be honest, he's one of the easiest kids I've ever had to deal with, and I was a preschool teacher for over ten years.
You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
Here is the actual study and is annoyingly light on details to help answer that question. The total number includes people diagnosed with Autistic Disorder, Aspergers, or Pervasive Developmental Disorder–Not Otherwise Specified. They have tables that slice and dice the data between gender, ethnicity, locality, IQ, and other factors, but nowhere in the paper do the say what the split between these categories is. The closest is a table that shows how many people were diagnosed before the age of 8.
If the increase is largely in Aspergers, the I would expect that it is mostly due to increased diagnosis, since it didn't didn't even have an official diagnosis standard until the early 90's and didn't enter into mainstream awareness till about a decade later.
Without this information I have no idea how to react. If we are seeing a huge increase in the number of people with low functioning Autism, that is a cause for alarm. If we are mostly seeing an increase in the number of people with Aspergers, then that's a good thing, because it means that more people with Aspergers are receiving information that can help them live their lives better, and there isn't much to be concerned about.
Was over at a friends house recently. He had on some kind of Mickey mouse adventure DVD for the baby. It was essentially demented. Mickey mouse traping around on an undefined saccharine adventure with shapeshifting companions, reaching into a sack of some kind to use tools on CG doors that lead to the next microplot with no connection to what came before or after.
It was the closest I have ever seen film come to capturing the hazy stream of consciousness of a dream. I think it was over an hour long.
If Disney and others have been mass producing DVDs like that for children for the last 15 years, I'd fully expect incidences of all kinds of mental pathology to be skyrocketing right about now.
May the Maths Be with you!
We evolved in a different environment with vastly different social structures. Is it so hard to believe that in today's society legitimate mental problems are rampant? Just a few thousand years ago humans were living in small tribes, hunting or gathering for food, and sleeping in caves. Today our communities are gigantic and our social interactions are largely anonymous. Mental work has replaced most physical work in developed nations. At the same time people are living far longer and having fewer or no children, changing the family dynamic. We've also learned to manipulate our emotions through music, substances, and entertainment. Social standards have changed, too. I can no longer show anger by punching you without consequences.
With all of these huge recent changes in how we interact with each other and our world and in how we think, is it at all surprising that the kinks have yet to be worked out?
A friend's child who was diagnosed with autism was excluded from school at 5 years of age because the teachers couldn't cope with him. His parents had to fight very hard to get him back in with the support that he was supposed to have. So the idea that people are trying to get their kids diagnosed in order to get more attention is rather an offensive one for those having to deal with the lack of support every day.
All right, let me elaborate through my editing your statement: Researchers have speculated for years that autism is heavily a question of chemical pollution in the environment, just like cancer, but it's never been demonstrated.
Perhaps I'm wrong. I'd be very willing, humbled and even eager to give a look-see to any valid, world-renown documents or studies that have demonstrated that what you're saying is true (especially if you're the one who'd come up with the results; I can't dispute that) without question. Seriously. I'll take back the 'bullshit' comment if you can, with promises.
You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
It's a lot more complicated than that. Everyday conversation is not the whole spectrum of human existence. A lot of clinically depressed people appear to be normal in short conversations—are you saying that they, too, are indistinguishable from 'everybody'? It's only because they work hard to fit in that they appear normal, not because there's no difference.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Whereas a trained observer may be able to spot it as they walk in the door, and it may be obvious to anyone given extended interaction (socially, professionally, family, whatever).
And in everyday conversation, people see the best behaviour, the greatest effort to pass as Like Everyone Else. They don't, as a rule, see the anxiety attacks, the stimming, the meltdowns and shutdowns, the continual gnawing fear that you're doing it all wrong and no-one will tell you, the desperate desire to go hide somewhere quiet and dark and alone, the continual rehearsing of social interactions in your head.
Just because you can't tell an Aspie when you pass one on the street, that doesn't mean they aren't suffering from it.
Trust me on this.
"This is a Hollywood movie: when it comes to the Laws of Physics, they're lucky if they get Gravity!" --- my wife
This might be a stupid thing to do, but at this very moment, do something for me: read this entire comment I'm making to you with deep thought. I'll try not to be preachy and over-wordy.
In some ways, you are absolutely right. In some cases, there's over-diagnosing, and some people use it as an excuse instead of working with the diagnosis. You'll have parents who get their child diagnosed with autism and think "well, nothing I can do", whine about it then expect everyone to understand why their kid just knocked down an end-cap full of cereal boxes.
But that doesn't mean that the child isn't autistic. I myself believe I'm an undiagnosed autist, or at the very least AS, so when my son was diagnosed as autistic, I already had a grasp on what that meant. My world wasn't over, my son wasn't dying and there was plenty I could do about it. He was diagnosed early, so he was able to be enrolled in special programs that popped up in our public school system (free services, with the quality of ones you'd pay thousands for--we're never moving from this town). I'm a parent of an autist who easily and readily recognizes what is an autistic-meltdown and my son just being obstinate. When he IS being ridiculous which is connected to his natural, "I'm a nine-year old who WANTS SOMETHING!" self, I get right down at his level and say, "You know exactly what I'm telling you to do. You're smart and you know better. Now come on," then lead him away. Does it work every time? No, because he's autistic, and his threshold level is MUCH lower. But when my mom's tried justifying something he's done in public as "well, he's autistic," I've sat her right down and said, "He's not stupid. He knows. If it was an 'autistic thing', I'd tell them myself it was, but don't say that when it's not warranted."
Any parent needs to figure it out and know what their child can and can't handle, depending on where they are in the spectrum. My son is almost nine now, and we have worked extremely hard on getting him acclimated, while meeting him halfway. He will never "fit in" or be "normal", and there are times when he can't control his autistic-impulses. Those times, yes, you have to excuse. It exists. No rods or paddles will do anything for my son, and those like him. In loads of cases, it's not an excuse; the sooner you see that, the better.
You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
Suzuki is indeed and unfortunately more of a PR mouthpiece than a real human being at this point (much less researcher); perhaps it would be better to say he illuminates the opinion of the research community by exploiting it to his own shallow ends rather than anything else. And yes, "disease" is a bad word to use; both pieces are dated (the first by age and the second by shortage of recent exposure) and hence prone to what today would be considered something of a faux pas. Make no mistake: it is improbable that it has anything to do with junk food, and Suzuki should have been shot for suggesting that. More likely culprits would be air and water contaminants, or perhaps some cocktail of food preservatives.
The word "autism" is also hilariously broad, certainly. One reason the diagnostic categories are expanding is that researchers want to understand the whole spectrum of attributes that go into making the really dysfunctional cases what they are. As my boss likes to parrot, almost everyone has one or more traits that would be considered autistic if they appeared in the right combination with other aspects; in fact, the diagnostic questionnaires (which you've probably seen) are scored by adding up the 'autisminess' of the responses, so even that is a spectrum. Of course, it's hard to take the news from a psychiatrist that your son has a surplus of autistic traits when they explain it like it's a disaster.
There's another confounding factor, also, in how the population of diagnoses has grown, besides shifting definitions and older people getting re-assessed: better-educated (as well as more paranoid) young families are more likely to seek diagnoses out in the first place. In retrospect there's probably too much interference to say honestly if the rate of autistic traits is increasing or not.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
As a parent of an autistic child, let me tell you:
You are ignorant and have no idea what you are talking about.
Just like all those wonderful "parents" with all the answers who don't actually have children.
Boy though- I do wish you were right. I wish it was just a simple failing of myself as a parent that caused this. I wish I could lift this burden from my daughter through simplistic things like like being more servere in disciplining her. Lord knows my wife and I tried that route unsuccessfully for over a year and a half before she was diagnosed.
Anyways- keep on trucking in your ignorance and comically naive view of complex problems. My family and I in the meantime have to live in the real world.