The mad scientist Chuckie attacks with no facts and I have fact checked his ass.
Far out of the mainstream? Hmm. Well, take a look at this video from Mike Savage talking to an actual group of callers that work with autistic kids.
1. Caller Kyle is a school psychologist who works with autistic kids and agrees with Savage on the over diagnosis of autism and how it only hurts the kids who truly have the condition.
2. Caller Susan says her child was labeled autistic by school officials and that she was pressured to sign off on the diagnosis.
3. Caller Tikvah is a therapist in New York City who works with children who says that kids are frequently labeled with autism even though they have other conditions because the agencies are provided with more funds for that diagnosis.
4. Caller Victoria has an autistic child and says it is too easy to get a child diagnosed as autistic. Savage says resources for autism must be reserved for children like hers.
There you go.
Overdiagnosed? So autism is the new AD/HD? More drugs for our kids!! Especially the Adderall…..that sells big to your friends.
all that shit is a scam. My stepkids were on ritalin (before I met my wife) and I forced her to take them off that poison.
When I was in the developmental psychology discipline at UC, do you know how many autism diagnosis we made there and at Langley Porter. VERY FEW. Teachers now want to label them with Asperger’s or ADD. There’s good federal money in those diagnoses.
I have a nephew with genuine functional autism – he was diagnosed at ONE YEAR. However, I have a niece who was diagnosed with Asperger’s last year by her school counselor. She’s sullen, withdrawn, uncommunicative. Wow. She’s 17. Didn’t see those character traits coming.
And now Chunky the Wonder Fecal-head is all about “autism” – from the guy who was panning the anti-vaccine crowd not too long ago about their irrational fears or autism – so irrational that they would rather take the risk of exposing their kids to diseases that can kill them. There was one subject I agreed with Chunky on.
So now this asshat is an expert on autism. Fuck you, you piece of shit.
I know something about autism and ADHD. I had ADHD as a child and my youngest brother is truly autistic. I believe the 2 conditions are over-diagnosed. But the 2 conditions should never be minimized.
Autism diagnosis seems to be everywhere these days. It is almost—maybe not even almost—a fashionable disorder.
Surely there was less such diagnosis in prior decades. Does that mean we are “better at detection”—or does it mean that there is money to be made by having quantities of children who have been so diagnosed, either in money for various forms of special education, or money for alleged drug treatments, or money for therapists? Or does it mean that the broad diagnosis of autism is an easy way to excuse some of the abysmal failures of incompetent teachers? “It’s not my fault—it’s those autistic kids! I’m doing the best I can with them, but you can’t expect much!” Some of the above? All of the above?
Maybe we are “better at diagnosis”—but does that diagnosis serve any useful purpose? Doesn’t integrating kids who might (or might not) have some borderline condition into the larger population make more sense than culling them from the herd and balkanizing them?
Coming out of lurking to make a few points…
First, I don’t know if it’s a good idea to quote Savage show callers. Michael Savage has made inaccurate statements about autism before (although it’s true that his callers may have good points). Here is a letter to Pediatrics that makes a similar statement and further explains why the diagnosis may be desired:
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/eletters/124/5/1395
Also, school labels (including “autism” or “ASD”) are made with criteria determined by each state and may not be accurate. In fact a Time magazine article quoted a psychiatrist saying “I’ll call a kid a zebra if it will get him the educational services I think he needs.” Only the validated diagnostic instruments (e.g., the ADOS or the ADI-R) can give an accurate dx (and these take time to implement).
Based on what I read about Angle’s statement, I think it’s understandable that she would be concerned about the use of just one label to get help/services/whatever to many different students (including probably non-autistic ones). There are probably better ways to improve education.
If parents perceive (rightly or wrongly) that anyone “with autism” gets special benefits or a great education with extra attention, it is understandable that they might want the school-based label. It may be a good idea to question a lot of stuff that goes on in public schools.
Okay, here’s the full quote from Angle:
“You’re paying for things that you don’t even need, they just passed the latest one is every, everything they want to throw at us now is covered under autism, so that’s a mandate that you have to pay for.”
If it’s true that you can demand just about anything using the label “autism,” then I would agree that’s a huge concern.
fixed it for ya.
My wife is somewhere in the middle of the autism spectrum with a pretty severe case of Aspergers. She gets absolutely pissed off at the bandwagon-jumpers who claim they have autism or aspergers the same way they used to claim they had ADHD or some other currently fashionable syndrome, because it makes her look bad.
So many people use aspergers or other similar autism spectrum disorders as an excuse to behave like antisocial arseholes.
The problem is, it is a genuine disorder. Someone with aspergers isn’t capable of filtering information effectively – every stimulus comes at them with equal weight, whereas most people are able to focus on certain things and discard the rest without any trouble. It leads to obsessive behaviours designed to control their environment and reduce the stimulus, which can be mistaken for being merely antisocial or withdrawn (especially in the teenage years). The ability to properly distinguish stimuli also leads to every tenuous sense of self and an inability to filter incoming information into internal and external sources. A child with aspergers who is told that they’re useless will believe it right into adulthood. Most people are able to learn to reject that sort of statement, but aspergers doesn’t have that strong sense of identity, and consequently no ego layer to differentiate between things that are external and things that are internal, so the statement is absorbed directly into the subconscious mind and accepted as absolute truth.
Unfortunately, aspergers in particular and autism in general has become the new in thing and everyone says they have it now. The wife gets pissed, I get pissed, and the greatest injustice is that she never got any of the entitlement that these fake “sufferers” are going to get.