Friday, September 17, 2010
Wholesale misdiagnosis of Aussie kids as autistic?
There's a very interesting article in today's Australian about autism misdiagnosis, particularly in Queensland, Australia. This article throws the whole idea of a genuine modern-day autism epidemic into very serious doubt by highlighting how some government funding policies have caused some serious distorting effects upon autism rates. Get this - Queensland in Australia apears to be the most autistic place in the world with a whopping incidence of autism there of 1 child in 50 (compared with a reported rate of "ASD" of 1 in 160 in the Western world).
Apparently kids in the sunshine state who aren't autistic are being formally diagnosed as autistic. They say this is happening because an autism diagnosis attracts funding which would otherwise be unavailable. If this is true it is a very bad thing for a number of reasons. It will give people a misleading and distorted idea of what autism is if all types of kids with differences and problems that aren't autism are dumped under the label. If this misdiagnosed population are at some time used as research subjects by autism researchers, the resulting studies will likewise be misleading and distorted. The misdiagnosed themselves will become victims - of unecessary stigmatization associated with being labelled as autistic, and victims of confusion about who they are and where they fit in. This is sad indeed. And I also don't like to see people misdiagnosed as autistic because I would like the autistic spectrum to be the exclusive reserve of true-blue, genuine misanthropes, single-minded obsessives, extreme nerds and the genuinely strange. Standards must be upheld.
The situation in Queensland sounds like a similar story to what was happening in WA 10 or so years ago with the diagnosis of ADHD. The rates of ADHD in WA were ridiculously higher than in other Australian states, and there has been much speculation and hand-wringing about why this was happening. It's a pity to see that the futures of Australian children are being treated with such a lack of care and disregard for professional standards by bureaucrats and health professionals.
Disorder in the classroom on the rise
Jane Hansen
The Australian
Inquirer, September 18-19th 2010, p. 5.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/commentary/disorder-in-the-classroom-on-the-rise/story-e6frgd0x-1225925201873
I think that something very similar is happening here in the US. I took a walk with a friend yesterday, who told me about her work life assessing kids for various developmental disabilities. She said that parents were actually pissed off when she didn't give their kids an autism diagnosis, because that's where the services were. She said there was another person who did assessments who concluded that just about every child he saw was autistic. (Non-autistics are so vulnerable to peer pressure, aren't they?)
ReplyDeleteBut really, it must be those vaccines...clearly.
It's fantastically hard to uphold standards in the face of this kind of thing.
In the future will we have groups and communities of "autistic" people in which truly autistic people feel alone and alienated? I think some people argue that this already happens.
ReplyDeleteI myself can't wait till we start Categorizing people by genetics and genetic syndromes. That is where the science is, not in absurdly subjective diagnoses based on observations and interpreteations of child behaviour.