It's official - autism used to be "Schizophrenia, childhood type" and "schizoid personality", and it used to be just for kids. And if that isn't confusing enough for you, next year a bunch of personality disorders are going to just disappear. That's how the science of psychiatry works, superseding one debacle with another possibly less disastrously wrong mistake. I feel so inspired!
Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness
By Gary Greenberg
Wired January 2011
online December 27, 2010
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/12/ff_dsmv/all/1
Reality is catching up on me, one by one people are realising I was right all along, that this all a slip of the pen, conditions are brought into and out of being by committee, and that is what is called "real"
ReplyDeleteSo do the underlying neurobiological realities change, or is it simply societies reaction to them. I think the answer is clear enough, what really annoys is how people invest the current definitions of anything with any veridity at all when given time they will change too.
We haven't even started researching the neurobiological realities. How can research mean anything when it is based on inexact diagnostic practices?
ReplyDeleteDo I remember correctly that a shrink once tried to pin a diagnosis of schizophrenia on you?
If anyone doubts that clinicians used to take a casual attitude towards the difference between schizophrenia and autism as a diagnosis, they should read the book "Extraordinary people" by savantism "expert" Darold Treffert.