General Autism Discussion

i was never good at sports either.

i remember during PE i'd mostly sit out in a corner somewhere waiting for the time to pass rather than play with anyone else. i was particularly bad at volleyball.

I wouldn't say that handling criticism poorly is a specifically autistic trait. That said, when getting through the day is already difficult, it may become harder to handle criticism, even of a constructive variety.

During recess, I'd just wander around aimlessly. At least the school I went to from Kindergarten-3rd and 6th grade had a freaking playground! The school I went to from 4th-5th grade didn't, so I just walked back and forth along the fence, daydreaming.

I'll tell you what I couldn't handle well as a kid: compliments. See, I saw compliments as being expectations.

Like:

"You're so smart!" "Shit, she said I'm smart. Now I have to keep being what she thinks 'smart' is, or else I'll have disappointed her."

You too?!

Regarding compliments?

I wonder how common this is.

The website Age of Autism, as its name suggests, believes that autism is some terrible new thing. In other words, we’re living in the Age of Autism.

In response to that book NeuroTribes getting a lot of positive attention, the site’s editor asks, well, the same questions she always asks on every article autism under the sun. I’ll repeat her questions, and I’ll give you my own answers to them. Everything she says will be in bold.

What Silberman and the reporters cheering him on don't want to talk about are the inconvenient truths about the autism rate and the link with vaccines. I have the following questions about the glaring gaps in his reasoning.

How could all the doctors of the world have missed the signs of autism as a distinct condition until the last century?

• Because they kept mistaking it for schizophrenia and other conditions. The author had talked about that a lot. Heck, another study showed that the number of kids diagnosed with mental retardation has gone down as the number diagnosed with autism has gone up. People are starting to realize that they were misdiagnosing a TON of people.

Where are the adults with the symptoms of autism that we can so easily recognize in our children? I'm talking about men and women with classic autism with its serious limitations, not people who are a little eccentric or odd. I want to see the non-verbal adults, stimming and prone to wandering.

• In institutions. At home. Not out and about where they can be seen.

Why is the rate always based on studies of eight year olds, not eighty year olds?

• Good luck finding many 80-year-olds on the spectrum. Would make more sense if she said, say, twenty year olds. Also, children are easier to get ahold of to study.

Shouldn't we look at autism across the population? Why doesn't Silberman devote his energies to finding the one in 68 forty, sixty and eighty year olds out there on the autism spectrum?

• That’s not his job. But I’ll bite. Why not look at autism across the population? There have been some attempts to do that. One study in the UK (which is said to be flawed) found a 1% rate of autism in the general population overall. I do, however, think there should be even more attempts to look at it in the population at large.

Why is nothing said about regressive autism in any of coverage of Silberman's theories about autism? How does Silberman explain the sudden and dramatic loss of learned skills and the development of chronic health problems in previously thriving children?

• Okay, that point I’ll concede. We don’t know what causes regressive autism. My parents told me that I was talking at age 1, then suddenly stopped, and had to be explicitly taught how to talk at age 3. My speculation is that the period of “regression” is a time when the brain is changing, similarly to how people’s brains suddenly change when they become teenagers, to prepare them for new ways of thinking. However, we really don't know for sure.

Why is there a dead end in the road for young adults with autism after high school? With all the autism everywhere, we must have had to come up with something for these people in the past, even if we didn't call their condition autism.

• People used to not believe that autism was something adults had, only kids. Therefore, they didn’t bother to do anything for autistic adults. This is a horrible mistake we are only beginning to correct.

Why do we still have increases in the autism rate when, as Silberman claims, the definition was expanded over 20 years ago? How much of the population will eventually be considered autistic?

• We’re beginning to recognize how many people are on the spectrum. In some people it can show up in very subtle forms that are easy to miss without knowing the person well.

Why do we have to train people in every walk of life about autism? Stories are in the news constantly about educating doctors, police, fire fighters, teachers, EMT's, librarians and others about autism. Why is everyone so unfamiliar with the signs of autism? Surely all the people with autism weren't hidden away in the institutions and state hospitals that Silberman talks about.

• Well, let’s put it this way. How many people know the signs of schizophrenia? Or psychopathy? People don’t know a lot about psychology, particularly the more in-depth stuff. They have to be taught. To be trained.

If everything Silberman alleges about autism and vaccines is true, why isn't he asking for a comparison study of fully vaccinated and never vaccinated children? If his theories are correct, there should be no difference in the autism rate in the two groups. This would convince a lot of people that he is really on to something here.

• I forget if there was such a study done or not. There was supposedly a very large-scale study done in Sweden that concluded vaccines don’t cause autism. That said, how many people will willingly not vaccinate their kids in order to participate in such a study? We’re risking public health by saying “Don’t vaccinate your kids, just in case, oh and by the way, I’ll be checking up years later to see if you got autism or not.” Most people would refuse to participate in such a study.

How is it possible that medical experts at HHS conceded the vaccine injury case of Hannah Poling? What about the dozens of other claims involving autism that the government has compensated over the years? How could government officials be fooled into believing vaccines can cause autism?

• I’d have to know more about this.

Anyway, as you can see, an incredible amount of poorly thought out arguments there, with the occasional either legit point, or thing I don’t have enough information on to form an opinion. But that’s the sort of thing I see anti-vaxxers say all the time.

edited 1st Sep '15 9:57:21 AM by BonsaiForest

Just ignore the idiots. After all, given their logic, polio magically turned up only after people could see it under a microscope. It wasn't visible before, so didn't exist! Epidemic!!

Unlike many other illnesses hfa is relatively subtle and diagnosis is highly dependent on the specific criteria being used. The supposed link between autism and vaccines is best treated as an urban myth at this point.

When someone tells you vaccines cause autism, nod and tell them it is true, but that you can counter those effects easily with a magical potable of eye of newt and tongue of frog, sung to under the moonlight, when magical elves frolick and shall bless your potion with a kiss.

Unless you decide to sing anything by Justin Bieber. Then the elves are pretty much going to just spit on your potion and you are screwed.

Be aware that if you decide to sing a Michael Jackson song, then you must bring your own dance troupe to do a dance battle with the elves. If you win, your kid will be brilliant, and if you lose, the kid will be gay.

And That's Terrible.

Also tell them the potion is for them. And they must apply it via enema.

Wanna come work for me Aszur?

I personally suggest you tell them that it's fine, the vaccine was from a GMO, nuclear powered, drone, see if you can get their head to explode.

Sure. Just dont pay me in peanuts like they do in here and I am sold. In fact you can pay me in peanuts. Here, they jsut pay me the shells.

Seriously though the whole vaccine autism thing is ridiculous and has yet to have any credible legal recognition. More than an urban myth it is like old ladies' gossip overworried about their poor babbies

Few things give me as much schadenfraude delight than to hear the cases in my country where people request not to have their children vaccinated but since we have a nationwide social security system that has vaccination for free and mandatory by law they get vaccinated anyways. And then they throw a tantrum. A powerless, drool and snot filled tantrum that achieves nothing.

Put it on Youtube so we can all enjoy.

The governor of my home state threw a bone to the anti-vaxxers once.

My home state has the highest diagnosed rate of autism spectrum conditions in the US.

i don't even understand how the idea they cause autism got any traction.

Wakefield's fraudulent studies, basically.

I occasionally see far-right sites (like Newsmax, for instance) alleging cover-ups about vaccines causing autism. There's an audience for this sort of thing.

I am heavily leaning towards it being primarily genetic, and also being not one condition but multiple conditions.

I think this is very likely as I've read about many cases of autism that are strangely different or in some cases almost opposite each other. A child who was speaking fluently at the age of 2, and was very much the type of kid Asperger would have called a "little professor". A 7-year-old boy who is unable to talk, but reads adult-length novels (such as To Kill a Mockingbird) and can hold intelligent discussions... by pointing to pictures of letters on the wall in order to spell out what he wants to say.

And I hear from time to time of people with autism + something else. And people who were born prematurely who ended up with autism (notably, one of the boys featured in the documentary Bully). I wonder why? Is that a particular form of autism? I don't have enough info to even speculate.

I don't know why you even bother raising it here when it crops up in your vicinity.

It's bunk. It's discredited bunk. The people who won't let it go have ulterior motives. We all know this: giving them even a little nod towards their obsessing over vaccines obscures the real problem: people being afraid of other people.

Interesting point. As in, they want to believe there's something that causes autism that they can easily do something about, to prevent it from occurring, because they fear it that much. That is, they fear it so much, they want easy answers to at least give them some feeling they can control it.

However, if autism is shown to be almost totally genetic, what might happen next?

Nothing because it's already been proved to not be caused by vaccines, proof isn't something that can convince these people, nothing can convince them.

Well Bonsai, for one thing there are enough idiots out there ignoring facts that being informed that autism is genetic won't matter, they'll believe what they want to believe.

And for the malicious/fearful that are also intelligent, some might go back to an age old idea as American as Mom and Apple Pie: Eugenics!

Everyone else will be "meh, oh that's cool I guess" and perfectly reasonable people such as I will bang at the inscrutable walls of science, wailing and screaming "BUT MAH CURE, THO?!??"

Ugh, that would be a fairly stupid thing to do.

edited 2nd Sep '15 4:50:57 PM by Artificius

I typed "autism" into Google News, and there has been a big burst of articles that are sympathetic to the side/cause of Aspies who want autism to be accepted.

There are articles talking about its history, like "We've called autism a disease for decades. We were wrong."

Hey hey, what's this about listening to autistic adults describe themselves and how they think and what they're like? Blasphemy, I say! You know you can't trust those people to understand themselves! After all, autistics are "not people in the psychological sense" - an actual disturbing term used by an early psychologist in the field.

Meanwhile, The Guardian argues that we need to spend more money on helping autistics who actually exist right now, instead of searching for a "cure": The time has come for us to invest in under-funded direct services that people with autism so desperately need to realize their full potential.

Steve Silberman and his book Neurotribes are name-checked a lot, which really shows just how much his book is doing for us. It is spawning all these editorials that come to the same ultimate conclusion - autistic people have always been here and we should accept them and try to help them make the most of themselves - but coming at it from different angles.

While recognizing that each individual autistic is different, how much do you agree with these positive traits of Aspergers Syndrome?

Ditto on the first and last of those, but the second one is a bit iffy, at least for me personally. While I do my best to stay unprejudiced, I can't honestly say I'm completely unprejudiced. Yes, I'm accepting of all races, creeds, religions, and sexual orientations, but when actually meeting certain types of people in person, I just can't help myself. For example, when I see a tough-looking black person dressed in baggy pants, a black t-shirt and dreadlocks, is also wearing jewelry around his neck, and he's also got an unruly scowl on his face, I still try to look past that and not think, 'He's from the hood and might beat me up if I give him a chance', but it can be hard to do so. I also can be rather... unsettled by extremely effeminate gay men. It's not that they're gay that bothers me, it's just how they act. They could be straight for all I care, but I'd still be unnerved if they started acting highly effeminate.