That wasn’t my question. But to clear up your further misinterpretation and conjecture: I don’t doubt there’s an increase in allergies, and I haven’t offered up internet boards and right-wing radio screamers as evidence that there isn’t a huge increase in developmental delays.
How about you back up your hypotheses with at least some statistical data to refute the analysis you’ve already accepted as possible:
Not literally.
My point is that we’ve gone back to saying “why is there a diagnosis of autism” and pointing at parents.
But plenty of people come to doctors thinking they already know the diagnosis, and maybe even pushing for it. So what? That doesn’t mean doctors just bow to their wishes. They HAVE to wait for a doctor to bestow a diagnosis - since only a doctor can officially diagnose.
Yes, there is an increase in allergies.
http://fooddrugallergy.ucla.edu/body.cfm?id=40
If you don’t think so, post your own epidemiological data showing otherwise.
I haven’t offered a hypothesis.
I am merely pointing out that others who claim they know the cause need to back up theirs.
A good resource, with actual science.
Yes, maybe they should. In fact probably they should. But this thread is about the causes of the recorded increase in autism, so it’s perfectly valid to point out that one possible reason is that autistic people were not diagnosed as such in the past, so the statistics are distorted.
“Special snowflake”, you’ve got me on that one, but my use of “imbecile” was a deliberate quotation, and not my word. Just the other day I watched an episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, the BBC genealogy series, and one thing that stuck in my mind was the subject looking at a page from a Victorian-era census with entry after entry described as “Imbecile”. (The census was of an asylum, by the way, although it might have been any town in Norfolk 
)
Oops, there I go belittling mental health problems again. (And I write as someone who has seen a close family member sectioned in the past few years, so believe me I know my way around lunacy, nutbaggery and other non-PC terms…)
Quotes shortened for emphasis.
From that resource:
This is exactly what’s being claimed in this thread and some evidence for changes in diagnosis practices being a major contributor has been offered.
These are hypotheses:
They were offered up in response to a perfectly good statistical analysis indicating changes in diagnostic practices are a major contributing factor. You’ve offered no evidence, beyond your conjecture, that they significantly impact that analysis.
Absolutely. I was just refining the point.
Yeah, let’s avoid that kind of thing.
Ah, those. That’s fine.
I only offer these as possibilities. I do not claim that they are proven. They simply are alternatives. They cast doubt on the claim that this “perfectly good statistical analysis” proves what you say it does. It is another possible reason for the results.
I have no quibble with that.
My apologies, I read you wrong.
I have no doubt that some parents “push” for a diagnosis. But I also think that parents are much more willing to have their kids examined for anything than they probably were 50-60 years ago. The more you look, the more you find.
Anyone remember Noah Joad’s character from The Grapes of Wrath? It’s one of my favorite novels, and that character has always remained with me. He had a difficult birth and everyone knew there was something not quite right about him. Partways into the trip to California, he takes off on his own, making his alienation complete. Maybe he had Asperger’s!
Back in the day, eccentrics were all lumped together–distinguished only from the retarded and the crazy. In recent years, we have come to realize that “eccentric” is too broad of a term. Some are people are weird from birth, some turn into bizarre creatures during childhood, and for others, the Boo Radley-switch is flipped in adulthood. IMHO, clinicians and lay people mistakenly treat these as fungible groups. But the DSM seems to be trending back to its “lumping” tradition, and I think this is wise. It’s recognition that treating symptoms makes more sense than coming up with arbitrary, meaningless labels.
I think as our understanding of the brain and human development improves, we will also see the lines blur for other kinds of neuropsychiatric disorders. The category of schizophrenic spectrum disorder is undergoing similiar shifts in the DSM-V.
One thing the stats don’t tell us are the number of people who were diagnosed as having a ASD as children but no longer meet the criteria as adults. Also unaccounted for are individuals who manage to leave the diagnostic label behind during childhood, either because they no longer meet the criteria or because the original diagnosis was incorrect. Then, there are the adults who were not diagnosed as children but who have now received their golden membership card in the mail. Once we get a handle on these phenomena, we’ll come closer to understanding if there’s an argument to be made for over-diagnosis.
After 22+ years of dealing with a son with PDD, i still don’t understand the world of Autism. I have two older children that have gifted abilities (131 IQ), and the youngest with PDD. What I’ve noticed in the years is that this “newly” addressed mental disorder is prevalent in male’s. After that, it’s basically a blue-eyed dominant trait. I was only 27 years old when i delivered. I’m petite in stature, and my husband was only 31 at the time. As far as the mental retardation stature, please…
OK. As it happens, I’m sitting in a special education class intended for future special ed teachers, and this very issue was just now discussed by the professor. I have no written cites for this, just the word of a professor who, presumably, knows what he’s talking about.
Special education services are often a process of negotiation between parents and the school. The parents want the world for their child, but the school wants to give the minimum. So the parents will either go doctor-shopping to find someone who will assign the diagnosis the parents want, or they will bully the school into giving them what they want by threatening to sue. My professor said that it doesn’t happen all that often, but it does happen often enough that it’s something of a concern.
Whoa.
There are differing opinions, even among professors. Don’t take his word as gospel.
I have personally seen parents work hard to AVOID labels, because they find them stigmatizing, or they think that certain special ed labels will put their kid in a restrictive environment. So the opposite effect occurs too.
How can they sue to get a label from the school when it must come from a doctor?
And in most cases, schools laugh at lawsuits. They have a team of lawyers on staff, and parents don’t.
Moreover, you forgot that he said it’s a negotiation. Having a label actually doesn’t mean that much. Every kid is judged by his/her specific needs when writing the IEP, regardless of labels. The needs and abilities vary widely within each label. Some kids with autism can barely function; others will go to college. In most cases, the label just isn’t that important for getting services, though it might be in a school where resources are scarce.
P.S. It’s cool that you’re studying special ed. Undergrad or grad?
I have no idea on if autism rates are increasing, or it is just MR being re-diagnosed*. I do however have an issue with the clumping of the spectrum. I am not happy when I see a someone who doesn’t have “classic” autism using the term autistic without clarifying Aspergers etc.
The people I talk to at playgrounds, in the streets, shopping who when talking will say about their “autistic” child, grandchild, neighbor, friend, who has autism but surprisingly is an honors student in college/functions awesomely! Or as been said upthread about autism not being something we should cure. Those people may be in the spectrum, but they’re not autistic.
My child flaps, rocks, bangs her head, bites herself, will eat/play with her feces, laughs when someone is crying, does not speak, wasn’t potty trained until the age of seven, will elope with no concern for her safety, has ate a nightlite bulb, has no fear of fire/water. The list can go on 
This is not something evolutionary, this is something bad. We need to find the cause. (sidenote I place my meager bets on ultrasounds, yeah not much to go on but due to circumstances my wife had more/longer ultrasounds than normally used)
*As for the correlation I cannot debunk this, but I do know from the special needs standpoint told to me by an old special education teacher, Downs Syndrome is all but extinct in the classrooms due to parents aborting. But I have little doubt that without ASL (and now ipads) my daughter could have been considered MR because how the hell are you supposed to know she can count/spell/read/understand without communicating.
As a parent of a kid with DS, I can assure you they are far from extinct, though that may change some day. The forces of abortion and testing are pushing one way, but the forces of acceptance and support are pushing in the other. A good book on the subject of parents choosing whether to abort, if you’re interested, is Choosing Naia.
I am simply comparing (from a special needs teachers standpoint) the amount of students through the years she personally has had. I for one had a great aunt, Aunt Elsie who had Downs and was probably the most loving person I had ever met.
Don’t worry, I wasn’t complaining about your comment, just noting that kids with DS are still out there in sizable numbers.