Monday, April 2, 2012

Well, I've learned one thing about autism lately...

Autism.  It's a buzzword.  Did you get chills?  Maybe you thought of a child, maybe your own child, and have had suspicions.  They're a little... strange.  Too quiet.  Hard to relate to.  Stand-offish.  Maybe there's something wrong with them.  Maybe they're... autistic!

After all, the CDC itself has now published information saying that 1 in 88 kids has autism, which is a 78% increase from a decade ago.  Seventy-eight percent.  That's a huge jump!  And now, the dreaded medical E-word is being bandied about: epidemic.  We have an Autism Epidemic in America! 

This... sounds familiar.  Does it sound familiar to anyone else?  A time at which, suddenly, we had a mental disorder become a buzzword for unexplained or abnormal behavior in children?  A time when a diagnosis suddenly was reordered as a "spectrum" and those diagnoses suddenly spiked radically?  Well, if you paid attention in the late '90s and early '00s, you probably do remember a time like that.  When virtually every kid you knew suddenly was on the ADHD spectrum.

The article about the ADHD boom is particularly striking when the author explained ADHD to a foreign mother, citing the DSM's description to her.  Her response?  "This is a definition of children."  And, indeed, isn't part of being young figuring out what or who we are?  For some kids, that means disorganization or hyperactivity.  For some, it means introversion and social awkwardness.

The autism boom is strikingly similar to me.  Like ADHD, it's extremely easy to diagnose any abnormal child as being on the "high-functioning" end of the spectrum.  In fact, if I grew up as a child today, I probably would fall under that category, as it is now being defined.  I was born with a speech pathology, which resulted in predictable speech difficulties early in my life.  I also suffered scalded skin syndrome as an infant, which skewed my pain receptors (I overreacted to pain as a youth) and gave me some minor PTSD (nurses had to hold me down as an infant and remove dead skin so it would heal).  Huh.  I couldn't speak properly, I overreacted (truly, I was inconsolable) to pain, and I freaked out anytime someone held me down.  Man!  I must have been autistic!  How come no one knew?!

The above factors led to me being a very quiet, cerebral child who didn't like to get dirty.  I liked to do my own thing.  In fact, as a six or seven year old, my mother was once trying to get me to play outside (I was doing some quiet solitary activity at my little kid table) and I turned, looked at her, and said "When will you understand that I like doing what I'm doing!"  My mother, in her wisdom, got the message.  She let me be myself.  And sure, as a kid, I was quiet and socially awkward.  I had a handful of friends who I had grown up with.  When we moved, I didn't really make any friends.  It was a struggle for me because I've never really known how to relate to people.  I grew up without a male figure in my household, so relating to men, in particular, has been something I had to learn.  When I became a big sports fan (of my own volition) that became simpler.  But all in all, I grew up and I matured.

I must have been a "late bloomer" or whatever the term is now.  A kid who "grows out of" their autistic traits or habits.  What the heck?  Let me be frank - if you "grow out of" your autistic, or your ADHD, habits, then you were improperly diagnosed.  I'm no doctor, but I've known enough people with those disorders (both diagnosed and misdiagnosed) to know that autism and ADHD - in their real forms - are a lifelong struggle.  If you grew out of either, then, well, it's because you were just being a kid and now you're not.  I never "grew out of" any autistic disabilities; I simply grew up.  I learned how to better relate to people; I gained confidence in myself.  And as a result, I became something of an extrovert when I'm comfortable in a setting.

My sister is another good example - she's ADHD.  She's actually got a clinical diagnosis for it.  I think she's probably borderline; a legitimate case of ADHD on the low-end of the spectrum.  She was a straight-A student in school, a musical phenom, and, all things considered, is probably smarter than I am.  At the very least, she thinks differently than I do (she's left-handed, too; I am not).  When she focuses on something, she's able to maintain it well.  She was like that for school.  She could always fall back on her innate high intelligence, too.  But outside of that focus?  A tornado.  Unfinished projects, lack of order in cleanliness, etc.  As she went out to live on her own, this manifested further as she was outside of the family house, which was managed by our mother.  My sister made some poor financial decisions that could probably be chalked up to ADHD.  But she's low-end of the spectrum.  She medicated briefly for it, but didn't get the desired results (and an unexpected heart palpitation), so now she self-therapizes herself.  And, for the most part, from what I know, it seems to be working. 

See, that's the biggest problem.  For one, we stigmatize these disorders, so that when there are genuine cases on the low-end of the spectrum, the suggestion is resisted - by the patient, by the parent, whoever.  Average Dad says "My son doesn't have ADHD!" because he associates stigma to that.  Everyone has a mental image of a kid with ADHD or autism and they don't want their kid to be that kid.  So they resist.  My sister vehemently resisted any suggestion of ADHD by my mother during her teenage years.  It wasn't until she was in her 20s that she became more open to the idea.  We see these as bad things; something wrong.  Something to be medicated.

And that's really the crux of it, isn't it?  Look at Dr. Goldin's article again - during the ADHD boom, the production of Adderal and Dexedrine went up by 4516% and the production of Ritalin by 375%.  That's insane.  That's just insane.  Think about that for a minute.  4516%.  That'd be like investing $1 in something and getting a $4516 return. 

Make no mistake - there are serious cases of autism out there, just as there are serious cases of ADHD.  Those require attention.  Those require therapy (and probably medication).  But the widening of the spectrum, the vast increase in diagnoses does nothing but marginalize those genuine cases.  They become outliers and examples; poster children of a made-up epidemic.  Those children are the ones who need attention, while these "low-end of the spectrum" and "high-functioning cases" need only some time to grow up being their own person.  Or maybe the goal is just to medicate everyone into some imagined concept of normalcy. 

So as I see this "autism boom," all I can think is that there's a pharmaceutical company (or companies) that's going to be making a lot of money off of this.  Already, I'm seeing stories about the thousands of dollars it costs to medicate and get therapy for autistic children.  Suddenly, with the widened spectrum and range and the increased diagnoses, all those people stand to make a lot more money.  Autism just became incredibly profitable for some people.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for saying this stuff. I've always been confident that if I had been in school for another six months, I would have been labeled ADHD along with 90% of my (academically undernourished) class, and because of that, I've always had the suspicion that ADHD was just a buzzword for boredom. It's much easier to medicate than entertain or teach, and at its worst (and most conspiracy theory-ish) it speaks to a generation of parents who would rather have drug companies raise their children.

    I can't help but wonder if the autism "boom" is the same thing. Autism is also, as I discovered a couple of years ago, a handy excuse for almost any relationship difficulty... so I have to wonder if being labeled autistic as a child could become a crutch to a new generation of children who never just grow up.

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