Steve Silberman does a better job explaining the increase in diagnoses than I can:
[video]https://www.ted.com/talks/steve_silberman_the_forgotten_history_of_autism?re ferrer=playlist-the_autism_spectrum[/video]
There is a saying:
If you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism.
Each one is different. They span the range of disability and IQ. The odd thing is that sometimes the most apparently IQ challenged can actually be quite intelligent - we just can't measure what's there.
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/MindMoodNews/story?id=8258204
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc
Temple Grandin is somewhat of a "hero" in this world. Very successful. Very intelligent. Autistic.
As many of you know, I have 3 children.
My oldest was a little professor. At 2 she could name many dinosaurs and bugs. In addition to English she speaks German and Japanese, and at least some Spanish and Mandarin. As a teen doctors indicated she was likely on the spectrum, but she denies and denounces the diagnosis. Fine, she is fairly successful. She scored the highest score ever scored in our small county on a college readiness test given at the time.
Our middle child hardly spoke a word. He was 3-1/2 when, at Walmart (where he usually just said "aw" for ball or "iii uuu awww" for big blue ball) he declared repeatedly and ever more intently "a u! a u!". Knowing he was trying to tell us
something I kept searching up and down the isle when finally! I saw it - a paw print. I cried. Right in the middle of Walmart. "a u!" meant "A clue!" As in Blue's Clues, his favorite show (he dressed up every single day in a Blue outfit that had been just for Halloween originally). Amazingly, when he was 2 in 1999 Early Intervention folks completely blew the diagnosis and declared he'd grow out of it. At 6 he learned to multiply and in a few moments (literally) was multiplying numbers I had to pull out a calculator for. Then school made him show his work, which was like putting a mathematician's brain in a vice until it succumbed. Anyway, he lives at home as a young adult and is fairly independent but is not prepared yet to take on the world by himself. Loves to read books that would simultaneous bore and challenge most of us.
My youngest was diagnosed at 2 and began therapy early on. Nonverbal at that age and we taught signs and encouraged him to use his words. His intellect has developed far beyond his emotional maturity and as a result behavioral issues are a big issue now. Dealing with self injurious and occasional aggressive behaviors along with depression and anxiety and seriously considering CBD since other medications and therapies have had limited benefit. He's slightly obsessed with video games. He is making a "mod" with a group of people and it's basically a "soon" to be playable extension of an existing video game complete with its own story line/plot, but they have to "build" the "levels"/maps. But try to get him to do a relatively simple math problem.... Until he was somewhere between 8 and 10 Theory of Mind did not exist in his mind. He still struggles with understanding what others are thinking/feeling and yet sometimes gets what you're feeling seemingly when no one else can.
3 kids. 3 diagnoses. Asperger's, PDD-NOS, and Autism. Now they all fall under the umbrella term ASD or autism spectrum disorder.
And yes, I have traits. Mom has some traits. (and I scored low on empathy)
So do I think it's overdiagnosed? No. Probably the opposite is true based on what I've seen in practice. And I can say without a doubt that schools, insurances, the medical community, and society as a whole fails these people terribly.
Of course I can't speak as to the one nephew and whether he has it.
With ADD we have two different problems that are sometimes hard to flesh out: there's a lot of ADD/ADHD and there's a lot of female teachers who think boys should sit still for hours just like little girls do. And those teachers too often point to the child and demand they be medicated when they should be pointing out what a miserable failure the school system is to boys overall.
I guess you didn't ask for all that but there it is. I have lots more to say, but that's all you get for now.
