Never heard of Mr.Savage. He certainly seems like a bit of a twit, but occasionally there's a weak signal discernible in the noise of the emptiest vessel.
There is a clear tendency in certain areas to ascribe any social failing in children- or indeed in adults- to one "syndrome" or other.
Drunks are no longer drunks, they have alcoholism.
Lazy people have fatigue syndrome.
Thieves have "kleptomania".
Some of the time, this view is justified and helpful.
If treating behaviour X as illness "I(X)" gets people over it, fine and dandy- whether I(X) actually exists or not.
But if it merely provides an excuse to persist in behaviour X, then it is a useless strategy.
Pretending every badly behaved brat has ADHD or autism will not help either the brat or the people who genuinely DO have those conditions. Indeed it harms both and adds insult to the injury of those who do have the condition. (I don't have the slightest doubt autism exists as a spectrum of neurological problems. I'm less convinced by M.E. and I don't believe in alcoholism at all. (I do believe in drunks. I know several)).
Where the problem is not medical, but attitudinal, then what needs adjusted is attitude. That can't be done by indulgence, or by pretending the cause is not what it is.
The trick is knowing which case is which- and thatcan be genuinely hard.
It is made even harder when any departure from the default, "syndrome" view is seen as unhelpful because unsympathetic.
Sometimes, being unsympathetic is the kindest way to be. We need to separate those cases and handle them appropriately.
That's a very nice man of straw you've built up and knocked down there.
Wait! Before rushing to that Reply button, please finish reading my post...
There have certainly been plenty of conditions that have either been prematurely diagnosed or misdiagnosed in many cases, especially over the last twenty years. ADD was a fairly potent fad, especially in the 1990's, though most likely not as much as the detractors of treatment would have like and probably more than its defenders would have liked. The phenomenon of 'erectile dysfunction' has certainly exploded from its formerly meager (and mostly elderly) beginnings-- though it is fair to say that there are more people of a higher age in the US today than there were 5, 10, or 15 years ago, and that may be part of the contributing factor (but can't account for the huge size of the ED treatment market). I'm not really going to go too far into diagnoses of depression and possible correlations with overall fitness in the US, though, because I don't think there's sufficient correlative evidence and there are other mitigating factors (like 9/11, two wars, eight years of increasingly partisan politics, etc.) that likely have a lot more to do with overall morale in the country. I also happen to be someone who thinks gastric bypass surgeries are performed way too often on people who don't actually need it. There are a number of medical conditions, not all of which deal with moods or personalities, where I believe the medical field has gotten in the habit of over-prescribing. I don't think it's quite as bad as its sharpest critics or quite as wrong as its staunchest defenders, but I think there are both some merits and some histrionics involved in accusations of over-diagnosing or over-prescribing people for problems.
I believe it was back in WWI (though it could have been WWII, someone can correct me) when (steel) helmets were first being issued to soldiers, and to some decent amount of protest. As a result there were huge increases in the number of head injuries from combat being reported. It was initially considered to be a flaw that was causing injuries (and sometimes later fatalities) by detractors to these new helmets. I do believe there was even supposed to be a redesign that never finished (because the war ended). However, looking back on the data it seems that there were more head injuries being reported because more people were
surviving-- albeit still heavily injured-- hits by shrapnel or glancing rounds or other things that had previously been killing troops instantly. The concept of body armor in the twentieth century has served to save literally millions of lives since that time. As a matter of fact, in nearly every American war so far the types of non-fatal injuries has widened in range while the number of casualties continues to drop due to this very technology. This is even an issue today with troops in Iraq and Afghanistan (most notably victims of IEDs).
But how does that relate to what I'm talking about? Well, specifically in the case of autism, a similar phenomenon has been taking place. A greater number of children are being diagnosed with autism these days for two main reasons: 1. medical science knows a whole lot more about the brain today than it did even half a century ago, and 2. methods for detecting (and treating) autism and its less-extreme related conditions (like Aspergers) have improved dramatically over the last 30 years. The result is that we're seeing more people diagnosed with it today than have been in previous generations. Much like detractors of helmets in WWI (and other types of body armor in subsequent wars) there are critics who cite the increase in diagnoses of autism to quackery or, in more woo-ish cases, to things like inoculation or aluminum cans or something that so far seems completely unrelated.
People like Sigmund Freud contributed much to the field of psychotherapy and psychiatry, but they've also left lasting images of pseudoscience as well (sometimes a cigar
is just a cigar, after all). It needs to be stressed, however, that autism is a condition that isn't diagnosed simply through observation There are specific brain functions and chemical makeups that modern science knows take place-- or in some cases
doesn't take place-- in autistic brains and the medical community has spend many years refining processes to test for this. Autism is a
physical condition, not a mental one, and it also has been associated with other physical conditions as side effects of the autism. Views like the radio personality mentioned in the original post are reminders that not everyone is aware of this, and that kind of willful ignorance is an insult to the overall basic intelligence of the general population as a whole, and can be insulting to those who know better either through experience or association.
We don't tell someone who has broken an arm to get over it or someone who has torn a ligament to walk it off, nor do we tell someone who is born blind or deaf that they just need to deal with it and stop whining. The situation really isn't significantly different for those with autism, except for the symptoms and how it affects the individual.
Okay, go ahead and hit reply now to tell me I'm mistaken.
