Incidence, Not Incidents
August 10, 2008 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
Autism incidents rising, is the headline for an August 9th story in the Grand Rapids Herald-Review. Two different school districts report having 35 and 52 students diagnosed with autism, versus five and maybe two students ten years ago: It’s been the past ten years that have seen the results of changes in the diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorders and a concurrent rise in diagnoses.
Though, isn’t it “autism incidence” that is meant in the headline for that Grand Rapids Herald-Review article?
Wow, how embarrassing for the journalist and paper!
Although one could say the incidence of autism incidents reported has also risen!
actually it is probably prevalence rather than incdience, since incidence refers to a rate of increase over a given period of time, whereas prevalence refers to the total number-the latter would seem to be more correct in this context.
Incidents are rising, too. Y’know, like kicking autistic kids out of restaurants.
We can’t do anything about how many cases there are, but it’d be nice if the “incidents of autism” were a little more positive.
Yeah…how’s an “ice cream social” for an autism incident? Be sure to bring lots of ear plugs and spinny, shiny things though!
Or is it just a rise in the reporting of “autism incidents”………..
“Autism” is the most grossly misdiagnosed neurological disorder in existence.
Leo Kanner has already explained another unexplained rise in the incidence of autism that occured a few years after he published his landmark article in 1943. That ‘epidemic’ between the early 1950’s and the early 1960’s has been completly forgotten.:
http://neurodiversity.com/library_kanner_1965.html
A few of his cogent remarks that pertain to the new global autism pandemic:
“Moreover, it became a habit to dilute the original concept of infantile autism by diagnosing it in many disparate conditions which show one or another isolated symptom found as a part feature of the overall syndrome. Almost overnight, the country seemed to be populated by a multitude of autistic children, and somehow this trend became noticeable overseas as well. Mentally defective children who displayed bizarre behavior were promptly labeled autistic”
“By 1953, van Krevelen rightly became impatient with the confused and confusing use of the term infantile autism as a slogan indiscriminately applied with cavalier abandonment of the criteria outlined rather succinctly and unmistakably from the beginning. He warned against the prevailing “abuse of the diagnosis of autism,” declaring that it “threatens to become a fashion.” A little slower to anger, I waited until 1957 before I made a similar plea for the acknowledgment of the specificity of the illness and for adherence to the established criteria”
“To complicate things further, Crewel, in the hope of avoiding confusion between true autism and other conditions with autistic-like features, suggested the term pseudo-autism for the latter. Even this term came to be employed haphazardly, and conditions variously described as hospitalism, anaclitic depression, and separation anxiety were put under the heading of pseudo-autism”.
“The 1960’s have witnessed a considerable sobering up. The fashion deplored by van Krevelen has gradually subsided. This is perhaps caused in part by the fact that those who go in for the summary adoption of diagnostic cliches have now found another handy label for a variety of abnormalities. Instead of the many would-be autistic children who are not autistic, we have the ever-ready rubber stamp of “the brain-injured child.” While this certainly is regrettable, it has at least driven the acrobatic jumpers onto another bandwagon and has left the serious study of autism to those pledged to diagnostic accuracy”.
“cogent remarks” indeed.
RAJ, so what?