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Personally I think it's more likely that we are grouping a bunch of distinct disorders under the "Autism" label right now, because psychiatric diagnosis is stil

Personally I think it's more likely that we are grouping a bunch of distinct disorders under the "Autism" label right now, because psychiatric diagnosis is still quite crude. Origins, mechanisms, etc. could be widely different while still causing some overlap in symptom profile. Imagine if we had to distinguish between different infections using only fuzzy behavioral definitions for example.

dnautics 6y ago
Agreed. I have worked with autistic students in high school and lived with people with asperger's in college, and I am very unconvinced that there is a "spectrum". There is of course a research and funding incentive to cross-label marginally related disorders.
- caddemon 6y ago
  No kidding about the funding. I once asked a PI what they thought about the relation of both Schizophrenia and Autism to maternal immune activation models, like is there any way to distinguish what we are actually modeling. Their only answer was "depends who you are trying to get funding from". I don't think that fully explains it though, even psychiatric diseases with less funding buzz word power suffer from a similar fate. Diagnosis is a hard problem, especially when all you can really go on is patient self report and a few hours of observed behavior. Although I do think that psychiatry as a field could be approaching the issue better too, a lot of people seem to get stuck in their old ways.
dogma1138 6y ago
I agree, it seems to be that the spectrum at this point is pretty close to losing clinical significance, I know it’s been rained down a bit in the past few years. When I was in highschool we had a mandatory “volunteering” program (yes I understand it’s an oxymoron) I volunteered at a day care for kids with learning disabilities. To me it almost felt that those which do express savant like aptitude towards certain activities are quite similar to how blind people get relatively super human hearing. To me it seemed that w/e training or reinforcement of our neurological networks happens is interrupted in some manner for most signals other than those which say makes you extremely good at music or maths. It never felt like the next step in human evolution to me but always like they were caged and found a single avenue of escape.

dnautics 6y ago

Agreed. I have worked with autistic students in high school and lived with people with asperger's in college, and I am very unconvinced that there is a "spectrum". There is of course a research and funding incentive to cross-label marginally related disorders.

caddemon 6y ago
No kidding about the funding. I once asked a PI what they thought about the relation of both Schizophrenia and Autism to maternal immune activation models, like is there any way to distinguish what we are actually modeling. Their only answer was "depends who you are trying to get funding from". I don't think that fully explains it though, even psychiatric diseases with less funding buzz word power suffer from a similar fate. Diagnosis is a hard problem, especially when all you can really go on is patient self report and a few hours of observed behavior. Although I do think that psychiatry as a field could be approaching the issue better too, a lot of people seem to get stuck in their old ways.

dogma1138 6y ago

I agree, it seems to be that the spectrum at this point is pretty close to losing clinical significance, I know it’s been rained down a bit in the past few years. When I was in highschool we had a mandatory “volunteering” program (yes I understand it’s an oxymoron) I volunteered at a day care for kids with learning disabilities. To me it almost felt that those which do express savant like aptitude towards certain activities are quite similar to how blind people get relatively super human hearing. To me it seemed that w/e training or reinforcement of our neurological networks happens is interrupted in some manner for most signals other than those which say makes you extremely good at music or maths. It never felt like the next step in human evolution to me but always like they were caged and found a single avenue of escape.