7 ms·

I really wish people wouldn't lump Autism and ADHD together. This is like lumping "cancer" all together. "Autism" isn't even a single disease just by itself.

by bsder 3y ago

I really wish people wouldn't lump Autism and ADHD together. This is like lumping "cancer" all together. "Autism" isn't even a single disease just by itself. For autism, the correlation on age and diabetes status is real, but weak. The counterfactual is that autism in minority populations is growing much faster than it is in the non-minority population. The only good correlation is health care coverage and the correlation is very strong. That tends to suggest that the "increase" is mostly increased diagnosis and treatment. And, in my personal experience, "weak" ADHD is being HUGELY over diagnosed (for various reasons--some of which are non-medical) while "stronger" ADHD is being significantly underdiagnosed (because dealing with it is expensive on multiple fronts). However, note that none of these things are absolutes. Weak correlations do exist. The human organism is highly variable--some things work for some of the people some of the time. The problem is figuring out which things work for which individuals most of the time.

faeriechangling 3y ago
>Conflating ADHD and Autism The diagnostic overlap the two is quite striking and I’ve heard people seriously suggest that not only should the two be conflated, but that the two are the same thing. Realistically ADHD and Autism are arbitrary social constructs only loosely linked to biological reality popularized by the ICD and DSM and behaviourism, and I don’t find the unquestionable biological reality of ADHD -or- Autism all that convincing. One of the more interesting attempts at rethinking how we categorize people is this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Domain_Criteria https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Domain_Criteria >weak ADHD overdiagnosis ADHD diagnosis is used to gatekeep methylphenidate and amphetamine access, and I think making those drugs more freely available would be helpful, so I have little issue with rising ADHD diagnosis. I do question the wisdom of forcing people to go to a doctor and convincing them to label them as “disordered” if they want access to drugs they find helpful, but that’s the system we have. Autism overdiagnosis I take more issue with because there are limited effacious treatments or accommodations for it. Diagnosis to me seems driven to me quite bluntly more by entitlements being connected to Autism than anything else and I find the rising diagnosis more perverse. Generally my support for a diagnosis hinges on my perception that being diagnosed helps the person diagnosed and the collective good. There was some research out of Texas after they passed a law forcing Sped enrollment to be capped at 8.5% with an allowed racial discrepancy of more than 1%. BOTH the GenEd and SpEd started graduating less, but the black students who were the most likely to be put in SpEd classes before the legal changes graduated more. To me this shows we have either already passed the point of overtreatment in the black population and are likely just above or below the line of an “optimal level of treatment” for the rest of the population. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/special-education-beneficial-to-some-harmful-to-others/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/special-education-benefic...

by bsder 3y ago

faeriechangling 3y ago

>Conflating ADHD and Autism The diagnostic overlap the two is quite striking and I’ve heard people seriously suggest that not only should the two be conflated, but that the two are the same thing. Realistically ADHD and Autism are arbitrary social constructs only loosely linked to biological reality popularized by the ICD and DSM and behaviourism, and I don’t find the unquestionable biological reality of ADHD -or- Autism all that convincing. One of the more interesting attempts at rethinking how we categorize people is this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Domain_Criteria https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Domain_Criteria >weak ADHD overdiagnosis ADHD diagnosis is used to gatekeep methylphenidate and amphetamine access, and I think making those drugs more freely available would be helpful, so I have little issue with rising ADHD diagnosis. I do question the wisdom of forcing people to go to a doctor and convincing them to label them as “disordered” if they want access to drugs they find helpful, but that’s the system we have. Autism overdiagnosis I take more issue with because there are limited effacious treatments or accommodations for it. Diagnosis to me seems driven to me quite bluntly more by entitlements being connected to Autism than anything else and I find the rising diagnosis more perverse. Generally my support for a diagnosis hinges on my perception that being diagnosed helps the person diagnosed and the collective good. There was some research out of Texas after they passed a law forcing Sped enrollment to be capped at 8.5% with an allowed racial discrepancy of more than 1%. BOTH the GenEd and SpEd started graduating less, but the black students who were the most likely to be put in SpEd classes before the legal changes graduated more. To me this shows we have either already passed the point of overtreatment in the black population and are likely just above or below the line of an “optimal level of treatment” for the rest of the population. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/special-education-beneficial-to-some-harmful-to-others/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/special-education-benefic...