Re: better diagnosis

[Guest guest]

>I think Mark Blaxill's presentation at the Thoughtful

> house conference included some interesting information

> about better diagnosis, etc.

> http://thoughtfulhouse.org/0405-conf-mblaxill.htm

>

I find this very sad. It is quite ridiculous to assert that autism is

something new that has only been around since 1930. Asperger himself noted

in his paper that the parents (particularly the fathers) of the boys he saw

showed the same sort of traits as their sons. And they clearly would have

been born well before 1930. Lorna Wing also addresses this in her book " The

Autistic Spectrum " and suggests that 'feral' children were autistic.

My father-in-law was born before 1930 and is almost certainly autistic; it

is quite likely his father before him was too.

It is now thought that Prince , a son of V who was hidden away

from public view, was autistic. He was born in 1905.

And please do not talk about 'epidemics' - in the US you are still not

finding the prevalence which was found in Lorna Wing's study of 1979 and the

Gothenberg study from the early 1990s - 91 per 10,000 (20 autism and 71

HFA/AS). Lorna Wing went into all the special schools in one district of

London and looked at all the children - she found that a very large number

were not dx'd autistic, who were according to the criteria now used. That is

startling evidence that the change in criteria finds more cases!

One reason that so many ASD people are being found now is that we have had

major changes to the *social* environment so that they find it a lot harder

than previously to just 'blend in'. My son saw a TV programme recently

showing what school was like back in the 1960s and 1970s and his comment was

" I would have got on a lot better back then " .

I have been reading Bernard's paper in which she claims that autism shares

many symptoms with mercury poisoning and I have to say it is scientifically

very unsound. If you Google on mercury poisoning/Minimata disease/'mad

hatter' disease and Pink's disease you will not find anything which sounds

remotely like autism. That paper uses quotes from 'Alice in Wonderland' as

examples of what 'mad hatters' were like. The mad hatter in that book is a

figment of Carroll's imagination (a man who regularly used

mind-altering drugs which were not illegal back then and accepted amongst

the upper classes), and should not be taken as a character study from real

life. If he resembles an autistic person then perhaps that tells you more

about Carroll than about mercury poisoning.

And whilst you do not get genetic epidemics, do remember that you can cause

lots of genetic changes with radioactivity and look at all the atmospheric

bomb tests which were carried out from the 1940s to the 1960s or 1970s. So

if you want anything to blame, why not pick on that?

in England