new favorite blog

[walkitout]

http://autismcrisis.blogspot.com/

Really, really, really awesomely wonderful stuff. Highlights so far:

(1) Early diagnosis incredibly unstable. Big surprise here. Every time a "disease" category becomes popular (usually because someone is selling something that people will pay for to treat the disease), diagnostic creep becomes rampant. Which of course "proves" that the treatment "works". After all, if you diagnose a whole bunch of people with diabetes that never used to be diagnosable, and then give them pills, and then demonstrate that they no longer have the thing you were measuring, and are not dead or dying, clearly you've done great good things! Right? Well, until you realize that untreated people with the diabetes metric are living longer than the treated people, but that can take a while to figure out, and you can hold it off longer by saying that NOT treating people is unethical so you aren't allowed to set up an RCT to check the results.

(2) As I _strongly_ suspected, there are people in the treatment community who view loss of some amazing ability in someone who is autistic or on the spectrum as a sign that they are being cured. Yup, that's right, you could do something most people couldn't, and most people were really impressed, now you can't and that means you're somehow ... better?

No surprises, other than that wow there is some sanity.

Comments

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Re (2), I wonder if it's partly anti-intellectual bias? I am sure my grade-school teachers were happier when I read "age-appropriate" books rather than bringing in the complete unexpurgated _Gulliver's Travels_, for instance ... it certainly seems to me that there are plenty of people who are threatened by what seems to me a relatively ordinary display of precocity.

could easily be

[walkitout]

Especially if the people doing the research tend to think that "intellectual" = geeky. In some ways just anti-meritocratic (is that a word?), or anti-skill or something like that. It's a general problem in groups of people who are so busy enforcing a norm that they're basically just as happy lopping off and limiting those who outpace the pack as those who lag behind.

I am utterly entranced by the idea of "a relatively ordinary display of precocity". That's sort of the point: precocity in one form or another _is_ completely ordinary in developmental terms. While it may or may not make sense to try to help people who are lagging developmentally to "catch up", it makes _no_ sense to slow down someone who happens to be way out in front of the pack in one way or another. And that _that_ is exactly what enforcing group norms _does_, when the norm gets defined in a really brain dead, operational way. If you define the norm in a larger picture sort of way, I think people would act a little more reasonably.

I like the way you interpreted it

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I actually just meant that I wasn't at an extraordinarily rare level of precocity -- they should have heard of kids like me plenty of times before (especially as most of my older sibs had been to the same school, though I'm not sure we had any of the same teachers).

Does it really happen that some of these kids *lose* savant talents when they gain communication skills and what not? That seems very odd to me. The study that was linked seemed to be focusing strictly on tone perception, which I didn't quite get: if they mean pitch, as it seems they do, I can think of a zillion confounding factors (environment is known to make a *lot* of difference in the likelihood of a child having perfect pitch -- e.g., children who are raised speaking a tonal language have much higher rates of perfect pitch than those of the same heritage and musical background who grow up speaking only a non-tonal language). But I can definitely see a lot of fluffyheadedness in that abstract, along the lines of "Since most people are rubbish at distinguishing tones, we can assume that any extraordinary ability in that arena is probably due to a splinter skill, which in turn is evidence of autism." What you'd really want to see is before/after testing, wouldn't you? and even then, confounding factors, dude!

In any case, I can see how a neurological quirk that made one hyperfocus on one subject could lead to a compelling interest in that subject, and that might persist even if it was possible for the quirk to be subsequently ironed out. Look how many lonely, myopic children turn to reading in part because they can handle its demands so much more easily than those of sports or socializing, who go on being avid readers after getting glasses and making friends.

But speaking of sports, I should go ride my bike.

Re: I like the way you interpreted it

[walkitout]

I tried to post this 4 times last night and ultimately got locked out because of too many login attempts. Something really weird happened because the same password I tried last night worked fine this morning. :(

Anyway, I take it you got the Townie? Very, very exciting!

Re: I like the way you interpreted it

[walkitout]

Oh, and I wholly agree with your comments about confounding factors.