AUTISM

WHY IS IT INCREASING RAPIDLY?

I’m sure you’re aware there’s a lot of misinformation and disinformation about autism out there and one of the things that these people kind of cling to or fly to is the rising race of autism. Race of autism has been a topic for the discussion for probably over a decade or so the CDC estimates that in the U.S there’s about two percent of the children have autism we don’t quite know what the rate is for people who are like adults when we’re talking about autism we have to understand what the words are and what that means 2013 is what the introduction to the DSM-5 and that’s really a turning point in this whole discussion of autism autism spectral disorder what the DSM is is the diagnostic and statistical manual it is a checklist manual that’s there to help people diagnose various psychiatric psychological disorders could be depression , anxiety ADHD part of that also is autism 2013 was the introduction of DSM-5 before that we had dsm-4 which came out around 2000 and with dsm-4 there was the word autism spectrum disorder but they were within that four different disorders first was artistic disorder next was Asperger’s disorder next was PDD NOS or pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified and last was something that was called child disintegrative disorder or Heller syndrome going into these a little bit you know when we had autistic disorder back in dsm-4 and I’m going to use the language that was used around that time again this is not what we use a lot now autistic disorder is what we think of and refer to as classical autism and this is when we talk about quote unquote lower functioning autistic individual people who may have troubles with cognitive impairments people have trouble with maybe language impairments they mean non-verbal and they may need a lot of assistance and help in their life. Asperger’s is what we used to call quote unquote high functioning autism people who may not have had issues with language and or intellect and cognition PDD NOS pervasive dilemma disorder is is kind of a cluster umbrella term of like something’s going on in regards to communication something’s there in terms of intellect sometimes they’re in terms of socialization maybe some repetitive things they may hit some characteristics of what maybe autistic disorder. not quite all of them and then childhood disintegrative disorder is something that’s very rare it’s almost like this regression that occurs somebody may have a quote-unquote normal development they hit all their Milestones on time everything is great and good and then around three years old and after there appears to be this massive regression that occurs so they lose speech they lose motor function they may have things like hallucinations or endocytosis that really are drastic and be very frightening as well this brings us then to DSM-5 so , DSM 5 comes around and it says let’s get rid of all these labels that are there and we’re putting them all under one umbrella we’re calling it autism spectrum disorder this is revolutionary because what we were seeing was that when we’re using the old criteria dsm-4 people were able to say hey somebody’s in this autism area but we’re not sure are they autistic are they Asperger’s are they x y and z are they PD and Os and autism now when we talk about autism spectrum disorder where there’s certain specifiers that go along with the diagnosis so again using DSM-5 we use autism spectrum disorder we talk about a with or without language impairment and then again with or without cognitive impairment and then also we have the levels there’s level one two and three level one requiring support level two requiring substantial support and level three is acquiring very substantial support so if we’re really looking into how we communicate these diagnoses clinician to clinicians we have an understanding of where someone is on this spectrum instead of just saying autism spectrum disorder and this language that is there these levels are there for more effective communication where we’re looking at things like supports for school IEPs 504 plans that’s why we have all these descriptors that are there question becomes now the increasing rates because there’s people again who are out there who will say the rates are increasing the rates are increasing and if we look at some charts well we have what’s out there the rates look like they’re increasing I was reading a stat between in the UK between like 1998 and 2018 there’s a almost a thousand-fold increase in the rates of autism diagnosis and this is again alarming for people who just look at it without saying hey let’s look at the what’s there beneath it so what’s leading to these increases there’s a lot of schools of thoughts we’re not really fully sure and it’s unsure if there is actually an increase in incidence we don’t actually know if the actual number of people who are autistic is going up or is it and this is my personal belief we’ve had greater awareness of autism spectrum disorder as a whole because of that now we’re also looking for it more there’s greater resources that are there for people who are potentially looking for a diagnosis and also going back to DSM-5 we’ve expanded the definition of what autism is so if you take this combination of all these things is it more of the fact that hey there is more autism out there or we’ve expanded the definition we’re looking for more we know that it’s out there and more people know to look for it and therefore we’ve opened our eyes to the people who would have fallen between the cracks beforehand and this is my personal belief although we have a lot of people who fell into this cracks of feeling like I’m not sure if there was something quote unquote wrong with me or I felt different I felt off and they may have escaped this diagnosis as a children and this is why we have this kind of Greater increase in people we’re pursuing adult autism diagnoses because they said I felt off my whole life I felt different I didn’t connect I had these kind of qualities that were there and now if they were children they were they would have been diagnosed with autism we’ll dive into autism a little bit more in but this was something I wanted to kind of bring up in regards to this whole controversies that are out there in regards to hey are the rates of people actually going up or is it not.