NotHardUp1
What? Me? Really?
Definitions matter.
And they matter even more in the culture wars. As the U.S. is either confirming Kennedy as HHS Secretary or not, many will HEAR the topic of autism bandied about, but won't know anything more about it than they did before Trump's turd hit the punchbowl.
This is one online article that helps lay out the progression and its effects:
The problem is that lay people tend to think of diseases and syndromes as finite and well-defined. If you have measles, you have symptoms that identify the disease by their characteristics. But when you have a cognitive or behavioral disorder, the boundaries are often less rigid, and some discernment and evaluation may cause disagreement about what the syndrome actually is as well as who qualifies to be within a diagnostic grouping.
With autism, the definition has been steadily evolving since it was initially described in the late 19th century. It became a term in the 1940's to describe what was then perceived as "childhood schizophrenia". The family of symptoms was formalized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in the early 1950's. As that manual has been updated over the decades and republished, the requirements to diagnose autism have broadened. Today, fewer symptoms and requirements are allowed to be present to enable a case to be categorized as autism. This has greatly expanded the number of autism cases in the population, a sort of instant explosion of statistical incidence.
As much as I regard psychiatry to be best informed about their field, it is still worth mentioning that homosexuality wasn't removed from the DSM until 1973.
Unsurprisingly, broadcast media doesn't address this more subtle aspect of incidence. If anything, they intentionally remove context and incidence from news.
And, when some social or behavioral offense like homophobia, #metoo, hate speech, or even reported anti-Semitism or racism is reported, there isn't any objective standard for evaluating changes in incidence when they occur.
The internet expanded the ability to "publish" statements via social media. If some throwback posts a comment blaming Jews for the economic collapses of 2007, and it gets republished or repeated in 10 or 10 million other sites, is it an increase in "hate speech", or it is just a Hall of Mirrors where every reflection counts as another instance?
If advocate groups can also champion a constituency to report more about any problem, then is that something objectifiable or statistically significant if it is a campaign to affect policy and influence perception?
This ramble circles back to say that we again have the confluence of a populace's disinterest in learning combining with the influence of "desktop publishing" to influence huge numbers of viewers with short attention spans. And eventually, with the law of large numbers, one of them becomes president, prime minister, or Secretary of Health and Human Services.
There is also thte problem of thousands, even millions, of individuals self-identifying as "on the spectrum" when they would NEVER qualify under a clinical diagnosis of autism. So, the apparent incidence becomes exaggerated through implication in imputing it.
Our societies started down this path in the 1950's through the 1970's, as the undermining of the status quo elevated anti-authoritarianism. This progressed via the internet to the growth of a sort of false egalitarianism of ideas, givinig ridiculous conspiracy theories a cachet of being clever by having insight to what authorities are "up to".
The question becomes how to fix stupid, and I do not mean that to refer to any autism.
And they matter even more in the culture wars. As the U.S. is either confirming Kennedy as HHS Secretary or not, many will HEAR the topic of autism bandied about, but won't know anything more about it than they did before Trump's turd hit the punchbowl.
This is one online article that helps lay out the progression and its effects:
The problem is that lay people tend to think of diseases and syndromes as finite and well-defined. If you have measles, you have symptoms that identify the disease by their characteristics. But when you have a cognitive or behavioral disorder, the boundaries are often less rigid, and some discernment and evaluation may cause disagreement about what the syndrome actually is as well as who qualifies to be within a diagnostic grouping.
With autism, the definition has been steadily evolving since it was initially described in the late 19th century. It became a term in the 1940's to describe what was then perceived as "childhood schizophrenia". The family of symptoms was formalized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in the early 1950's. As that manual has been updated over the decades and republished, the requirements to diagnose autism have broadened. Today, fewer symptoms and requirements are allowed to be present to enable a case to be categorized as autism. This has greatly expanded the number of autism cases in the population, a sort of instant explosion of statistical incidence.
As much as I regard psychiatry to be best informed about their field, it is still worth mentioning that homosexuality wasn't removed from the DSM until 1973.
Unsurprisingly, broadcast media doesn't address this more subtle aspect of incidence. If anything, they intentionally remove context and incidence from news.
And, when some social or behavioral offense like homophobia, #metoo, hate speech, or even reported anti-Semitism or racism is reported, there isn't any objective standard for evaluating changes in incidence when they occur.
The internet expanded the ability to "publish" statements via social media. If some throwback posts a comment blaming Jews for the economic collapses of 2007, and it gets republished or repeated in 10 or 10 million other sites, is it an increase in "hate speech", or it is just a Hall of Mirrors where every reflection counts as another instance?
If advocate groups can also champion a constituency to report more about any problem, then is that something objectifiable or statistically significant if it is a campaign to affect policy and influence perception?
This ramble circles back to say that we again have the confluence of a populace's disinterest in learning combining with the influence of "desktop publishing" to influence huge numbers of viewers with short attention spans. And eventually, with the law of large numbers, one of them becomes president, prime minister, or Secretary of Health and Human Services.
There is also thte problem of thousands, even millions, of individuals self-identifying as "on the spectrum" when they would NEVER qualify under a clinical diagnosis of autism. So, the apparent incidence becomes exaggerated through implication in imputing it.
Our societies started down this path in the 1950's through the 1970's, as the undermining of the status quo elevated anti-authoritarianism. This progressed via the internet to the growth of a sort of false egalitarianism of ideas, givinig ridiculous conspiracy theories a cachet of being clever by having insight to what authorities are "up to".
The question becomes how to fix stupid, and I do not mean that to refer to any autism.
Last edited by a moderator:
