Adam Lanza and Diagnostic Fads

On Friday I was streaming ABC News at work and the reporter started talking about how Ryan Lanza (who turned out not to be the shooter) might have had Asperger's, so that's why he killed 27 people. Apparently that theory has been transferred to Adam Lanza now. I thought, "What." People with autism can be prone to tantrums, even extremely violent tantrums, but there is no evidence at all that autism would prompt someone to premeditate an attack like the one in Connecticut. People with autism are often overly emotionally sensitive because they have trouble regulating their own emotions and putting others' emotions in perspective.

Furthermore this woman's mentally ill son had also been diagnosed on the autism spectrum at one time, so let's talk about fad diagnoses for a second: When my brother was diagnosed with autism, there were still vestiges of a theory that autism was caused by “refrigerator mothers” floating around, so the psychologist told my parents that my brother had "PDD—autistic type." A quick look at the DSM-III-R reveals that PDD is a category of disorders, one of them being autism, so the doctor was actually saying my brother had autism. Now autism has groups and celebrities and apologists and, most important, funding, so doctors diagnose autism when the problem is clearly something else. For instance a study by the American Academy of Pediatrics found that diagnoses of mental retardation and LD have fallen proportionately to the rise in autism diagnoses. I'd also like to see a study comparing diagnoses of mental illness in children to diagnoses of autism over time. Labeling mentally ill children as autistic creates two big problems: (1) The children receive woefully inadequate treatment, and (2) a stigma could again build around autism, fueled by poorly treated children with mental illnesses. A lesser but still damaging effect is that as wildly variable syndromes are are labeled as autism, fewer people will have a clear idea of what autism is, what it affects, and what autistic people can actually do.