Heye Sophia's List: Medical/Diagnosis

• An accurate diagnosis must be based on observation of the individual's communication, social interaction, and the quality of his or her activities and interests.
• age of the person being assessed, severity of his or her symptoms, and local available resources.

• That definition matters — an official diagnosis of autism is what opens up access to services and treatment to many affected individuals, both children and adults.

   
• remove up to a million people, statistically, from the numbers of those diagnosed with autism.
• without, of course, changing the daily lives of those disabled by their symptoms one bit.
• Dr. Frances “thinks his manual inadvertently facilitated these epidemics — and, in the bargain, fostered an increasing tendency to chalk up life’s difficulties to mental illness and then treat them with psychiatric drugs.”
• a changed diagnosis is going to change lives, and probably not for the better.
• So take your questions to Consults, but we can discuss further here — what will this mean for newly undiagnosed kids?

4 more annotations...