Children were not usually singled out as having problems until they started school,and then they were labeled as “slow learners”, learning disabled,and given a lot of psychiatric,and behavioural diagnoses on top of that.This was the case with both my sister and I.We are 41 and 50 respectively.You go on like this with a string of such diagnoses for years.And then one day,if you’re lucky,you see a doctor,therapist,or whatever,who thinks you might have an ASD after all,and wants you to have an evaluation to see if you’re really autistic and consolodate all these diagnoses.

In the last five years,my sister and I have both been diagnosed as autistic,independently of each other.My diagnostic evaluation was the full eleven hour one given to children, conducted by a developmental psychologist at a local teaching hospital that runs a regional autism center.Since then,I have also been found to have a chromosome 22 deletion,something I could not have been diagnosed with as a child,and I suspect is a lot more common than you’d think,even among aspies.

http://www.touchneurology.com/.....5B1%5D.pdf

It’s not severly disabled people in institutions.It’s not people with Asperger’s who read something on the internet,and decide they’re “on the spectrum”,it’s people with ASDs all over the spectrum,who are being diagnosed now,that should have been in the past.

Genetic disorders don’t magically resolve themselves when you turn eighteen.

I’m not sure why.

Sullivan, and others, have pointed out that we are only dealing with a subset of the population here.

This is a subset that can be reasonably assumed to be in repeated and prolonged contact with services, where those services have experience with autism, and where the contact may range across years if not decades.

This is a subset that appears – in regards to intellectual ability and general function – to be similar to the supposedly ‘obvious autistic’ archetype promoted by epidemic procliamers.

A sizable portion of the subject base appears to be based in group homes, which typically have live in or buy-in support workers. The other remainder may live at home or in larger institutions. Regardless, this may mean that a significant proportion of the subject base have regular contact with appropriate services. My experience of wokring in a local LD/ID service indicated that knowledge of autism in not unusual, and such services may even have those with professional or clinical expertise in autism.

So to repeat:

A subset of individuals that can be reasonably deemed to have an extensive health history, with repeated contact with appropriate services, that have conditions that are believed to be comorbid with ASD’s and that were deemed disabled enough to be on a centralised register in a country reputed for its quality of services, nevertheless were found to have been non-diagnosed at a rate of nearly 50%.

I’d say that’s a fairly significant finding in terms of what it may mean for people that are less ‘obvious’, less scrutinised, in less contact with services, less likely to be in contact with ASD approriate services and less likely to be on a centralised register.

Of course, it can only account for a small portion of the observed ‘increase’, but if one declines to admit to the validity of the entire base of evidence through unfounded dismissal of the constituent parts, then one is never going to find any convincing evidence.

Severe ID is typically defined as an IQ of 40 or less. Of all the people with ID, only about 5% have severe ID.

I just found an old comment of mine on the unseen Adults with Autism http://springingtiger.autisabl.....le-autism/

This statement is misleading. The authors made no attempt to identify autistics within the full 70,000 population. They only looked at a small subset. I could say, “they only found 30 adults with autism in a world population of many billion”.

This is not “The” missing group of adult autistics. There is no single group. We have obviously undercounted autistics (both children and adults) in the past and are probably still doing so. The question is not “if” but “how many” have been uncounted in the past and whether this number is sufficient to account for the apparent disparity in the number of adults and children autistics.

But how many autistic adults did they really find? In a city of 70,000 people, they identified fourteen individuals that fit a classification of autism that didn’t have that diagnosis to start with. Even had the entire population of 256 had participated and the ratios been the same, they might have found 30 adults with autism. I’m not convinced this is a meaningful finding considering the magnitude of increases we seem to be seeing in our children. (?)

The study concludes: The study identified twice the number of autism cases than those previously recognised within the service system.

Technically true, but our observations are much more alarming than a mere doubling of cases.

– pD

The answer is always “Where you’ve just been told, by the paper you’ve just implied you read and understood”.