The Los Angeles Times produced a series of articles called “Discovering Autism”. The series is in four parts and represents was researched for years. The articles are:
Autism boom: an epidemic of disease or of discovery?
Autism rates have increased twentyfold in a generation, stirring parents’ deepest fears and prompting a search for answers. But what if the upsurge is not what it appears to be?
Warrior parents fare best in securing autism services
Public spending on children with autism in California varies greatly by race and class. A major reason: Not all families have the means to battle for coveted assistance.
Families cling to hope of autism ‘recovery’
An autism treatment called applied behavior analysis, or ABA, has wide support and has grown into a profitable business. It has its limits, though, and there are gaps in the science.
Autism hidden in plain sight
As more children are diagnosed with autism, researchers are trying to find unrecognized cases of the disorder in adults. The search for the missing millions is just beginning.
The first article brought a great deal of criticism, from many quarters. As you can imagine challenging the way the “autism epidemic” is viewed is not welcomed by those promoting vaccines as a primary cause of autism. This article also brought out at least one commenter who asserted that the rise in autism diagnoses is driven by people seeking social security payments (SSI), which goes to show that readers tend to bring their own preconceptions to what they read.
Interest in the online discussion of the series dropped off dramatically after day one.
Autism boom: an epidemic of disease or of discovery? looked at the rise in autism diagnoses observed in many places. Writer Alan Zarembo points out quite rightly that autism rates vary dramatically by school district in California, as well as state to state.
Such variability of autism rates across geography speak strongly against the idea of a single cause, such as vaccines. Autism Diva wrote about the strong variation by regional center district within California years ago (her piece is not up, but this article from LBRB discusses her article)
The variation by school district and by race/ethnicity was a major factor in helping me see that the vaccine-epidemic of autism did not make sense, back when I first started to read up on autism.
The LA Times quotes Prof. Peter Bearman of Columbia University, who studied the California Department of Developmental Services data closely and showed, amongst other things, that a large autism “cluster” existed in Southern California. The Times notes that similar clusters were found by U.C. Davis Professor Irva Hertz-Picciotto. (I was present when Autism Diva discussed the regional center graph with Prof. Hertz-Picciotto, by the way).
Prof. Bearman also showed that social forces were at work–awareness, if you will–which has aided the increase in autism diagnoses.
In other words, autism is not contagious, but the diagnosis is.
“`Is it real or not?’ is a meaningless question,” Bearman said of the surge in cases. “The sociological processes are as real as the biological processes.”
A diagnostician (neurologist) is quoted in the Times:
Dr. Nancy Niparko, a child neurologist in Beverly Hills, said that whether she identifies a child as autistic can come down to whether she believes it will do any good.
“If it’s going to improve the possibility of getting services that will be helpful, I will give the label,” she said.
“I don’t work for labels. Labels work for me.”
In Warrior parents fare best in securing autism services makes the point that it takes work, hard work, to get the services that a child may need. An autism diagnosis is not a ticket to services, it is a first step. Parents who fight harder and longer tend to get higher levels of services for their children.
The Times points out that within a single district (albeit one of the largest in the U.S., Los Angeles Unified), the fraction of students with 1:1 aides varies by geography and race/ethnicity:
District officials acknowledge that advocacy efforts make a big difference in who gets services, but see things differently than parents on the value of 1:1 aides:
L.A. Unified officials offered a similar explanation for the disparity. As parents successfully lobbied for outside aides, the idea spread, and in certain schools it became standard practice to offer them.
“Parents learned from each other,” said Nancy Franklin, a top special education administrator. “It became a cottage industry in LAUSD.”
The district is trying to break the pattern by persuading parents that its own staff can meet children’s needs in many cases.
“We’re paying lots of money for services that are of questionable value,” said Eileen Skone-Rees, who oversees the district’s contracts with companies that supply one-on-one aides.
In Families cling to hope of autism ‘recovery’, the Times focuses on ABA. Biomedical approaches are not really discussed.
The article talks about ABA from the early work of Ivar Lovaas to the present day, where it is common in some school districts and regional centers. The high costs and the level of research support are discussed along with examples of children who are success stories and those who are not.
In Autism hidden in plain sight, the Times looks at how autism is often missed in adults.
The Times presents an intriguing look at the past in medical records from a child diagnosed by Leo Kanner (whose work coined the term “autism”).
The times provided a number of slide show vignettes of people they interviewed.
I can’t link to them directly, but I’ve watched a few and enjoyed them. Jeane Duquet, autistic adult diagnosed at age 39 (right side, middle). Jesse Castillo, age 11 (bottom right corner)
The author of the series, as well as Catherine Lord were interviewed by NPR:
http://www.npr.org/v2/?i=144022386&m=144022377&t=audiowidth=”400″ height=”446″ />
I would certainly have done some things differently had I written the series. I would have chosen different wording, for example. Yes, the pieces brought out some less than pleasant perspectives. I’ve read a few complaints about the series, from not supporting vaccine causation or biomedical approaches to presenting autism as a costly burden. Ironically, these complaints come from the same people who repeatedly say that “autism costs society $3.5 million per individual”. A big piece of that $3.5M is ABA and if we as a community (or part of the community) are to defend the need for ABA, we have to accept that there is a cost. I believe, and I commented, that the choice of language at times put a negative slant where one was not needed. However, the series put some very good information out, including: 1) the “epidemic” has a large portion which is driven by social factors, with a much smaller part that may be a real change in the number of autistics, 2) services are not handed out on a silver platter. Parents and autistics have to fight for what supports the law says they should get, 3) 1:1 therapies such as ABA may be effective, but they are expensive and the research behind them is still incomplete and 4) adult autistics are out there in greater numbers than is currently reported.
The biggest complaint about the series is that it portrays parents as seeking diagnoses for their kids for some sort of financial gain. Dr. Jay Gordon (a major promoter of the vaccine-epidemic idea) has noted this where Mr. Zarembo has been interviewed (http://www.scpr.org/programs/patt-morrison/2011/12/22/21866/autism-diagnoses-spike-an-epidemic-in-the-making). Mr. Zarembo makes it clear in the interview that this is not his point. That the autism diagnosis “opens the door” and that parents are doing what they should for their children–including fighting hard to obtain appropriate services once the door is opened.
For those complaining that the LA Times series didn’t cover the vaccine-epidemic idea or biomedical approaches to autism: I’d recommend you be thankful. Quite frankly an evidence driven newspaper series on these issues will not go the way you want.
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