Discussing Autism

April is Autism Awareness Month. It’s a good thing, in that it brings additional awareness to the disorder, increased fundraising, and more attention from news organizations. It’s also a bad thing, because it tends to make people who don’t deal with autism on a regular basis think of it once a year, and that includes a lot of news organizations.

Many things about autism are controversial, from alternative treatments to statistics to even something like the ribbon I have as an image in this post. I read an article once that compared individuals with autism to snowflakes. No two individuals are the same, present with autism in the same manner, or have families that approach autism in the same way.

I have a ton of news items that have been released lately to cover, but I’m going to start off the month with a discussion of statistics. I know someone who is a statistics professor, and has been known to remind folks that statistics are all about interpretation, and that they can be skewed a number of ways depending on what you want to use them for.

Take the current statistic about Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). The current rate of diagnosis is 5:1 male to female. That means for every one girl diagnosed with a spectrum disorder, there are 5 boys. Most people tend to look at that statistic as meaning that more boys have ASD than girls, but is that really the case? I’ve found articles dating back to 1999 that suggest this isn’t a male-prevalent disorder, but more likely an error in diagnostics.

“Typical” autistic behavior seems to be centered on boys’ social skills, especially when it comes to an Asperger’s diagnosis. Girls don’t usually have the innate rough-and-tumble personalities that boys seem to have, so if they don’t act out aggressively, they may not be sent for evaluation in the first place. How many girls might be out there lacking services that might help them simply because they haven’t punched anyone in school?

Cure Autism Now highlighted a newer CDC study that suggests that the rate of ASD is actually something like 1 in 150 people, down from their previous estimate that it was 1 in 500. Many autism advocates suggest that the number is closer to 1 in 133. The interpretation of these statistics usually goes one of two ways, depending on which camp you fall into. Some people will claim that the increasing numbers have to do with a change in the way ASD is diagnosed, with some people who were previously diagnosed as mentally retarded now being diagnosed with ASD. Others will say that it has to do with environmental changes such as increased pollution, vaccination, use of plastics, and other factors. No matter which way you look at it, though, the numbers are increasing and it’s more and more likely that you will have someone in your life diagnosed with ASD.

Autism Awareness Month isn’t about looking at statistics or wearing ribbons or much else other than drawing attention to families and individuals living with autism. No matter what your beliefs or approach to ASD, the reality is that there are more people diagnosed every day; the statistics suggest one person is diagnosed every 20 minutes. EVERY 20 MINUTES. Autism comes with social impairments, communication issues, and often speech, fine motor, and gross motor delays. If some folks get their wish, Sensory Integration Dysfunction/Sensory Processing Disorder would be included in the next revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders under the Autism Spectrum. Imagine what that would do to the current statistics. I hope that this month will bring more people to a better understanding of autism, bring more funding to autism research, and most of all, make more folks with decision-making power do more to provide services to individuals with autism.