The Autism and ADD Epidemics: Just a Case of Misdiagnosis

When I'm watching television, a commercial comes on. It states shocking statistics. My child's risk of being in a fatal automobile accident is 1 in 23,000. My child's risk of being diagnosed with autism is 1 in 166. The Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry placed the figures around 1 in 2,200 in 1988. The U.S. Department of Education also reports a dramatic increase in the number of autism cases being reported. Certain states have reported shocking increases in autism, such as Illinois, which reported 5 cases in the 1992 - 1993 year, but 2,435 in 1999 - 2000, an unbelievable increase of 48,600 percent. California apparently experienced only 1,605 cases in 1992 - 1993, but experienced a whopping 8,376 cases in 1999 - 2000. Somehow, nobody seems to have an explanation as to the cause of this mysterious upswing in autism diagnoses over the two decades.

If I didn't know what I know, I might think that there was a huge autism epidemic going on. Many people believe that the increase in reported cases of autism is due to greater autism awareness.

In his books, Late Talking Children and The Einstein Syndrome, Thomas Sowell reports many suspect autism diagnoses of gifted late talkers, most of them made by the public school system. Even though Sowell seems to understand the severity of the problem in today's diagnostic climate, he still considers himself "conservative" and recommends "multiple, independent evaluations" in order to determine whether the child really has autism. He seems to think that the psychiatric evaluations outside the school system are not subject to the same fallacies as the ones in the school system. And he recommends them, regardless of the fact that his own research proves them to be inconclusive. Unfortunately, Sowell does not seem to understand what torture pointless repeated evaluations can be for the child, or the harm that they can do.