Fake autism, ADHD, Aspergers, etc. Blame the parents or the doc?

[ImperialPhantom]

I know a lot of other people with children, and I swear, everybody's kids have something "wrong" with them. At least half of the people I know have kids who ALL (not one kid, but every single one of them) have ADHD, a learning disability, or some other 'problem'. Why did these problems not exist in such a grand capacity until the recent decades? I myself had THREE phony disorders, two of which were not diagnosed (Tourette's and ADHD) and which i plainly do NOT have, and the other (mild autism) which was speculated (don't even know if it was diagnosed) when I was a toddler and then reversed when I was in my kindergarten and/or 1st grade years. Yet my mom held onto that diagnosis and made me into her "special boy", and still refuses to believe that I don't have any of that.

Who's to blame? Are doctors overdiagnosing or are they doing it to shut parents up who keep begging the doctor for a diagnosis? Who's really getting screwed here? In my opinion, the kids who really do have disorders are, as are their parents (who I'm sure are sick of hearing parents talk about their kids' fake disorders), as are the kids who get the fake diagnoses put upon them (I have known MANY people my age who are perfectly normal and capable, but who have revolved their identity around their "disorder" and receive SSI money from the government due to their disorder despite being perfectly capable of working)

 

[Darkhorse]

Just a little perspective...

I have 2 kids (both boys) who both have autism-spectrum disorders. The older one has high-functioning autism, the younger one has Asperger's Syndrome.

I did not push my pediatrician or anyone else to reach these diagnoses, and I do not recieve (nor would I accept) any government money as a result of them.

I have always homeschooled my kids, while paying for the public education of others (through taxes), and I don't complain about it.

I wish my kids didn't have these difficulties, but things don't always go the way we want. That's life.

 

[earagun]

I know a lot of other people with children, and I swear, everybody's kids have something "wrong" with them. At least half of the people I know have kids who ALL (not one kid, but every single one of them) have ADHD, a learning disability, or some other 'problem'. Why did these problems not exist in such a grand capacity until the recent decades? I myself had THREE phony disorders, two of which were not diagnosed (Tourette's and ADHD) and which i plainly do NOT have, and the other (mild autism) which was speculated (don't even know if it was diagnosed) when I was a toddler and then reversed when I was in my kindergarten and/or 1st grade years. Yet my mom held onto that diagnosis and made me into her "special boy", and still refuses to believe that I don't have any of that.

Who's to blame? Are doctors overdiagnosing or are they doing it to shut parents up who keep begging the doctor for a diagnosis? Who's really getting screwed here? In my opinion, the kids who really do have disorders are, as are their parents (who I'm sure are sick of hearing parents talk about their kids' fake disorders), as are the kids who get the fake diagnoses put upon them (I have known MANY people my age who are perfectly normal and capable, but who have revolved their identity around their "disorder" and receive SSI money from the government due to their disorder despite being perfectly capable of working)

I believe your one of the few who have opened your eyes and see what a delusion the medical world is creating (sure there are real cases) but not the astronomical statistics were witnessing, if the numbers were seeing today were true, we should drop the war on cancer, and there should be a war on all these new childhood diseases

 

[WeCryOut]

What on earth are you talking about?

My son is Autistic. We don't get money from the government for it, and you can't "cure" Autism with medicine. Now he does get medicine in the form of anticonvulsants, which are common for his disorder. It's to keep him from having seizures, which would be pretty hard for a preschooler to fake.

Who told you that you get money and medicine for Autism? You can't treat Autism with drugs the same way you do for something like ADHD.

 

[Sabertooth]

My non-verbal 17yo daughter, who is autistic, has a mental age of an 18 mo. old. I have a High-Functioning Autistic 24yo son, with a mental age of 6-10yo. If they had to work for their keep or die of starvation, they would die of starvation. Neither of them grasps causation in the least.

I have Aspergers Syndrome, as do one or two of my other sons. My 24yo, my youngest and I were all initially diagnosed with ADD. Fortunately for two of us, there is a test called the TOVA(?) that ADD's can rarely pass and we did. (To answer the OP) initial misdiagnosis is not that unusual, like the TV show "House, MD." I have a 20yo daughter diagnosed with ADD, as well, but she won't consider taking the TOVA and its ramifications.

Aspergers is the autistic equivalent to being color-blind. We can still function in regular society (including work), but we are missing some of the information that other people don't even think about. Aspergers is likely not a defect as much as it is an anomaly, like being left-handed. And, yes, it is being diagnosed more today.

I am presently underemployed, delivering free/advertiser papers part-time. From 1989-1996, I worked for various cellular phone manufacturers, even getting a patent for Motorola. Traits of my Aspergers worked in my favor, while I was there. What also worked was the fact that it was a seller's market at that time. Because there was a shortage of qualified technicians, employers had to be more patient with the techs they managed to recruit. For various reasons, I started off performing below their expectations, but as I was able to get my "sea legs," I later met and surpassed them. Now that we are in a buyer's market, few employers are willing to extend the patience necessary to cultivate an employee like me, which is their loss.

A competent deaf person is likely to face a similar struggle.

If we include the Aspergers diagnosis in the autism statistics, it is about 1 in 150. If we exclude the iffy Aspergers diagnosis, it is about 1 in 200-250, which is still too high. It is these worse-case conditions that are so worrisome and constitute the present epidemic, not Aspergers. It doesn't take an expert to recognize that my two worst-case children have something wrong with them. And Kanner-esque autism seems to be the best fit. The occurrence of this kind of autism is unprecedented in this generation going forward, which means it is triggered by some recently-developed environmental factors. One promising research can be found here...

 

[earagun]

What on earth are you talking about?

My son is Autistic. We don't get money from the government for it, and you can't "cure" Autism with medicine. Now he does get medicine in the form of anticonvulsants, which are common for his disorder. It's to keep him from having seizures, which would be pretty hard for a preschooler to fake.

Who told you that you get money and medicine for Autism? You can't treat Autism with drugs the same way you do for something like ADHD.

yes the medical world doesn't have a cure for autism, but other researchers have found treating autistic kids for heavy metal poisoning, have shown unbelievable results, many have reversed the affects of autism all togather (cured) The CDC has admitted that there are a predisposed population of people who can not flush mercury from their system. this mercury can go and settle anywhere in the body, causing many of the disabilities were seeing in such great numbers today. there needs to be a test to find who these people are before they are subjected to any form of these mercury filled injections. Yes they will say there is no correlation between mercury and autism, yet researchers who are treating autism with technics for mercury poisoning are getting fantastic results. So if the medical institution has no cure or remedy, are you willing to just except that, or do a little research yourself, its mind boggling how many alternative medicines have cured the uncurable

 

[Sabertooth]

I have been watching the mercury/thimerosal issue, too (and still remain cautious about its use), but, in places where they have ceased to use it, the incidence of autism has not decreased. So it has effectively been discounted as the main cause. The report I cited in my previous post has a better likelihood of being the primary cause, given its timelines of introduction here and various other parts of the world.

 

[earagun]

I have been watching the mercury/thimerosal issue, too (and still remain cautious about its use), but, in places where they have ceased to use it, the incidence of autism has not decreased. So it has effectively been discounted as the main cause. The report I cited in my previous post has a better likelihood of being the primary cause, given its timelines of introduction here and various other parts of the world.

I'm not sure of anywhere in the world where its use has been ceased, can you give me the place where its been stopped in its usage. why would it be stopped, the medical world insist it has no conclusive evidence it harms anything. the only place I know of is the Amish community which showed rates of autism far below the national average. but I am willing to agree that there may be many more factors to the autism problem, there are many variables that may also be contributing factors, processed food, plastics, hormones in food, chemicals in water (flouride) and the air we breath, it may be all of these things who knows.......what we do know is that the cases per 1000 is rising at an alarming rate and something needs to be done to find out whats causing it. even if it means $$$$$ loss for big pharmacuitical companies. right now its search for a reason as long as it doesn't effect anything their doing!

 

[Sabertooth]

See Thiomersal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and associated footnotes.

 

[ImperialPhantom]

Just to be clear, I'm not saying that all or even most diagnoses of autism and/or Asperger's are phony. My apologies for not being more clear on that. I do think that there are more instances of legit autism and other disorders diagnosed today, both due to environmental and/or parental reasons and due to more advanced medical knowledge. So my intent wasn't to paint all diagnoses with a wide brush. It was simply to ask who is to blame for the ones out there that might be false diagnoses. It's said that nowadays "everybody has a diagnosis", which, in my eyes, does a huge disservice to those who actually do have a legitimate diagnosis, as it can cause them to be taken less seriously. Some say that docs overdiagnose, but in defense of many of the doctors, I wonder how many of them "find" a diagnosis in order to appease a parent.

I'm sure that was the deal with my childhood pediatricians who my mother picked out for me. One said I had signs of mild autism at age 4, and then reversed his position at age 7. Nevertheless, my mother continued to tell me that I was autistic, and still maintains it, yet has deliberately hidden the reverse "diagnosis", if you can call it that. I found out about the "reversal" from my dad about a year ago, but long before that I knew that it was garbage. This (among MANY other things) has caused a GARGANTUAN amount of tension between my mother and I in the past few years.

As for "getting money from the government", about 8 years ago my mother set up a psych appointment for me to see if I qualified to get SSI money, to the tune of over 800 dollars a month. Obviously, that didn't happen, considering there's CLEARLY no reason that I should be receiving SSI (a fact that is obvious to everybody BUT my delusional mother). I assumed at the time that I was being screened for my phony autism, but now, thanks to those who corrected me on this thread, I know it was something else that she was trying to get me diagnosed with. Wonder what that could have been.....

 

[Sabertooth]

When three of my sons turned violent in their teen years, the first thing we did was to give them psychiatric evaluations, for TWO reasons:

1. To see if they had conditions that needed to be treated. You can't punish those kinds of problems away,
2. (secretly) so that if they had been found to have no such conditions, they would be culpable for their actions. Once cleared, they could not "plead guilty by reason of insanity" so to speak.

If you are correct in your assessment of your mother, she may have (had) a condition known as Munchausens by Proxy. Doctors will look at that before they give "appeasing diagnoses," as you say.

Before you run down that road, have you taken any online autism tests (such as Aspie-quiz )? They can't replace an actual diagnosis, but they seem pretty consistent for those of us who have already received a diagnosis, one way or the other.

We compare scores at the CF thread http://www.christianforums.com/t7320922/

 

[hedrick]

Just to be clear, I'm not saying that all or even most diagnoses of autism and/or Asperger's are phony. My apologies for not being more clear on that. I do think that there are more instances of legit autism and other disorders diagnosed today, both due to environmental and/or parental reasons and due to more advanced medical knowledge.

Perhaps. But in your own example you were not falsely diagnosed, and didn't receive any money.

It may be true that there's so much talk of things like ADD and AS that people throw the terms around. THere's a difference between that and an actual diagnosis. As a Sunday School teacher, I've only known of one student claimed to have autism or AS, and he very clearly did. I know the family enough to know that he was properly diagnosed, and I didn't need an official diagnosis to see it anyway. Maybe there are situations where the parents don't tell anyone, but on your theory that would seem odd. The only ADD diagnosis I know of (aside from the AS kid who at one stage was also diagnosed as ADD -- not an uncommon confusion) is a teen who was diagnosed as *not* officially ADD, but having enough of the characteristics that his mother encouraged him to get involved in certain kinds of activities she thought might help.

I carefully don't claim to have any condition. In some online tests I show up at the edge of having AS. It's a set of characteristics that are not uncommon among techies (which I am), and the term Asperger's does get thrown around. But not that many are actually diagnosed with it, and in most discussions people who know what's going point out the difference between having some AS-like tendencies and actually having an AS diagnosis.

As long as we understand the difference between tendencies and actual diagnoses, I'm not sure it's a bad thing. While not everyone has a condition that requires actual treatment, most people are "different" in some way. If we can recognize this and respect differences, I think that's a good thing for everyone.

This tendency for the culture to stick labels on people is a different question from parents who want to stick a diagnosis on a kid in order to get help. I don't take such a cynical view as you do. Asperger's isn't a good way to sell drugs. To the extent that drugs are used, it's for conditions that go along with it, which could be diagnosed even without the AS label. It's probably more relevant for ADD. But the more common accusation there is that schools want a quick fix for discipline problems. I can see that it's a temptation. But I think both parents and schools are trying to find a way to help the kid. Unfortunately the doctors are going to have to resist the temptation to give parents what they want, and only support treatments that will actually do something useful.

 

[ImperialPhantom]

When three of my sons turned violent in their teen years, the first thing we did was to give them psychiatric evaluations, for TWO reasons:

1. To see if they had conditions that needed to be treated. You can't punish those kinds of problems away,
2. (secretly) so that if they had been found to have no such conditions, they would be culpable for their actions. Once cleared, they could not "plead guilty by reason of insanity" so to speak.

If you are correct in your assessment of your mother, she may have (had) a condition known as Munchausens by Proxy. Doctors will look at that before they give "appeasing diagnoses," as you say.

Before you run down that road, have you taken any online autism tests (such as Aspie-quiz )? They can't replace an actual diagnosis, but they seem pretty consistent for those of us who have already received a diagnosis, one way or the other.

We compare scores at the CF thread http://www.christianforums.com/t7320922/

Nope, my mother did not have Munchausens by Proxy. She never intentionally tried to make us ill or sick. She simply wanted the attention of having a "special kid".

As for the aspie quizzes, I'm three steps ahead of you. I've taken aspie quizzes, as well as having been evaluated by actual psychs, and I've never even come close on anything. I'm not even on the spectrum. I'm not "running down that road" - I'm sprinting down that road at full force.

 

[Sabertooth]

MbP can also read into symptoms that aren't there, even going so far as convincing the child of their existence. That side of the condition doesn't require a deliberate injury.

 

[Sabertooth]

HERE is an interesting article contrasting ADD to Aspergers Syndrome and the difficulties in making an assessment.

 

[k450ofu3k-gh-5ipe]

Part of the increase of autism cases has to do with the broadening definition of the word autistic. So is autism truly on the rise, or is the medical definition of autism being broadened to include more and more different disorders that aren't fully understood which are lumped into the autism spectrum?

 

[Sabertooth]

Old-school/Kanners-type autism is definitely on the rise. The current statistic of 1 in 150 includes Aspergers Syndrome which is in the broadened definition. The statistic WITHOUT AS, is about 1 in 200-250 or 4-5 in 1000. In 1996, there was about 0.6 in 1000. That is a 7-8x increase, not counting the broadened definition...!

 

[Cgnet]

I have a couple of opinions. I agree with you, and I'm glad PC culture didn't scare you from saying what you honestly think.

I think that "spare the rod, spoil the child" comes into play here. It is virtually impossible to spank a child in public. The only actual discipline happens at home. Boys, in particular, are always being given these fake diagnosis disorders.
My son is a strong willed child. As much of a delight he is, there is no way I can be lazy or selfish when it comes to disciplining him. He has boundless energy. Boys tend to not excell in public schools as much as girls, statistically. That's because they're wild. Prolonged sitting in group settings don't work well for them.

I personally believe there are a lot of fake disorders.

My opinion is that parents are tired of societal judgement due to the fact that they do not have naturally subdued or calm or obedient children. They allow these fake disorders to be slapped onto their child to deflect judgement.
Then there are the parents who love the special attention they get for having a "different" child.

I honestly think it's often an excuse.

That said, I am NOT saying this is always the case by any means.


There is some exploration into the correlation of the rise of mutiple vaccinations and autism.

My own loved ones gravitate to labeling themselves and others with self indulgent fake disorders. Leaping to label anyone in the family with one, including my kid, just because he does not like listening or obeying, is going to do more harm than good.

It's stressful for me to encounter other groups of children and their parents because my child is different. It's not a disorder. He's just a little bit different. I was too.

Truth is, some kids are harder to raise than others, but every child is special.

Personally, I love an energetic child who will go on to do great things.

 

[JAM2b]

This is a VERY old thread.

The thing is accurate diagnosis can be tricky to obtain, especially if the case isn't very severe. The younger a person is when evaluated, the murkier the water can be. This isn't anyone's fault. It can be difficult to pinpoint a diagnosis in very young children.

The symptoms of ADHD can be present for a lot of different reasons. It doesn't mean a person has ADHD, but it can certainly look like they do. Over time, if the symptoms go away as circumstances or other conditions improve, then it isn't true ADHD. If a person has ADHD, then other factor can make the symptoms worse temporarily. Real ADHA does not ever go away. People can learn to cope and manage themselves, and even use ADHD to work for them in a productive way. But the condition doesn't get cured.

Aspergers is now lumped together with Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) and Autism as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The most common professional opinion is that they are all the same condition, there are just different levels of severity. It's a spectrum, rather than different diagnoses, low functioning (most impaired) to high functioning (least impaired). PDD would now be considered high functioning Autism, and Asperger somewhere in the mid-range, and what used to be Autism is at the lower functioning end of the disorder. It is a developmental disorder. The person with ASD does not develop typically.

As kids with ASD grow and develop, other conditions and life circumstances occur, their symptoms (abilities) can become worse or better. It's not a definitive thing. I've seen kids who's parents were told they would never be able to communicate effectively or use the toilet, end up speaking and being toilet trained, and participate in their own modified ways in society. I've seen other be neglected and go down hill for lack of supports and assistance in development.

Fake diagnosis? I believe it does happen sometimes, but for the most part, when diagnoses change or don't end up as bad as people thought, it wasn't anything malicious. It was just people (professionals) doing the best they could with the current information they had, and current behaviors/needs of the kids.

 

[CRAZY_CAT_WOMAN]

Nope, my mother did not have Munchausens by Proxy. She never intentionally tried to make us ill or sick. She simply wanted the attention of having a "special kid".

Yes. Your mother has something wrong with her. Like Munchausen's. But not as severe. But you had to deal with crazy emotional trauma. I'm guessing she brought things to your doctors attention. They kept having to rule them out. And this screwed you up. I had the same thing happen to me growing up. By a foster parent. And had to stay in this environment. Except she also harassed teachers. And they took it out on me. And constantly trying to put me on SSI. But I always was to smart. It made life hell for me. I really gave up . Because of the constant put downs. So I got screwed out of a better school experience and life.