Maggie's Farm

Is autism on the rise in America? Or is the diagnosis on the rise and the rate hasn't changed? There is a lot of money at stake. Assistance to families with autistic children, to schools, to doctors, to big pharma, to all kinds of NGO's and friends of government and politicians. It used to be that there was "autism" and the child/adult was literally non-functional. Then there was the "autistic spectrum which included children and adults who seemed quite normal over a very wide spectrum down to the few who were non-functional. Did it really change? Wasn't there always an "autistic spectrum" and those at the higher end had to make their way through life without special attention or help just like everyone else?

Cui bono? Lawyers, mental health professionals, doctors, health care workers and corporations, and on and on. If you suddenly took the money out of the autism diagnoses the boom in autism diagnoses would plummet. We would still have real autism. We would still have those people on the fringes of the autism spectrum but they would be finding their place in society just as they did in the millenniums before all the attention. And billions of dollars would be saved. Of course there is a downside too, a lot of mental health workers would have to find real jobs and the grifters would have to find new grifts but maybe that is how it should be.

It won't change the struggle and pain of families with children with genuine autism. BUT it might change the focus from grifting by inflating the numbers to actual search for effective treatments.