Psychiatry and the prevalence of autism

I was surfing the net looking at what is being said about folks with autism and Aspergers by folks who presumably don't have it, and there are all these neat numbers that suggest that only x number in 1000 people have a DISORDER on the autism spectrum.

Well, in my unscientific survey of my life, I would say that whatever number they are giving, it is vastly under-reported. Okay, there's my immediate family: five people, four of whom are Aspie, then my sister's children, both of whom are Aspie. That's a lot, but one might argue that there is a genetic influence with that population.

Okay, then there are my sister's friends at college who called themselves the "Nuts of the Table Round" (there was a round table in the student center). And all the computer people I knew in those days of mainframes. That's a lot, but then one might argue that it's a college campus and since Aspies are nerdy, they are over-represented in universities.

Okay, then let's take my church. It would be generous to say that ten percent of them were college educated--and that's not a put-down. I deliberately chose a church that was not professorial, for many reasons. But at that church of maybe 50 people, there are two people who definitely have Aspergers (myself and a kid, who has a diagnosis) and two possible people--another adult and a kid.

So, why the major under-reporting? Two reasons I can think of: first off, Asperger Syndrome is a relatively new diagnosis. Dr. Asperger noticed it in 1944 (I believe) but it wasn't made an official diagnosis until the last ten or fifteen years.

Secondly, the lack of diagnosis has to do with how psychiatric "DISORDERS" are diagnosed. In order to get a diagnosis, you have to have a problem. Think about it in contrast to ethnicity marked by skin color. No one goes to a doctor and says, "Doc, I have a problem because my skin is XXX [whatever color]."

There are plenty of people with Asperger Syndrome who are not currently suffering enough to be identified as such. When I was growing up, I thought I was normal because we were definitely the majority in my family.

Being left-handed used to be a problem--lefties were often forced to become righties by narrow-minded school teachers. If someone had done a survey during those years, they would have under-reported lefthandedness by a considerable amount because of the ways lefties were treated in schools.

The same is true for Asperger Syndrome. We are the left-handed thinkers in a right-handed world, but our numbers will rise!