tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548560205914833324.post3217064150724692180..comments2023-04-23T00:16:48.148+01:00Comments on Questioning Answers: Kanner's original autism descriptionsPaul Whiteleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14288851488012254897noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548560205914833324.post-81342510480819243612012-01-10T22:50:41.806+00:002012-01-10T22:50:41.806+00:00All of Kanner's 11 children would be diagnosed...All of Kanner's 11 children would be diagnosed with autism. Kanner wrote another paper in 1965 reviewing the response to his original 1943 article. He would be appalled at the the DSM-IV definition of autism and would have blamed the introduction of DSM-IV for the what Allen Francis called the false epidemic of autism, attentional disorders and childhood bi-polar disorder. In 1965 he excoriated child pschiatrists for what was called 'the abuse of the diagnosis of autism that threatens to become a fashion:<br /><br />'This sage advice was not heeded by many authors. While the majority of the Europeans were satisfied with a sharp delineation of infantile autism as an illness sui generis, there was a tendency in this country to view it as a developmental anomaly ascribed exclusively to maternal emotional determinants. Moreover, it became a habit to dilute the original concept of infantile autism by diagnosing it in many disparate conditions which show one or another isolated symptom found as a part feature of the overall syndrome. Almost overnight, the country seemed to be populated by a multitude of autistic children, and somehow this trend became noticeable overseas as well. Mentally defective children who displayed bizarre behavior were promptly labeled autistic and, in accordance with preconceived notions, both parents were urged to undergo protracted psychotherapy in addition to treatment directed toward the defective child's own supposedly underlying emotional problem. By 1953, van Krevelen rightly became impatient with the confused and confusing use of the term infantile autism as a slogan indiscriminately applied with cavalier abandonment of the criteria outlined rather succinctly and unmistakably from the beginning. He warned against the prevailing "abuse of the diagnosis of autism," declaring that it "threatens to become a fashion." A little slower to anger, I waited until 1957 before I made a similar plea for the acknowledgment of the specificity of the illness and for adherence to the established criteria.<br /><br />To complicate things further, Crewel, in the hope of avoiding confusion between true autism and other conditions with autistic-like features, suggested the term pseudo-autism for the latter. Even this term came to be employed haphazardly, and conditions variously described as hospitalism, anaclitic depression, and separation anxiety were put under the heading of pseudo-autism'.<br /><br /><br />History repeats itself.<br /><br />Full text available here:<br /><br />http://www.neurodiversity.com/library_kanner_1965.htmlRAJhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17686665037607780553noreply@blogger.com