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Does watching television trigger autism? (2007)

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Re: Does watching television trigger autism? (2007)

#51

Post by skissane »

sascha_sl wrote: post #50
Rury wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I think the problem is simply we're over-diagnosing autism. Basically borderline people would've been considered normal in the past, but are now considered autistic. Frankly, the entirety of symptoms involved in diagnosis sounds subject to a person's opinion of what people's behavior should be vs shouldn't be. Since this line is hard for everyone to agree on, we've come up with degrees of autism, like "high fun…

Autism (and ASD) should really not be seen as this essentialist "yes or no". There are degrees to which people, considered autistic or not by your favorite arbitrary standard, exhibit autistic traits. And those traits are not strictly inherently better or worse than neurotypical traits. The standard for consideration as disorder should be the same as with most psychiatric disorders: Not mere presence, but causing iss…

> But at the same time, the people that are doing fine with autistic traits are no less autistic.

I’d question that statement. People with BAP (broad autism phenotype) have autistic traits and are doing fine with them, but by definition are “less autistic” than people with ASD. A lot of people with other psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, can have significant autistic traits as symptoms of that other disorder (the symptomatic overlap between ASD and schizophrenia is much larger than many people appreciate, although it is believed that the similar symptoms nonetheless are caused by rather different processes) and obviously are not “doing fine”, but nonetheless are in a very real sense “less autistic” than a person with an actual ASD diagnosis

> (Also, Asperger's has ceased existing a while ago)

That’s not really true; the DSM-IV still exists, and professionals are still free to use it if they wish. Our son’s psychiatrist told me that he still sometimes gives children DSM-IV Asperger’s diagnoses if the parents feel particularly uncomfortable with the label of “autism” inherent in DSM-5 ASD.

Re: Does watching television trigger autism? (2007)

#52

Post by aidenn0 »

metamuas wrote: post #13
sascha_sl wrote: post #9

This is a hilariously bad line of reasoning and basically a signal for me to take econ researchers less seriously.

"Diagnoses of autism have risen dramatically over the past few decades, from an estimated one in 2500 children thirty years ago to one in 150 today." is one of the first lines of the article. If you are so smart, and only you are so smart, what environmental factor has increased that rapidly?

Besides the obvious differences in diagnosis that others point out (my parents specifically had me screened, and both neuropsychologists said no, while every therapist I've seen as an adult says yes), there's some reasonably compelling evidence that assortive mating has a role, and don't less compelling evidence that parents being older at time of conception may play a role.

Re: Does watching television trigger autism? (2007)

#53

Post by aidenn0 »

skissane wrote: post #51
sascha_sl wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autism (and ASD) should really not be seen as this essentialist "yes or no". There are degrees to which people, considered autistic or not by your favorite arbitrary standard, exhibit autistic traits. And those traits are not strictly inherently better or worse than neurotypical traits. The standard for consideration as disorder should be the same as with most psychiatric disorders: Not mere presence, but causing iss…

> But at the same time, the people that are doing fine with autistic traits are no less autistic. I’d question that statement. People with BAP (broad autism phenotype) have autistic traits and are doing fine with them, but by definition are “less autistic” than people with ASD. A lot of people with other psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, can have significant autistic traits as symptoms of that other disord…

If you have ASD, but learn coping skills are you not "less autistic?"

Re: Does watching television trigger autism? (2007)

#54

Post by gryson »

sascha_sl wrote: post #42
gryson wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What specific problems are you referring to?

The number of assumptions made without good evidence (neither rain nor having a cable subscription is automatically more TV time - especially the presence of cable says nothing about how parents control their childs media diet and is just an indicator of wealth) and the blindness for alternative explainations for these supposed relationships. They started from a typical armchair hypothesis and then looked for a way t…

They address the connection between rain and TV time in the article:

>The authors first use data from the American Time Use Survey to confirm the link between precipitation and television watching. The results suggest a strong relationship - a child under age 3 watches an average of 27 additional minutes of television on a day with one inch of precipitation (which is equivalent to a day of heavy rain) than on a day with no precipitation.

Re: Does watching television trigger autism? (2007)

#55

Post by spacemanmatt »

blowski wrote: post #47
metamuas wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically, humans are pattern seeking creatures, and children exposed to white noise will try to find patterns in white noise, when there are none, thus leading to the brain maladapting to random patterns. My theory, but I couldn't find a good definition of traffic noise being related to white noise or classified in particular, but who knows.

In argument against your theory - a lot of parents use white noise explicitly to help their babies to sleep. From my own personal experience, most of those kids don’t then suffer from autism.

In argument against your theory - personal experience is not data.

Re: Does watching television trigger autism? (2007)

#57

Post by mrblampo »

metamuas wrote: post #2

Proximity to freeways increases autism risk, study finds [0]. Having a mother who lived within 1,000 feet of a freeway while pregnant doubles a child's odds of having autism [1]. Basically, white noise can cause autism. People are screwing up their kids at an exponential rate [2]. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210609042055/https://www.latim... [1]: https://www.webmd.com/brain/autism/news/20101217/fast-lane-t...…

[2] does not support the idea that white noise causes autism. It's a pretty big leap from "freeway proximity, even in utero, correlates with autism" to "white noise causes autism."

Re: Does watching television trigger autism? (2007)

#58

Post by mrblampo »

spacemanmatt wrote: post #55
blowski wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In argument against your theory - a lot of parents use white noise explicitly to help their babies to sleep. From my own personal experience, most of those kids don’t then suffer from autism.

In argument against your theory - personal experience is not data.

Is there data showing that white noise _does_ cause autism?

Re: Does watching television trigger autism? (2007)

#59

Post by bayesianbot »

Rury wrote: post #46
skissane wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s disputed; another point of view is that “autism” is a label and we’ve increased the scope of that label to cover a lot of things which in the past were either given different labels or no label at all. There are a number of voices in the academic/professional community questioning the great and growing breadth of the “autism” label and the flimsiness of the scientific justification for its expansion (people su…

This. I think the problem is simply we're over-diagnosing autism. Basically borderline people would've been considered normal in the past, but are now considered autistic. Frankly, the entirety of symptoms involved in diagnosis sounds subject to a person's opinion of what people's behavior should be vs shouldn't be. Since this line is hard for everyone to agree on, we've come up with degrees of autism, like "high fun…

I and many other autistic people would strongly disagree. Neurotypical vs ASD isn't some gradient like you seem to think, it's much bigger, clearer wall between us.

I am one of those that you wouldn't diagnose autistic, but in reality me and my thoughts are much much much closer to the ones you would than neurotypicals. I wasn't diagnosed as a kid, partly because autism wasn't diagnosed at least in my country when I was born, partly because even though it was obvious to everyone how different I was my parents tried to pretend I'm just a normal kid. And partly because with time I honed my high quality human emulator to the perfection so at some point I could play that almost-"normal" kid part that they and society wanted from me.

Doesn't mean I didn't constantly feel there's been a mistake, I've been born on wrong planet, in middle of different species that doesn't understand me and which I don't understand. Absolutely nothing about the world made sense, life was hard and strange even if I was extremely good at pretending it isn't. It all changed when I found out and found others like me. Nowadays I'd be diagnosed at two years old, and my life would have been so much easier. I wouldn't have the need to pretend (or mask as we call it) as much, which is a HUGE constant stress. I could understand the world and myself much better, and adjust my life knowing better why and how I'm different. I feel like I could have grown up to be much less of a broken person. There are millions and millions like me, many of whom still don't know and are thinking what is going on in this world. They should be diagnosed as early as possible so they could start enjoying life like I have in much healthier way after finding out.

It's not really surprising that it was - and is - underdiagnosed and we're now finding more cases, as not that long time ago we didn't really diagnose it at all, and after that we only diagnosed the minority of cases who couldn't come up with an acceptable human emulator.

And because the mental image we have of autism is so wrong. I spent decades trying to find people like me, disorders that would explain the things. I gave up, thinking I'm unique. But my mental image was wrong also, so I didn't really give it enough thought - autism was a list of symptoms on wikipedia page and Rainman - that's not me, it's just that my brain and thinking is completely different and nobody understands, I can't even tell anyone because it's impossible to explain. It wasn't until I randomly read an article written by autistic person, and like 1/4 way through it I knew I found my kind - before that nobody understood, and that article could have been word to word written by me, except he knew the reasons behind it.

Re: Does watching television trigger autism? (2007)

#60

Post by skissane »

sascha_sl wrote: post #49
skissane wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s disputed; another point of view is that “autism” is a label and we’ve increased the scope of that label to cover a lot of things which in the past were either given different labels or no label at all. There are a number of voices in the academic/professional community questioning the great and growing breadth of the “autism” label and the flimsiness of the scientific justification for its expansion (people su…

I don't see how both can't be true. The diagnosis itself has changed a lot (retiring Aspergers, changing it to "ASD") to account for this though, and I'd generally say that having more awareness of how people deviate from neurotpicallity is a good thing. If you see it purely as a disorder (and thus a bad thing) maybe you have an interest in continued underdiagnosis, but many people now see autism as different, but no…

> I don't see how both can't be true.

Laurent Mottron believes that the original narrow view of autism had some genuine scientific value, but DSM-5 ASD has broadened the concept to the point that it has become scientifically meaningless. He presents the idea of a “spectrum” as essentially taking a wrong turn, and he argues the only way to get autism research back on track is to move away from the idea of a “spectrum” and return to a focus on “prototypical” autism

Lynn Waterhouse goes further - she believes that even the original narrower concept of “autism” is a failed scientific hypothesis, and the best way forward is to drop the concept of “autism” entirely (and related concepts such as ASD, Asperger’s and PDD-NOS), and look for alternative constructs to replace it with (her tentative proposal is “phenotypes of neurodevelopmental social impairment”)

Allen Frances has said that (in hindsight) he made a big mistake by agreeing to put Asperger’s in the DSM-IV. He says it was sold to him as a very rare disorder and he was shocked to see how frequently it came to be diagnosed. And he’s said that DSM-5 ASD is “even worse” than DSM-IV Asperger’s. (Like Mottron, unlike Waterhouse, he has no objection to DSM-III/IV autistic disorder; Mottron is less negative on DSM-IV Asperger’s than Frances, but I suspect there is actually less distance between them in practice on that issue than a cursory reading of their public statements might suggest.)

While they don’t agree with each other in all the details, what they all have in common, is a critical attitude towards contemporary mainstream diagnostic practices - maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but your response sounded to me like an attempt to harmonise those criticisms away

> I'd generally say that having more awareness of how people deviate from neurotpicallity is a good thing.

I think “neurotypicality” is a myth. Nobody is “neurotypical”. As the English child psychiatrist Sami Timimi says, “we are all, all humanity, neurodiverse”.

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