Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis

We wish we could give you all the true data about autism, but we don’t know it all. Instead, we can give you many related facts and a few opinions; perhaps these can help you evaluate the subject. The reason we discuss it at all is because the psychiatric industry has claimed this disorder for its own purposes, and continues to wrestle with the line between unusual and abnormal behavior. For obvious reasons, we mis-trust anything that psychiatry has to say about the condition, especially about treating it with psychotropic drugs.

The word “autism” was coined in 1912 by Swiss psychiatrist Paul Bleuler (1857-1939) from the Greek autos- “self” + –ismos a suffix of action or of state. The notion was originally of “morbid self-absorption.”

The number of people diagnosed with autism has increased dramatically since the 1980s, partly due to changes in diagnostic criteria and practice; the question of whether actual prevalence has increased is unresolved, since diagnosis is based on behavior, not cause or mechanism.

Autism, sometimes called “autism spectrum disorder,” “pervasive developmental disorder,” or “Asperger syndrome,” apparently does not have a single definitive definition that can be used across the board to correct the condition; it generally refers to a range of symptoms characterized by impairment of the ability to form normal social relationships, by impairment of the ability to communicate with others, and by stereotyped behavior patterns.

A study was once done to figure out how common Asperger’s was, and the results were clear — it was vanishingly rare. Then Allen Frances put it in the DSM, and the number of kids diagnosed with the disorder exploded.

There are many competing theories about its etiology [its causes or origins]. We have seen articles relating autism to toxins (mercury, pesticides, etc.), nutrition, vaccination, genetic predisposition, neurological brain disorders, an alteration in how nerve cells and their synapses connect and organize, birth defects, the stress of circumcision, antidepressants, ad nauseum.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychiatry’s billing bible, may perpetuate the perception, whether true or false, that autism is related to mental retardation where it discusses atypical autism arising most often in profoundly retarded individuals.

Where to go from here?

Well, we’re not going to spend any more time discussing etiology and treatment, since you can google those thousands of articles as well as we can. The real point we want to make is that psychiatry currently owns autism, and they are on the move to re-define it for the next DSM version. They may change the DSM to make it easier to diagnose, increasing the number of children into the mental health system; or they may make it harder to diagnose, excluding children whose families are currently receiving, or hope to receive, some kind of monetary disability support. In either case, the hue and cry will go up demanding more psychiatric funding for whatever they are currently calling autism.

At least a million children and adults have an autism diagnosis or a related disorder, such as “pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified.”

There are as many recommended therapies for autism as there are theories about the condition; these therapies may include diet, nutrition, behavioral modification, and many other non-invasive alternative health treatments. Of course, the treatment of choice for psychiatrists is the usual list of harmful and addictive antidepressants, antipsychotics, and anti-anxiety drugs, whose devastating side effects are well-documented.

Autism is big business. The word “autism” appears 1,880 times on the Missouri government web site (www.mo.gov); and “autistic” appears 607 times.

The proposed Missouri Department of Mental Health budget for the next fiscal year (House Bill 2010) includes $10,621,176 for various autism services.

A search through the Missouri Accountability Portal (for the purchase of goods and services by the state) for the word “autism” finds expenditures for 2012 in the following table:

Granted, there is social justification for providing help to children and families coping with traumatic health situations. Given, however, psychiatry’s history of fraud, abuse, and use of damaging drugs, due diligence suggests examining this field very closely for exaggeration and mis-use.

This just in

An article in the Los Angeles Times on April 23, 2012 headlines, “Report says studies overstate drugs’ ability to treat autism symptoms.” It goes on to say that “Antidepressants are not specifically approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for treating autism, but they have become the go-to drugs for trying to control some of its key symptoms. By some estimates, the drugs have been prescribed for as many as one-third of children with the diagnosis. … A series of standard statistical tests designed to check the consistency and reliability of the published data [about the effectiveness of psychiatric drugs prescribed for autism] strongly suggested publication bias. The effect appeared to be so great that the researchers could no longer deem the anti-depressants effective.” [Publication bias occurs when studies that show a drug or treatment is effective are more likely to be published than studies with negative findings.]

Find out more about what you can do to expose psychiatric fraud and abuse, and support CCHR St. Louis so that it can continue to expose psychiatric fraud and abuse. Go to http://www.cchrstl.org/takeaction.shtml.