Autism

I read the article The Autism Wars in the New York Times. The article talked about the growing debate in the diagnosis of autism and how the range of who is declared with autism is a growing spectrum, to include not just those who are severely affected, but those with any signs of the disability at all, "the diagnosis can be reached from a mind-boggling 2,027 to 11," and "only about a third of those identified by the C.D.C. as autistic last month had an intellectual disability, compared with about half a decade ago." Unlike other mental disabilities and disorders, there is no way to test for autism. Autism is linked to mostly genetics and mutations. Two people can have the same mutation but be affected in very different ways. Recently, parents have been wary of autism diagnoses's since the range of people with autism keeps broadening, it seems as if anyone who behaves or thinks in a different way than the social "norm" is deemed to be autistic, and those children who have a light case of autism are often teased more in school than those more severely affected because they are the ones who "almost, but don’t quite, fit in." I found this article to be interesting in that it talked about how those we define as autistic keeps changing to encompass anyone who is "different". 

autism article